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 Nine

Stepan was right.

That was the first thought on Illya's mind once he had gotten himself on the aeroplane. That Stepan, damn him, was right.

Illya had, apparently, spent years in a coma. Years of motionless existence. He had used every ounce of resolve that he possessed to get himself onto this plane, drawn on reserves rarely touched to do this under his own power.

And, draining and difficult and painful as it had been, he knew that it should never have been enough. He should have collapsed in the airport – hell, he should have collapsed in the car, skidded off the road, been killed.

But here he was, panting and exhausted and sweating and shaking, and in none of the good ways, in the narrow airline seats that passed for reasonable these days.

Stepan was right.

The ghost – hallucination, ghost, memory: what difference did it make? – had vanished for the moment, leaving Illya alone with his thoughts. Perhaps it was simply too busy for Stepan, or perhaps for the moment, Illya's mind didn't need him to bounce noise off.

And so, naturally, Illya's thoughts turned to Stepan.

Stepan had been Illya's friend at the University of Georgia. The only two on their course to be from Moscow, they had bonded quickly and firmly, and had remained friends for several years. They had talked about nearly everything – until Napoleon, Stepan was the closest Illya had come to trusting someone.

But the facts were as they were: Illya had little thought of Stepan since leaving the USSR. What would have been the point? Illya was in espionage, and Stepan...Stepan was not. Stepan was also, rumour had it, a degenerate. Visits would put both of them at risk.

And then Stepan had died, and any potential thoughts had vanished too. He was no longer a part of Illya's life, so why had he been resurrected in this...whatever it was? Was it simply that Illya had trusted him, or was it that Illya's entire tenure away from Russia had been imagined, and he was, in reality, still in Stepan's life?

The thought gave him a headache. Well, made the current one worse. The mere idea that well over a decade of his life was false...well. It was enough to drive you mad.


"Can't you leave me alone?"

Illya was well aware that he sounded waspish, but Stepan only smirked.

"You visit me in my dreams and in...when I'm awake. Can't you give me a moment's peace?"

"Not if I have to keep reminding you," Stepan said. "You seem to have grasped the issue at hand, but running away isn't going to help. Not really."

"That's where you're wrong."

"How so?"

"If this isn't real," Illya said, "if nothing out there is real, if I'm...dreaming, or dead, or hallucinating, or...or whatever I'm doing...then what's making it seem real?"

This was familiar. Stepan had always been a sounding board for Illya's ideas, despite the fact that their respective IQ scores would have been a good forty or fifty points apart, had any of the Russian authorities bothered to test Stepan's mental strength. Which they wouldn't have – purely and simply because he didn't have any.

And, true to form, Stepan merely shrugged.

"What I already know," Illya said. "My mind's...drawing on what I know already..."

"Or what you think you know."

"But if I only thought I knew it, then I wouldn't know it. It would be false – a creation, an illusion, imaginary. And I have never practised my imagination, of all things."

This was true. Illya had not been prone to bouts of imagination as a child. He was Russian, born and bred: pragmatic and factual, and endlessly realistic, if a little cynical. He could be perfectly sociable if he wanted to be, and could logically plan the most convoluted plans, but imagination was a different story. He was not – and had never been – a spectacularly imaginative man.

It was, therefore, unlikely that his brain could flawlessly construct an enormous world for him to play in, when it was likely damaged in the first place.

"If you're brain damaged," Stepan said, "then you could be imaginative now. It might have changed you."

"And if I'm making this up," Illya said, "it explains how you know I was thinking of brain damage."

Stepan laughed.

"So I really am a figment of your imagination?" he said. "Or whatever you have that passes for it?"

"What other option is there?" Illya said. "You're dead."

"So what's your plan, to jolt yourself out of your little fantasy world?" Stepan asked.

"Prove it isn't real. The subsequent shock should – I hope – force my mind to take stock of the facts again."

"Hm," Stepan said, and shrugged. "Just remember what they told us when we were kids, Illya."

"What?"

"Well, I don't know about yours, but my mother always warned me that if people dreamed that they died," Stepan smirked, "then they died in their beds that same night."


By the time the plane landed, Illya's head was bordering on the crippling. He swayed off the craft like a drunk and had to sit down barely inside the terminal building for several minutes before making his way to the security checks.

Disturbingly, his fatigue was even less acute than it had been before. Clearly, his mind was abandoning the idea that his physical body should have suffered. Was his hallucinating psyche forgetting about the coma? Had there ever been a coma?

Illya wondered whether, in reality, he was in one now. Was this his coma?

Either way, he hoped he was soon to find out.

He had been, to use Napoleon's terms, sneaky. He knew that the assumption would be that he'd fled the country, or even – in a deluded state – returned to his homeland. Instead, he had caught a flight, under an assumed name (that he couldn't recall using before, but at this stage, that meant nothing) to Miami.

He had been to Miami once, and could barely remember it. If his mind could conjour up a living metropolis for him that he could barely remember (and the most vivid of those memories were the airport itself) then he would be impressed.

Unnerved, but impressed.

"So get moving."

He snorted, didn't look at Stepan, but obeyed.


"So how was Miami?"

It was an odd sensation. Every other time, Illya had not been aware of the transition between 'awake' and 'asleep' but he appeared on the road as if bursting into existence, as if popping between one world and the next, and Stepan was waiting with that idle smirk and easy humour.

For the first time, though, Illya took stock of himself. He was not, as would seem logical to him, dressed like he had done when living in Russia. He didn't look a bit different to the way he did in New York – haircut, suit, shoes: it was all the same.

"Illya?"


All of it.

"It was...a city," Illya said. "Constructed out of many American cities I have seen before."

"Oh?"

"I'm fairly certain there is no Del Floria's in Miami," Illya said dryly.

And that's what it had been. A conglomeration of cities that Illya had seen before – some not even American, but British or French – although his mind had, apparently, remembered not to push the distinct concrete architecture of the industrial cities of Russia into the sunny world of Florida.

"So," Stepan said, "you've established that isn't the real world. What are you going to do?"

"Well, the easier option would be to stay here until you and I can figure this out," Illya said. "But, as we both know I cannot sleep forever..."

The headache was present now, even in the sleeping world, and Illya clutched to the pain like it was a valuable reminder.

A link.

"People who die in their dreams," Stepan warned.

"I know," Illya felt for the familiar weight at his side, and drew out the pistol, eyeing the metal plains as if it were an alien object, as if he'd never held a gun in his life.

"I refuse to take responsibility if we're wrong about this," Stepan said, but he made no move as Illya turned the gun curiously.

"Why would you?" Illya asked, and raised it, aiming for the point of pain in his head. "You're already dead. What on earth could I do to you?"

He was aware of the motion of firing, but not of the sound of the shot.