A/N: This lil' plot bunny has been hopping around in my mind for some time now, so I decided "what the hell?" This will be a fairly long stretch of a fic, but I can't say that I'll have decent update times. The life of a high school senior is a hectic one, after all. Plus, diplomas are in a month, so I'll be spending a lot of time studying my brains out in order to pass on a good enough mark to get into uni. That said, please don't rip out my throat if I don't update for months at a time; I do have a thing called "real life" that I need to get to sometimes.
"Do you realize the importance of this mission, Mr. Solo?"
While the repetitive sounds of rattling metal wheels underneath clunked in that unchanging rhythm against the tracks, Napoleon looked up from his wrists, where he had been tugging at the cuffs of his long, wool sleeves. It was a nervous habit he had, that arose whenever a dangerous situation presented itself. He really had to stop doing that. No emotion alluded on his expression signified his growing anxiety at the particular assignment that had been given to him. This was perhaps the riskiest task he had been given in his espionage career, and the fact that global conflict was at an all-time high certainly did not help.
"With all due respect, Sir, are you trying to get me killed?"
In all his life, Napoleon had never seen a landscape like this. As he gazed out of the frost-covered window, the cold outside air fogging out the edges of the frame, he could have gawked at the sheer vastness of it all. There was nothing but thick forest and jagged rock for as far as the horizon stretched out around him. Thick snow coated the ground, untouched by mankind. Everything about this countryside brought about a heavy feeling of total isolation, which sat like a stone at the pit of Solo's stomach.
"Don't sass me, Solo. You can handle it, you're our best man. Besides, you don't really have a choice in the matter, do you?"
Napoleon swallowed down the lump that had formed in his throat; looking across the scope of the land made a shiver run through him, as though the cold had seeped into the protection of the train he was on, deliberately speeding through the Soviet wilderness towards a Communist labour camp, where the nearest speck of civilization was hundreds of kilometers away. What fun.
"I don't think you quite understand. You see, I like my bones intact."
By running the little brief he had gotten prior to his arrival in the uninhabited regions of Siberia through his head, Napoleon was able to find an odd sort of reassurance within the familiarity of it. The agent knew his to-do list, and he knew it well. He knew where to search, who to talk to, how to pass off as just another Soviet man on a trip to a Gulag. The identity of the man he was to be was already seeded within his every action, with a few Solo-esque quirks slipping through the cracks. He would have to tightly seal those as time went on. Vladislav Arkady was to be his new name, and he was merely another who spoke out against the horrors of USSR reality. Stalin may be dead, but his iron-fisted reign still lived on in some regards of this god-forsaken place. Napoleon's task was to simply gather information, walk in these people's shoes, then escape to the established drop-zone mere miles away from the collective camp. There, he would report back to the CIA exactly eight months and eight days from now, and America would be one step closer to winning the struggle for information so tightly guarded.
The track veered off to the side now, down a steep, rather precarious hillside. The angle at which the train tipped had Napoleon's fellow passengers exchanging nervous looks amongst each other, whispering in heavily-accented Russian. But the man himself kept a stoic air about him, staring off into the distance through the window, trying to pinpoint where in this massive stretch of fenced farmland that spread below him that he would be herded to. Before he could figure this out, the sudden drop in height fogged over the glass enough to prevent all sight to the other side. Not fifteen minutes later did a loud, sharp screech of metal against metal alert them all to their arrival at the very place where many of the people Napoleon saw before him would starve, be driven to madness, die at the hands of those in power. It was a chilling thought, even more so than the sudden bite of cold that assaulted Solo the moment he stepped off that train with the rest of the prisoners. It nipped at his exposed skin, the icy breeze enticing a chattering in his jaw, every exhaled breath forming mist in the air.
At this moment, it was truly impossible to tell that the shivering, dark-haired man with the strong build was in fact an American spy. Right now, with his grey, ratty coat, messy, undone hair, and perfect Russian accent as he swore under his breath in that very language, he was simply another Gulag prisoner, sent to work on a collective farm for the glory of the Soviet Union