After a while, in my line of work, you start to shift your focus. How many times can you honestly say you've saved the world before it just doesn't have the same impact? The big stuff starts to blur and you start to narrow your attention down to the little things. So much of my world is violence and pain, it bleeds, one day into the other, until I can't tell you the date, the meal I'm eating or even the country I'm eating it in. You just go where and do what you are told.
In that way, UNCLE is very much like the USSR. When I lived there, freedom of thought, well, it was for a select few. The rest of us had to pretend it never occurred to us. While I had a little more opportunity than my fellow countrymen as I was allowed to travel abroad, first to France and then to England, my movements, my activities, my thoughts were all carefully monitored by the mighty KGB engine. I was free to attend classes, permitted to have exchanges with my fellow students, even allowed to go out drinking once in a while, but always observed, never alone.
I was tested, often being called back to Moscow for this mission or that. I spent a year and a half on a submarine, spying on one of our own, and a month in China, recovering after my plane went down in Korea. My gift for languages kept me there longer than I would have liked, but I never complained, I never resisted and I never questioned, not once, even when I put a bullet through the head of a childhood friend and supposed enemy of the state.
And for being the good Soviet, I was rewarded by being ripped away from my family and my country and sent to America. At the time, it seemed a punishment almost on a par with a firing squad. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that it would be the best thing in my life.
I'm slow to love or trust in that, at least for me, fleeting brush of happiness. My life up to this point wasn't designed to incorporate such things. I had a girlfriend, but that ended badly. I had a boyfriend and that ended with even less success, not that it was Sergei's fault. He tried, he really did, but it was hard to love someone half a world away. When he wrote and told me he'd met someone new, someone special, I was relieved by his admission. By then, so had I.
I feel the soft caress of breath on my neck and smile. The little things like the reassuring measure of breath tickling my skin, the weight of my lover's arm draped over my waist, these are rewards greater than saving the world.
Napoleon shifts in his sleep and his arm tightens around me, possessively. It's nice to feel that you belong to someone, that someone has chosen you above and beyond everyone else and that someone would miss you if you were gone.
Napoleon starts to snore and I nudge back against him, feeling his morning erection prodding the small of my back. He snorts, grows silent for a moment and then starts up again. You can only have your nose broken so many times before you snore. His nose isn't very large and the last time THRUSH had broken it for him was the turning point.
When we found him, he was so very badly beaten that the doctors wouldn't even let me see him for two days. It was only Nellie's kindness and her quiet flow of updated information that kept me from going completely insane. He healed, but as a result of one too many blows to the face, he now snores. And even though I protest, it's a reassuring song in my ear for it tells me Napoleon is still with me, safe and alive.
I squint over at the luminous dial of the clock and sigh. In another few minutes, the alarm, purposefully set a half hour early will sound. We will then have to make the decision of more sleep or sex. I know which one I will pick, but it is up to us both.
Then I feel Napoleon rock against me and I know what his decision is. He lets his hand slide from my stomach to my penis and he gets my answer as well. For just a moment, he strokes me, slow and easy. He's in no hurry now, but that will soon change. Soon he'll be plunging into me with strong and steady thrusts, driving me to the brink of near desperation before he lets me come. When I do, it will be with every fiber of my being and the world will close in around us, holding us in its arms and hiding us from view.
Then we will rise and go about our morning routine, which may or may not include more sex; again, that needs to be decided upon by both of us. Whatever our decision, we will walk into UNCLE HQ, perhaps arguing about a baseball game or a missed appointment, but no one will be the wiser.
At work, we are the picture of decorum, all propriety and professionalism. But there are times that permit us a brief moment, a shared interlude, something perhaps too small for anyone else but the other to notice. Napoleon has made me a better person simply by loving me. A little thing, but in my world, so much more
******
I'm the sort of guy people think they know after meeting me for the first time. They think they know what makes me tick, what I want out of life, what life wants from me. They are wrong – dead wrong. I wouldn't be much of an enforcement agent if I was that easy to read.
But I do nothing to dissuade them from their belief. Hiding in plain sight, my dad used to call it. I let them see me, draw their conclusions and move on. By the time they figure out that they have me pegged all wrong, I'm dancing on their grave, figuratively speaking.
God knows I've had experience with that. My wife was killed soon after we married and I should have realized from the very start that Joyce was a flame that was too hot not to burn out prematurely. She exploded with life, grabbed at it with a ferocity that sometimes frightened me. She approached every situation as if it might be her last. Perhaps she had some inner sense and knew she'd die young. All I know is when she passed away, most of my heart died with her
It wasn't until Korea that I discovered the energy and desire to care again. Billy was a great thinker, he wasn't an especially good soldier, but he was kind and gentle and the first man to ever touch me. I don't mean in just the physical sense, although that is certainly true. He touched me spiritually, helped me to heal and to trust enough to love again. And then God decided that was enough of that and removed my lover from the gene pool.
After that, life became a blur of pain and routine. I got through the days because that's what you did. I moved forward, even bumped into Illya, although neither of us realized it at first. I patched his leg, he set my arm and we moved off in different directions. At first, I hated him and then begrudgingly began to realize that people are just people. It was our governments, our countries, which hated, not necessarily us.
I came back and flew into UNCLE's open arms. It gave me a place to at least feel like I was making a difference. I was still focused on the little picture though, which sort of makes sense at first. When you are a junior agent, your jobs are simple ones: courier, stake out, back up. It isn't until you start moving up in seniority that the shift begins and you start to see more than just the sheet of paper in front of you. Or at least that's how it's supposed to be. For me, it was still just that sheet of paper and that task immediate at hand. It wasn't that I didn't care about the job, I did, with my heart and every fiber of my being, but I also knew that if I fell, there were five more agents standing right behind me to take my place. I was just a very small cog in a large piece of machinery. I cared; I just didn't feel.
No one knew that of course. I had quite the reputation as a womanizer. If she showed an interest, I pursued. It didn't matter to me whether we had sex or not, it was just having someone to pay attention to, maybe flatter a little, someone to stoke the ashes of my heart.
Waverly is a sly old fox. He knew. I don't know how, but he realized and paired me up with some of the best agents UNCLE had. After I lost four partners in three years, even Section Two guys started avoiding going out into the field with me and more often than not, I found myself going out alone. I had the reputation of being less an advantage and more of a curse on assignments.
That was fine with me. Even though I had partners before, they didn't really take the trouble to try and get past the banter and window dressing. And when they were gone, I didn't really miss them. My life might belong to UNCLE, but my soul was all my own and I guarded it jealously. Twice I trusted and twice God slapped me in the face. Third time just wasn't going to happen. I screwed anything I could get my hands on, faced the consequences of such a libertine existence and sallied forth.
At least that was the case until I was sent to the airport to pick up a new agent and met Illya. Have you ever had one of those moments when you meet someone and swear you've known them all your life? The connection was instantaneous and, even odder I knew he felt it as well. That brief handshake and it was all over for me. I didn't know much more than his name and yet I knew I wanted a future with him in it. And I knew we'd met before somehow that feeling stayed with me.
It was fortunate, or perhaps just the craftiness of the Old Man, that he paired us because I don't think I would have been able to watch Illya go out into the field with anyone else. From the moment we became partners, we truly became partners.
It was during one of our nights together that I saw an old scar and commented upon it and we realized that this was not just a chance meeting. We'd met before, in a jungle, both hurt and both suspicious but each desperate enough to trust the other. And at the end of the day, we went our separate paths, only to have them meet again later. And I got the feeling that perhaps, in His own way, God was apologizing to me for his past vengeance upon my heart.
That's when my life shifted from just one to suddenly encompassing two. I grew that day, a small step into a big world. Before it was just me and now I had a reason to want to be involved and be part of the machine, just as long as Illya was a part of it as well.
When you become an agent, you soon realize there are times when you are more vulnerable than others. The worst is when you sleep because you can't avoid it and when it happens, you are completely open to attack. You learn to sleep lightly or hunker down in as safe a place as possible, like your apartment. And you never ever sleep with anyone… not really. I don't mean sleep with as a euphemism for having sex. You do have sex, but then you politely remove yourself or your guest and you sleep alone.
Unless, of course, you are sleeping with your partner, and I mean that in both senses of the word. I'd had sex with guys before Illya, as had he, but it had never held the same intensity, pleasure, or satisfaction as it did with him. Illya approached sex the way he approached most things in his life, with complete and absolute attention to detail. When he finished with you, you really were finished… utterly exhausted and drained of any free will. That's when sleeping with Illya takes on an added benefit because I can sleep with him and not worry. I don't have to wonder if he's going to try and murder me in my sleep. And four ears are better than two at picking up noises that need reaction.
I love waking up and finding him nestled against me, comfortable with having me so close, so ready for me. I revel at making love to him in the morning before work, reassuring ourselves of our commitment to each other before we have to rise and face the world. Before we have to take on the big picture and bend it to our will. Loving Illya has made me a bigger man, stronger, faster and I think maybe even a little smarter, but I'd never tell him that.
We move through the day and people see us as co workers, partners, friends, but very few could even guess at the depth and intensity to which that partnership has grown. I face the world and no longer see a cold, alien place, a big empty space of false dreams and falser love; I see a masterpiece of caring and warmth. I see my partner.