It's a long way down. Everything is green, it seems. Floating. Green like light through leaves. Something heavy on him. But he's floating, turning… A flash in his eyes but he can't blink. He just stares, stares, at the sun, very far away, far above his head, flashing with the movement of the waves.
He has stripped off shirt and trousers, fumbling with buttons and zipper. He has shed his shoes and kicked them aside. Five hundred yards away there are families sunbathing, children playing, dogs running. He can't hear any of the noise they must be making over the crash of the waves. There's only the distant drubbing of a music beat, waves curling in over soft sand, and the smashing of water on stone closer to where he stands. He stands straight on the rock and raises his arms above his head, forms his hands into an aquadynamic point, and dives.
It's all so far away. That little glint of sun. It's growing smaller. Dying. The light is dying up there, or – is he dying down here? Something is dying. It feels so easy. His arms are floating, his hands are jellyfish, fingers spread out. His clothes are like a shroud, tugged by the currents. It's all easy, all soft, and he's turning slowly like the needle on a compass, drifting, dying, dying under the dying light.
The water is a strong force all around him, air bubbles tickling up his naked sides, streaking towards his pointed toes as he dives, arrow-like, towards the sand and stone. His eyes are wide open but everything is blurred. The salt water stings in his eyes. His lungs ache. Fumbling hands hit rock and sand and rock again, but he doesn't feel anything like flesh or cloth. Nothing at all. He grasps blindly at sand and it slips through his fingers. His lungs can't stay frozen any more. He flips and kicks his legs and bursts out above the surface, heart pounding, gasping in air. He treads water and tries to steady himself, tries to look for a shape below that's darker than sand but lighter than rock, but he's afraid he'll never see that shape again.
Dwindling. Fading. Light is a spark. Drifting like a log. Waterlogged. All so far away. Eyes fixed open. Swimming. He feels himself grow very small. Very small…
He ducks down again and gropes out in the chilly water. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing again. He gropes and grasps and he knows that time is rushing past and the brain can't live without air. His hands hit rock and brush through sand, then – There! Flesh, cold and slippery and inert. Fabric catching on his fingertips. He grasps that fabric, cotton jersey, and pulls it upwards. The body in the clothes is like grain in a sack. It slumps around and slowly follows the stretching pull of the t-shirt wrapped around it. He finds the holster that is firmly buckled around the body and uses that for purchase. He pulls and kicks and gets his arms around the lifeless chest and kicks again, kicks and kicks, until he's breathing air and that other head is bobbing next to his, lolling, straw hair darkened to brown, lips apart and slightly blue.
He pumps his legs and tows this lifeless thing towards the treacherous rocks. The waves are smashing and shattering into millions of diamond sparks. Far away families are still holidaying, dogs are still running. He sees crimson blood streaking with water from his barked knuckles, down his hands and wrists. He sees crimson blood blurring into straw hair darkened to brown. He pulls his partner up onto the lava spread of rock. He doesn't care if he's bruised or cut because those things heal, but he tilts back his head to open his airway with the care of a man handling an egg, afraid of cracking the delicate shell.
He interlinks his fingers and rests his hands over that still chest, over that still heart, and he pushes his desperation and despair into each thrust, fighting to press movement back into the heart. He counts to thirty in his head, and then he leans and kisses air into the mouth, against the cold lips. He watches the chest rise and fall, and gifts him air again, and then presses his hands back over the chest. He thinks, god, god, god, with each press of his hands, knowing he's breaking ribs, knowing if his partner awakens each breath will be agony. God, god, god, god. Wake up, wake up, wake up.
He breathes for him again, one long breath, and suddenly there is a jerk, and salt water is filling his mouth. His partner's eyes are open, staring, reflecting the empty blue above, and water is spilling from his mouth as he coughs. He rolls him onto his side as he vomits water and bitty half-digested food which splatters down the rock.
Alive.
Blue eyes are staring at him. The lips are regaining the pink of oxygen-flushed blood. His partner coughs and chokes and vomits again, and he rests a wet hand on the wet shoulder and strokes the hair from his forehead and vomit from his lips.
Alive. He is alive.
Ribs are cracked and blood is flowing in ribbons across wet skin and he is hacking sea from his lungs, but he is alive.
Air and salt and pain and blood. Throat hurts. Chest hurts. Too many hurts. Were there fists? Were there rocks? What was there? The shock of water. The flash of sun. Drifting, sinking, winnowing. Light shrinking down to nothing – And then –
Air. Acid. Blood. Resurrection hurts. Air burns. Sun stings. Every breath, beautiful breath, hurts and hurts.
Eyes above him. A dripping face, dark eyes, hair dripping in black locks. A smile. That smile.
His mouth is full of salt and acid. The need to cough and choke still burns in his lungs. Coughing hurts. Breathing hurts. Pain means life and life is good.
The sun is warm. It presses on his chest. He breathes in air, and out again.
((O))
'I broke your ribs. I'm sorry,' Napoleon says.
Illya lets his head loll on the rock, and smiles a sickly smile. Blood is running down his forehead, into his hair, washing out with water onto the rock. Napoleon brushes his hair back again and his own blood mingles with Illya's and runs, fading into the water, down to meet the sea.
''S'all right,' Illya says. Then he says, 'Thank you.'
'I thought I was too late,' Napoleon says. He can feel the shock coming over him now, coursing through him, taking away all of his strength. He holds his hands carefully, wary of letting them shake. The muscles of his arms are burning from pumping on Illya's chest.
'I thought you were,' Illya replies. 'Thought you were too. Thought...'
'No,' Napoleon says. He lays a hand on Illya's shoulder and blood leeches into the wet white of his t-shirt and spreads like an ink stain.
'No,' Illya echoes. The sun is reflected in his pupils, two little sparks of light so bright they look like stars. His irides echo the sky and the sea. His sclera are bloodshot as if he's been days without sleep or drunk himself to oblivion.
Napoleon puts his hand around Illya's wrist and feels the shush of his pulse just under the skin. It isn't steady. It isn't regular. It's there, but he keeps his fingers on it, wary of any change. His partner's heart had stopped. He doesn't want it to stop again.
'Timothy?' Illya asks.
'I shot him as he was trying to get away,' Napoleon replies. He jerks his head backwards to where the rocks are dark and jumbled. There are chasms between them that lead down to more rocks and sucking water. 'He fell down there. I think he's dead. If he wasn't when I hit him he probably is by now.'
'Should check,' Illya murmurs.
Napoleon doesn't want to let go of his wrist, but he knows that Illya is right. There's nothing more vengeful than an injured Thrush. He gently lowers Illya's arm back to the rock and stands up. His legs are shaking and he isn't sure where his gun is any more. He hopes its in the little pile of clothes. One of his shoes has rolled away and been taken by the sea, but when he feels through the pile he finds the cold metal of his weapon.
He takes great care as he clambers over the rocks. One slip and he could be gone too. But he finds the place where Timothy was standing when he shot and he stands and looks down between the rocks, and all he can see is the foam of the waves sucking in and out, and a body there, limp as a discarded doll, being pulled out against the rocks as the waves draw out and then pushed back in as they return.
'He's dead,' he says simply when he gets back to Illya.
'Deader than I am,' Illya murmurs, and Napoleon puts his fingers on Illya's pulse again.
'Being that you're not dead at all, then yes, he is much deader than you,' he agrees.
'It's good to be alive,' Illya says.
He smiles up into the warmth of the spring day. He looks pale and weak, but water is steaming from his clothes in the heat of the sun. Soon they'll need to start the tricky process of navigating off these rocks and back to dry land, because the tide is creeping higher and their safe haven will be swamped. Illya will argue about the need for hospital, but Napoleon will make him go, and they'll keep him in and he will rail and protest against every little medical invasion of his privacy.
Napoleon presses a hand on his arm and smiles back at him.
'Well, Lazarus,' he says. 'Are you going to rise again?'
((O))
It's a difficult, tottering process to get from this rocky obstacle course to the beach. It would be more discreet to take the longer route, the way they came in, scrambling and clawing over and around great gargoyles of rock until they find the land and then the road; but there's no question of that. Illya's head is streaming blood and he wavers and stumbles as he walks and whenever his torso twists or bends in the slightest he hisses in pain. That's Napoleon's fault. Even though it saved his partner's life, he feels guilty. He broke Illya's ribs. He's responsible for this pain.
'Don't look like a guilty labrador,' Illya tells him after making a rather obscenely worded protest at a twist of pain. His voice is rough and weak, but he's trying. 'Napoleon. I'm alive. You did that.'
'Yes,' Napoleon says, but he still feels guilty.
'I could have vomited in your mouth,' Illya says. 'I didn't quite.'
'Small mercies,' Napoleon replies.
Mouth to mouth resuscitation is an amazing innovation in the field of emergency medicine, but its reality is not nearly as clean and clear as the lifeless medical dummies and crisply spoken trainers would have you believe. The reality is aching arms and breaking your victim's ribs and often exchanging a mouthful of air for a mouthful of half digested food. They don't put that on the posters. They don't tell you that most of the people you try to help won't survive. But Illya has survived; so far. His breath is whistling and wheezing in his lungs and those breaths are short and shallow, but he's alive, and Napoleon is amazed he's managing to walk, let alone talk.
'I think we're close enough that it's not so – ' Illya begins, but suddenly he is resting his weight very hard on Napoleon's arm.
'All right,' Napoleon murmurs. He's suddenly holding all of Illya up against him. 'All right. Are you okay?'
For a moment it looks as though he might see the contents of Illya's stomach again. His face is as white as the froth on the waves.
'Illya,' Napoleon says in a low, warning tone, 'are you still with me? Need to sit down?'
'I'm okay,' Illya says, his voice distant.
Napoleon just holds him until there's a little more colour in his cheeks again, then helps him on over the rock. He wishes he could carry him, but on these rocks it's impossible. They just need to get down to the sand.
They have to come down onto the populated beach, where all those holiday makers are lying, running, swimming, playing. Illya looks like the walking dead, his breath crackling, his face grey again. For a moment neither man is given any notice, but then a woman in cat's eye sunglasses catches sight of him and crumples upwards in her bright bikini, her lipsticked mouth open in an O. And then the buzz begins, a kind of Chinese whisper, and there's no chance of slipping off the sand unnoticed. There's no chance anyway, because despite himself Illya is almost fainting. He is being made to lie down on a stripy beach towel and Napoleon is glad of that, although he also wishes they could just slip away. There are lots of oh mys and oh my goodnesses from women and concerned noises from men. The holsters and Napoleon's gun are a part of conversation very quickly, and then the word Uncle is being passed through those Chinese whispers, and Illya is making such an odd sight, bleeding and pale on a sun worshipper's garish towel.
'No. Listen. Really,' he's trying feebly to protest, but the American social consciousness has him firmly in its grip. Someone has gone for the lifeguard. Illya will find the attention excruciating, but it's for the best.
'Put up with it,' Napoleon tells him firmly.
There's no point in hobbling off the beach when he is fully in the grip of the public machine. There will be an ambulance here soon, and he's glad of it. No matter how much Illya will protest against being in the claws of hospital staff he needs hospitalisation. He didn't see himself lying there, drowned, chest unmoving, face almost grey. That image is frozen in Napoleon's mind. The whole lot of it is frozen in his mind in a little flicker book of images. Underwater. Drowning. Inert. Then; pulled out. Dead on the rocks. The images only start to move at that moment when Illya coughed water into Napoleon's mouth and then vomited.
It's a bizarre scene. Gulls wheeling overhead. A boy with an ice cream cone, ice cream melting and dribbling down over his hand. Men in shorts and nothing else turning and looking with their hands shading their eyes, muttering about how long these things take. Women in swimsuits or bikinis clustering like flies and trying to get close enough to help while Napoleon urges them to stay back. Illya lying at the centre of it all, eyes closed, face pale, blood in his hair and on his t-shirt, the water steaming from his clothes.
Then the ambulance men are cutting through with an air of sacrosanct authority, and Illya is on their stretcher, being carried across the hot slipping sand and loaded into a low ambulance like a baking tray being slid into the oven. He looks half gone, white as a seashell, stomach distended with misplaced air, blood in his clothes, his eyes rolling back in his head.
Napoleon rides along with him. There's no argument about that. He sits there, staying back but watching with rigid focus as they cover Illya's mouth and nose with an oxygen mask and speak to him intently to keep him in the here and now.
((O))
It's always the aftermath that's hard. In the moment of the event one just grasps onto the ride and travels along with it. It's afterwards that one is dazed and spinning and shaking and trying to separate the leaves of that thrilling novel to understand what just happened. It had been so fast. Chasing Timothy, racing over the sandy, grassy ground, feet thudding. Then onto the rocks, dark and knotted, a spew of stone frozen and then etched for millions of years by the waves. They had all, fugitive and pursuers, slipped, fell, cursed; but they hadn't managed to catch him. What was he going to do? Perhaps he had thought there was going to be a boat. Perhaps he had arranged rescue. If he had, it had fallen through, because they had got to the edge of the rocks, and there had been nothing but waves and the taste of salt spray.
They had wanted him alive. It would have been too risky to shoot him with sleep darts because of the fall to treacherous rocks or the crashing water. So Illya had approached him, of course; arms wide, saying something that Napoleon couldn't hear over the waves, perhaps trying to convince him that there was nowhere to go, he had no gun, there was nothing he could do. Then Timothy's fist had lashed out, Illya had tumbled, head and hip and hands striking the rocks, his body suddenly limp as a rag doll. It took less than a minute to shoot Timothy and pull off his own clothes and dive after the shape of Illya's body that was deep under the waves, but what a long minute that had been.
God, god…
It takes him a moment to come back to himself, to realise where he is. He's sitting on a miserable formed plastic chair that's a little too small for his body, and he still only has one shoe, and Illya is asleep in the crisp bed bedside him, an oxygen mask still over his face, a tube taped to his skin that runs down into his stomach to help remove that misplaced air that is taking up space meant for his lungs. His hair is disordered and stiff with seawater and his clothes have been replaced with a hospital gown. Outside in the corridor there's constant noise of footsteps, gurney wheels, the PA system and telephones, but it's quiet in here, apart from the soft noise of the monitor watching Illya's heart. It's good that he's sleeping. It's tiring, apparently, dying and coming back to life. Only, the quiet gives Napoleon time to think, and sometimes thinking is unwelcome.
This happens too often. It's either Illya or him in that bed, inching back towards life after something brought them too close to the other side. He wonders, briefly, if it would be heaven or hell receiving them. Neither, Illya would say. Death is just a cessation of electrical function in the brain, the cessation of the circulation of oxygen to all parts of the body, the cessation of the division of cells. Heaven and hell will no more greet them than they would a tree uprooted from the ground or a blade of grass cut off by the mower. Cells have life, and then they don't, and their energy is slowly taken into other things. Worms. Bacteria. Earth.
His eyes are closed. He can hear Illya's voice. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots: your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table.
How does Illya know so much?
He opens his eyes and sees that Illya hadn't spoken at all. Of course he hadn't. He's asleep, with a mask over his mouth and nose. Napoleon is just exhausted and his mind is wandering and pulling up thoughts and then putting them into Illya's mouth. That must mean he knows his Hamlet just as well as Illya. Maybe Illya doesn't know Hamlet at all. He's not especially obliged, as a native of Kiev, to know Shakespeare off by heart.
A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and cat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.
So we are all food for worms, and all food for each other, and there is no heaven or hell waiting for the immortal soul, because the immortal soul is just electrical impulses that dissipate on death.
He looks at Illya and tries not to believe that. He would rather that Illya had an immortal soul. If anyone deserves one, it's him. There's a stent leading out of his chest because in bringing him back to life his ribs were cracked, and, in cracking, the ribs punctured his lung. His chest is a mass of bruising, and there's bruising on his head around the spider lines of stitches where he hit the rock, and bruising blooming across his jaw where Timothy hit him. Napoleon keeps reminding himself that all those things are a sign that he's alive. Illya is alive. Sometimes one has to be cruel to be kind; and that's Hamlet too, isn't it?
I must be cruel, only to be kind. Thus bad begins and worse remains behind.
Worse is lying drowned under the sea, being pulled back and forth by the waves, becoming bloated and vile and eventually being torn to tatters by hungry currents and opportunistic fish. That is worse.
Illya groans, and Napoleon's attention is riveted. His partner's eyes flicker open, his irides momentarily an empty sea blue before he focusses and they become Illya's intelligent eyes again.
'Ah. He has risen,' Napoleon says with a dry smile.
'Blasphemer,' Illya murmurs from under the mask.
'That's all right,' Napoleon says. 'You're an atheist and I'm – '
He stops because he isn't quite sure what he is. He knows that the season now is Easter, and that Christmas is a delight. He thinks that church marriages are beautiful and knows all the words to the Lord's Prayer. But he isn't sure what years of being an agent makes him. It makes him a man who knows too many words from Shakespeare, and who has read too many cheap novels on planes, and understands the curative powers of scotch for body and soul. It makes him a man who faces the unthinkable far too often, and sees the seamy side of life as well as the beautiful, and who sits at the bedside of his ailing partner pondering on the realities of life and death. He's not sure there's any place for God in that. The things he sees make it hard to believe in an omniscient being guiding his life.
'How are you feeling?' he asks, and Illya gives a smile through the condensation fogged mask.
'Terrible,' he replies.
'Good,' Napoleon says. 'That'll teach you to be more careful in future.'
There's still a risk of pneumonia. There's still risk from the concussion and risk because his heart stopped and was started again. Illya is far from well. But he is alive.
'I'm going to be bored to death after a few days,' Illya says plaintively. He does sound terrible. 'I'll wish you'd left me in the water.'
'I'll bring you books,' Napoleon promises.
'I hate hospital food.'
'I'll bring you grapes, and hamburgers.'
'It's too noisy at night. I can never sleep.'
'You who can fall asleep in a war zone with artillery firing overhead? I'll tell you bedtime stories and then I'll sing you to sleep. I'll tell you about Poseidon, and the Little Mermaid, and Jonah and the Whale, and Moby Dick. How about that?'
Illya grunts. He looks so tired that Napoleon doesn't think he'll have any trouble sleeping, at least not for a few days.
'And when they let me out but tell me I can't go back to work?' he asks. 'They're bound to tell me I can't go back to work for at least a week.'
'Going back to work is the least of your worries for now. But when you do I'll stay over and bring you vodka and Chinese food and we can watch all the old movies on TV and talk into the night.'
'Waverly will send you out on missions without me,' Illya reminds him. He looks like a little boy lying there in the bed. There's a kind of pleading in his eyes. A don't leave me that remains unsaid.
Napoleon shrugs. 'I've got leave coming. I'll take some. I have a vested interest in keeping you alive, because when you're alive you keep me alive.'
Illya smiles again, although the movement obviously pains him. 'When I'm alive I keep you alive. When you're alive you keep me alive. Is that how it works?'
Napoleon returns the smile. 'That's how it works,' he says, resting a hand on the line of Illya's arm, which is shrouded in a white sheet. 'Of course it is. Together, we're immortal.'
The smile stays on Illya's face. His head is deep in the pillow and his eyes are bloodshot and his arms are limp, but the smile stays.