Disclaimer: I do not own Man From U.N.C.L.E., and make no profit from this work.


In The Blink of an Eye

Chapter Seven

It felt, to Napoleon, as if they were back near the beginning of their partnership all over again. Illya was asleep, stretched out on Napoleon's couch and dead to the world once more, on a combination of painkillers and sheer exhaustion. He hadn't moved a muscle by himself in three years, and the stress of relocating from the medical wing to here had knocked him out cold.

But there was still a noticeable difference. Watching from his armchair, Napoleon knew that Illya only slept, nothing deeper. His eyelids flickered occasionally as he dreamed, and the hand curled on his chest clenched and relaxed every now and again – as much as it could anyway, being so helplessly weak now.

Illya had had difficulty even holding his head up by the time they reached Napoleon's apartment, and it had been like years ago. As if there had simply been an exhausting few missions, and when Illya was ready to drop, he would drop. Napoleon had lost count of the number of times he'd had to bundle his partner into bed so that his sleep wouldn't punish him with stiff muscles in the morning.

In the beginning of their partnership, the couch had become Illya's for a while. When Mr. Waverly had announced that their partnership would be a permanent feature, that had brought Illya under the Section Two code for living arrangements. For backup purposes, partners were to live not more than five minutes from one another by foot.

Illya had lived a good half hour in the opposite direction from Headquarters, and he had moved into an apartment block across the road. In the week gap between ending one lease and beginning another, he had slept on Napoleon's couch.

It had cemented their working relationship. Without that week, Napoleon wasn't sure he would ever have relaxed enough around Illya to get to know him. The Russian was frosty, undoubtedly, and intolerant of fools, and his very dry – judging by how he and Mark got along, very British – sense of humour had initially been lost on Napoleon.

But it had been moments like this, watching him sleep with his guard as far down as it ever got, that had told Napoleon that the man wasn't always quite like that. Maybe wasn't like that at all, on the inside.

They had had a good working relationship – a brilliant one, even. Napoleon found it difficult to trust people, but Illya had been one of the precious few. And in return, Napoleon knew that, even if the Russian would rather go another round with the enemy, he trusted the American in return.

Napoleon only hoped that that trust was still there – that Illya was not unsettled enough to push him away now, when the enemy was intangible and difficult to pin down. When the enemy was, in all likelihood, inside Illya's own mind.


Illya woke to the smell of something cooking, and chilly despite the heavy blankets on and around him. He pushed at them and felt a rush of anger at how weak he was, before there were other hands drawing them back and helping him to sit.

"Don't be like that," Napoleon urged. "It'll take time, you know that. Just be patient."

"When have you ever known me to be patient?"

"What?"

Illya belatedly realised that he hadn't used English, and repeated it.

"True," Napoleon said, but there was concern there. "Do you mind sticking to English instead of whatever that was?"

That was, perhaps, more disconcerting. Illya often talked to himself in Russian in the Section Eight labs when conducting experiments; Napoleon was well used to what Russian sounded like, and continuous sounds, even if he couldn't actually understand the language. If he hadn't recognise the language Illya used, it suggested an Eastern European one instead of Russian, English or the romance languages.

"Sorry," Illya said, and Napoleon sighed.

"Don't be," he murmured. "I know it'll take a while to find your equilibrium. At least you still speak English, right?"

Illya mentally ran through the database in his head of the various languages he spoke, as Napoleon propped him up on pillows against the arm of the couch and disappeared back into the kitchen. They seemed to be intact, but was he losing grasp of which one he was using when? Had they blurred in his head into one? Would he always do that?

"Stop worrying," Napoleon ordered when he came back. "I know that look. Good God, Illya, you've only been awake and aware for two weeks. Stop pushing."

"If I don't push, then I won't..."

"Save it for physical therapy," Napoleon said, putting the steaming bowl he carried down on the coffee table. "That'll start in a month, so I'm told. Until then, calm down and relax."

But Illya couldn't. He had always been a man with an edge in the physical world. Even in his childhood, he had been faster, stronger, better than the other children in the villages that he had lived in. In Kiev, he had survived because of his physical fitness; the same could be said a thousand times for a thousand missions for various military and espionage organisations in his lifetime.

And now he was so weak that his partner had to spoon feed him, that his hands shook when he tried to hold his own glass to drink, that he was exhausted by the simple act of eating and was half-asleep already by the time Napoleon removed the soup bowl and helped him lie down again.

"Get some rest," his partner's voice murmured, close by, and there was a soft touch to his hair. "It's the best healer."


"Welcome back."

Stepan was sat on the steps of an abandoned house, smoking. It was how Illya remembered him – tousled and smiling and perpetually smoking. Stepan had always been a relaxed man, despite anything that happened in either of their lives.

"I'd offer you one, but it would be a bit pointless," Stepan shrugged.

"This is only a dream."

"Sort of," Stepan agreed. "It's not the real world, that's for sure. Haven't you got any questions about that?"

"You can't prove the world isn't real," Illya huffed.

"No," Stepan agreed, "but I can prove it's not the one that you remember."

"How?"

Despite himself, Illya's curiosity and sense of dread had been piqued. Stepan was not a man prone to any kind of exaggeration: if he said he could prove it, then he was convinced that he could. And it was worrying to Illya – if Stepan was so utterly convinced that neither of these places was real, then how was Illya supposed to deal with that?

"Just look around, when you go back," Stepan shrugged. "There are logical problems."

"How would you know that?" Illya asked, suddenly sceptical. Stepan had been long dead by the time Illya had left the USSR. He would never have even come close to knowing about the Command, or Napoleon, or even America itself.

"Hey," Stepan shrugged, "I'm only a figment of your imagination as well, you know."

And he grinned, and maybe it wasn't all bad.