There was no direct way to get from Cairo to Shannon, so this time Napoleon and Illya found themselves on an aeroplane bound for London Heathrow. It wasn't, at least, such an arduous flight as the one from New York to Cairo via Paris.

Illya followed Napoleon carefully down the steps from the plane at Heathrow and drew in breath at the damp chill of the air. It was a long way from Cairo's heat, and there was none of the crisp cold of New York. It was a wet cold that penetrated his coat and seeped into his toes. He imagined an overcast sky, heavy with rain.

'We have time for coffee, at least,' he said, taking a moment to feel his watch.

'A little time to watch the world go by,' Napoleon agreed, linking his arm into Illya's. Illya didn't object at the lax guiding. He had his cane, and it was nice to walk like this with Napoleon.

'You can watch the world, I'll watch the clock,' he said. 'That way when you're distracted by girls in miniskirts at least I can tell you when we need to board.'

'Girls in miniskirts, in this cold?' Napoleon asked with a laugh.

'There are always girls in miniskirts, and you always become distracted by them,' Illya said darkly. 'Failing that, there are air hostesses.'

Napoleon shrugged. 'Maybe you're right. But I'll do my best to only have eyes for you.

They sat at a table in a busy, clattering area, and although Napoleon ordered coffee Illya stuck to tea, because the British knew how to make that, unlike the disaster that was usually unleashed upon a British coffee pot. He heard Napoleon's expression of disgust and smiled.

'I told you you should stick to tea,' he commented.

'Every time I think I'll give it another try,' Napoleon lamented. 'Wait there, Illya. I'll be right back.'

So Illya sat and listened as Napoleon's footsteps lost themselves in the mill of activity. He could hear aero engines from outside, and inside there was a constant chatter, a clatter of feet, cases being set down and picked up again, children crying or shouting, parents remonstrating with their tired offspring. He picked up his tea cup again and sipped the hot drink, thinking about how long it had been since he had drunk proper Russian tea. There was a special place for his tea things in their kitchen cupboards, the cupboards that used to be just Napoleon's. Napoleon had got rid of a few things and put Illya's teapot in there, and found space for the samovar, and sometimes Illya would take it out and run his fingers over the metal contours and feel the tracing of the engraving all over its curved sides, but he didn't use it so often because it was so much more complicated than just putting the kettle on the stove.

There was a little shop over in Brooklyn that he bought caravan tea from, but he didn't go there often either. It required either Napoleon taking him or getting a taxi, and it always seemed a little too much fuss when he could easily buy regular tea from the grocery on the corner. But he did love to go into that shop. He remembered going there for the first time after losing his sight, one of his first trips out alone, because Napoleon had been sent to Milwaukee for a few days, and going to buy tea seemed like such a small thing, really. The cab had double parked in the street and horns had sounded, but the driver, a Jamaican man with a voice that made Illya think of rich plum colours, had ignored them all and come around and opened the cab door for him, asking, 'You need help to the door?'

Illya had stepped out into that sea of uncertainty, the cars in the street honking, engines revving, with his so newly acquired cane in his hand. He wasn't quite sure where he was, and he just stood there, until the cab driver took him by the elbow and told him there was a gap between two parked cars right there, then told him about the kerb, and then took him to the door of the shop. And Illya had opened his wallet to pay him, and trusted the man to take the right change, because he couldn't yet tell the coins apart and he hadn't got his clips to separate the notes. And then he had been left on the doorstep of the little shop, and he had felt adrift. The taxi driver couldn't have done more, but he felt adrift.

So he had reached out and pushed the shop door open and heard the bell tinkle. It was a little steel bell, he remembered, set on top of the door. He took a few steps into the interior, the cane tapping and his feet stepping on the hollow wood floorboards, and the dusty, spicy scent of the place filling his nostrils. He knew that this shop was full of stacks of tins and packets, artfully placed in the middle of the floor, so he stood there, trying to work out what to do. He wanted his tea, but he didn't know what to do.

And then a voice. 'Mr Kuryakin! Oh, Mr Kuryakin! What is it that's happened to you?'

It was the little woman who ran the shop, a Russian woman in her sixties from just outside of Leningrad, and it was so good to hear her voice, so good to hear Russian instead of American English. Illya had almost sagged as she came over to him and kissed him and hugged him and took his arm, and he tried to explain that there had been an accident and that now he was blind. So she took him into the back room, a place he had never been before, and it smelt so much like home, so much of the scents of Russian cooking and Russian tea. He had sat in a chair and stroked his fingers over the fabric of the arm and listened to the little noises as she filled the samovar and lit the flame and waited for the water to boil. And she had asked him again what had happened and he said, 'An accident, Mrs Ponomareva.'

He fiddled with the cloth on the chair. It felt like it was covered with something loose, some kind of lace-edged covering, and said, 'It was an accident in the lab,' because she thought he was a scientist. 'I got acid in my eyes.'

And she pressed his hand and said, 'You poor boy, you poor boy. How that must have hurt. And how did you come here? You came here alone? Why are you alone? Are you living alone, Mr Kuryakin? Tell me you're not.'

So Illya had dropped his head and said, 'I'm living with my friend, Mrs Ponomareva, but he had to go out of town for a few days, and I ran out of tea.'

She paused to pour the water into the pot, and the beautiful smoky scent of Russian caravan tea had filled the air, and then she said, 'And your friend left you alone and blind? But I would have sent Konstantin, Mr Kuryakin, if you had only telephoned. He would have brought you your tea. No need to trek all the way over here alone.'

She had served him tea, strong and sweet with strawberry jam, and he had sipped at it and felt so warm, but so strange at the same time, because it was so strange to be sitting here in a room he couldn't see, talking in Russian and drinking tea and all the time thinking about how he was going to get home and what he would do with himself that evening with Napoleon away. There was a dish of lasagne defrosting on the counter and he would only have to slip it in the oven, but he hated to sit there alone. He hated having to guess which record was which if he wanted to listen, or putting the television on and listening to programmes made for people who could see, or putting the radio on and scrolling through the dial searching for something that wasn't inane. He would call Napoleon on his communicator, though, and talk to him in whatever hotel room he was staying in, and perhaps feel a little less alone.

Mrs Ponomareva had given him his packet of tea for free. She had pressed two packets on him and called him a cab and when it arrived she had walked him out to it with such great care and hugged him and kissed him on both cheeks before he got in. It had been such a lovely hour, sitting in the back room of her shop and drinking real tea and talking in one of his native tongues. Then he had sat in the cab all the way back to Manhattan and gone back up to Napoleon's apartment, and the scent of the caravan tea had been a wonderful, familiar thing when he took the packets out of the bag, but still, he had felt alone.

He was trying to avoid thinking about what Dr Bruner had told him. He knew that. It was easier to drift into reminiscences than to think about that. All he needed to do was to see Bruner's American acquaintance, and have his name put down on the waiting list. But he couldn't believe in that. He couldn't believe in that fairy-tale-like ease. He had been let down so hard before, every time he had got his hopes up. He needed to fold all of that away for now. When they got home he could let himself think about it, but not until then. Until then he would pretend that nothing had changed.

'Hey, Illya.'

There was a clatter as Napoleon set down his own cup of tea, and Illya smiled at the sound of him. Under the table he edged his leg forward until his ankle touched Napoleon's ankle, and Napoleon asked, 'You all right, partner? You looked a million miles away.'

'Perhaps a thousand,' Illya said, and he opened his watch and felt the hands and said, 'You had better drink up, Napoleon. We'll need to board in half an hour.'

It would be good to be home when the Irish part of this affair was over. There was always a subtle undercurrent of stress to all these unfamiliar places, and it would be good to know where everything was, to be able to go out on his own, to be able to sit with Napoleon in the evening in front of the fire with a drink in his hand, and go with him to his own bed when they both grew sleepy. It would be good to be back in the office, to hear Sarah's voice and go through the piles of print-outs she always had prepared for him, to feel secure again. And he knew that his feeling of a need for security had very little to do with these travels in strange places, and far more to do with the turmoil that Dr Bruner had unleashed.

((O))

It was raining in Ireland in a fine mist that coated Illya's hair and seeped under his collar and made his shoulders itch. They only walked from the plane to the terminal, and then from the terminal to a cab, but just those few hundred yards left him soaked. He sat in the back of the cab getting colder and colder as it drove through the dark land and Napoleon told him he would describe what was out there, but there was nothing to see, because they were driving out of Shannon to a town some way away, and the countryside was only occasionally lit by a light in a farm window or a small cluster of houses and street lights. Sometimes the scent of manure drifted in to the cab, but mostly there was just damp and cold.

'Can you recommend a place to stay?' Napoleon asked the cab driver when the dark became prickled with a vague degree of golden light. They were entering the small town, and they hadn't had a chance to book anywhere from Cairo. 'Somewhere we can dry out, perhaps?'

And the driver took them to a pub somewhere in the winding streets and said, 'Mr Nugent'll make sure you're dry, and the food's fair, too.'

'As long as there's a bed,' Illya murmured, as Napoleon came to help him out of the cab.

'Watch out for the kerb. It's high and we're about a foot out,' Napoleon said, and Illya slid his cane across an uneven surface and then up the vertical stone of the kerb. The road had felt rough under the car, and he wondered if perhaps the street was old enough that some cobbles remained. He wasn't fond of cobbles. They tended to be slippery.

Illya stood while Napoleon paid the driver, and listened to their cases being deposited on the pavement, and he wondered how they were going to get inside when he had to hold on to either Napoleon's arm or his cane, and there wasn't a little crowd of Egyptian boys offering to carry their things.

'You take that,' Napoleon said, giving him his own case, 'and I can manage two in one hand and one in the other.'

So Illya accepted that, shoving his cane under his arm and taking hold of Napoleon's arm, which was pulled down a little by the weight of the case in his hand. He followed Napoleon into a space full of talking and heat and smoke and the scent of alcohol, and he turned his ear to the sound of crackling.

'Napoleon, they have a fire,' he said with a grin, everything else suddenly shoved to the back of his mind.

'Yes, and there's nowhere to sit,' Napoleon told him grimly, but then they were being approached by a man with a broad accent, the cases were being taken, they were assured that there was a nice room as long as they didn't mind sharing a double bed, and Illya found himself manhandled through what felt like a dense crowd towards the sound of the fire.

'Shove yerself out of there, lad. Go on. Let the gentleman sit down, now.'

He wasn't sure where Napoleon was any more. The man who had hold of him had a deep, rich voice and a scent of tobacco about him, and he was manoeuvring him through the pub while Illya held his cane protectively in front of his body and tried not to hit anyone.

'There, sit you down,' the man said, and Illya felt out blindly and his wrist was taken and moved to the rough fabric of what he discovered to be a wing-back chair. It was so close to the fire that when he sat down his knees started to burn, and he had to turn them away. He leant his cane against the chair and basked in the heat.

'Now, will you be having a drink, sir?' the man continued.

'Er – my friend – ' Illya began, and the man said, 'Don't you be worrying about that. He's just straightening out all the details, paying for the room. Now, that's a lovely accent you have, isn't it? Where are you from?'

'The Ukraine,' Illya said rather awkwardly. He held out a hand and said, 'Illya Kuryakin.'

The man took it and shook it, and introduced himself as Eddie Nugent. His hand was warm and dry around Illya's cold fingers. Really he just wanted to be left alone, to have dinner, and to sleep, but the man plumped himself down opposite and started asking him why he had come so far to such a small place. Then he remembered he had asked Illya what he wanted to drink, and Illya said, 'A pint of stout, please,' and that got him a noise of approval.

Then Napoleon returned and just as Illya was picking up his drink the man excused himself and told Napoleon that a menu would be brought in no time at all, and finally they were left alone.

Illya sighed in the aftermath of the whirlwind.

'I couldn't say we have not been welcomed,' he commented, and Napoleon chuckled.

'Well, I've secured us a nice room that apparently sits right above where we are now, so all the heat from this big fireplace goes up through the back wall. There's only a double bed, but – '

'Ah, well, we all must endure some trials in life,' Illya commented with a slight smile turning up the corners of his mouth. The fire was wonderful and he was hungry, but it would be lovely to climb into that bed with Napoleon.

'Ah, thank you,' Napoleon said to someone else, then told Illya, 'The menu. Food looks good. Want me to read it out?'

Illya had his eyes closed and was lolling his head back against the chair. 'Oh, choose me what you think I'll like,' he said. 'I trust your judgement.'

He could feel the mist of damp that had penetrated his clothes since they disembarked in London slowly rising away from him in the heat. If he let himself, he could forget that they were here on a mission. There was just the fire and the babble of voices, and Napoleon a few feet away. They couldn't really talk about the mission here, with so many people around, so he put it out of his head. Napoleon ordered him a steak pie, and a lamb shank for himself, and half an hour later he was leaning forward to the low table between the chairs and filling himself with hot, rich food. Then he followed Napoleon up a set of creaking stairs and ducked under a beam when he was warned to, and when they went through their bedroom door his hand passed over unpainted wood boards.

'So, this is our room,' he commented, trying to read the feeling of the place. It was relatively small, and he could hear flames spitting. 'An open fire?'

'A small one,' Napoleon said. 'Must lead into the same chimney as the big one downstairs. There's a fire guard in front of it, but take care, won't you?'

'I always take care. Bed?'

'Oh, yes,' Napoleon said with feeling. Illya thought he was smiling. 'You know that brass framed double bed I mentioned? Well, it's here, in this room. Quite high, big enough for – well, you know, for two bachelors who need to share a room. What else? Hmm, there's a set of drawers, a nightstand on either side of the bed with a lamp on my side – '

'Your side?'

'Well, you won't be using it so I thought I'd call dibs on that side. You can read quite well without a light. But don't interrupt. There's a rather tarnished mirror over the drawers, and an armchair in the corner by the window. The window – ' And Napoleon moved away from Illya's hand and he heard curtains swishing back on rattling rings. ' – looks out over something, might be a back yard. It's dark out there, just a few lights from other houses in the town.'

'And the bathroom?'

'Ah, the lovely barmaid told me that was just down the hall. Shall we take a look?'

Illya sighed. 'Probably sensible, although I'd rather explore the bed,' he said. He did far prefer places that had their own en suite bathrooms.

So he went with Napoleon to find out about the bathroom, then they returned to their room and Illya threw himself onto the bed while Napoleon sorted out the cases. It was deliciously warm up here, and there was some kind of woollen bedspread underneath him, and the fire filled the room with a soft noise of wood popping and hissing as the flames licked around it.

'Do we really have to be on a mission?' he asked rather plaintively.

From across the room, Napoleon laughed. 'You were the one wanting to get out of the office, weren't you? Anyway, we're not on a mission tonight. Tomorrow I'll see about getting hold of a car and we can take a bit of a tour, see if we can find where these people are taking off from to export their drugs. If you want to come, that is?'

'Of course I want to come. I may not be much help spotting airfields, but I want to come.'

'Well then, tonight we'll forget about the mission,' Napoleon said, his voice becoming smooth as melted chocolate as he came back to the bed. Illya felt hands on his waistband, and he smiled as Napoleon started to peel away his clothes. Yes, this was a good room, and this was a good bed. He was sure the good Catholic folks of the town would be horrified to know what he and Napoleon were about to do, but perhaps that made it all the more fun.

((O))

In the morning Illya sat at a table in the now quiet pub, eating bacon and toast and eggs and mushrooms and black pudding and everything else the soft-voiced girl had offered him when he had sat down, listening obliquely to the voices of the other residents at their own repast. Rather fainter, in the hallway outside, he could hear Napoleon on the telephone. He was trying to hire a car, and Illya could hear him getting more and more frustrated, his voice growing louder and louder.

'More tea, darling?' the young waitress asked out of nowhere, touching his shoulder, and Illya stifled a jump. He found his cup and lifted it, and realised it was empty.

'Oh, yes, please,' he said, favouring her with one of his more charming smiles. As she poured he said, 'The breakfast is very good. Very good.'

'I'll be sure to tell mam,' the girl replied. 'Milk? In your tea?'

'Oh, yes,' he nodded. 'Thank you.'

Illya turned back to his plate and found a sausage with the tip of his knife, then speared it with his fork. Then he realised that the girl was still there, watching him, and he lifted his head enquiringly.

'Was there something else?'

'Oh, I'm sorry,' she mumbled. She was probably watching him because he was blind, and hadn't even expected him to realise that she was still there.

He decided to deflect her interest. 'It's all right,' he said. 'I suppose you don't get many foreigners round here?'

'Oh, no, we get plenty,' she said quickly, and her voice moved down and a chair scraped as she seated herself in Napoleon's vacated place. 'Plenty of tourists here. Americans, mostly, all looking for their roots. You don't have any Irish in you?'

Illya smiled. 'Er, no,' he said politely. 'Not as far as I know. I'm not sure the Irish ever made it to Kiev. So, do you have any Americans staying here at the moment? I mean, apart from Mr Solo?'

'Oh, not here,' she told him. 'Down the road, though, at McGinty's, there's a pair stay there all the time. I don't know what they do. There's no business for them round here, but I see them all the time. Big guys, you know. Look like they've stepped out of a picture.'

Illya's eyebrow rose. 'Really?'

He applied himself to his breakfast again, and he could feel her watching him again. Finally he said, 'Look, Miss – Nugent, is it? Is there anything you wanted to ask me? Something you wanted to say?'

'Oh, no, Mr – '

'Kuryakin,' he supplied.

'Mr Kuryakin. I'm sorry,' she said. 'It's just – well – ' and she giggled a little, then said, 'You're much better looking than most of the men who – '

Gunfire exploded in the bar. Illya's reaction was instant. It was coming from over by the door, and he pushed the table over to make a shield, sending its contents clattering and smashing to the flag floor. He heard Miss Nugent scream and he grabbed out for her and fumbled her to the floor, hissing, 'Keep your head down!'

He wanted to call out for Napoleon, but he knew better. He couldn't do anything to help, and calling for him would only alert the attackers to the fact that they were associated with one another. He heard the sputs of silenced shots, and recognised the distinctive sound of Napoleon's gun. The shots were close by; the muzzle flash was bright in his vision.

He held his hand hard over the waitress's head, keeping her on the floor, until abruptly the gunshots stopped, and silence spread to fill the space. He lay still, waiting. Someone started to cry. There was shouting from outside. Illya stayed very still behind the table, because he couldn't be sure that the gunmen were dead or gone, just that they were silent.

Then he heard Napoleon's beautiful voice, shouting out, 'Illya? Illya?'

He sighed out his relief. Only now did he notice how hard his heart was thudding against his ribs.

'Here,' he called back. He kept his head down still. 'Napoleon, are you all right? Is anyone hurt?' Then he turned to the girl beneath him and asked, 'Are you all right?'

She said something unintelligible and then burst into tears, and he touched his hand to her head, trying to feel her scalp, her face. The wet on her face was tears, he thought, not blood. He couldn't smell blood, just the mixed scents of human sweat and the remains of his breakfast, which must have been spread over the floor when he overturned the table.

'Miss Nugent, listen to me,' he said rather harshly. 'I can't see. Tell me if you're all right?'

'Yes,' she snuffled then, through her tears. 'Yes, I'm all right.'

Illya felt a great surge of guilt at what had just happened. Those attackers had undoubtedly been Thrush. They would not have come here to this innocent Irish pub had he and Napoleon not been staying here.

He heard running footsteps in the street outside, a door banging, a stentorian voice shouting, and then Napoleon said in his smoothest voice, 'Gentlemen, if I can have a word?'

'Listen,' Illya said, shaking the girl's shoulder a little. 'Can you see my cane?'

'W-what?' she asked him, still shaking with tears.

'My cane,' he repeated, trying so hard to keep his voice from becoming a growl, but not quite succeeding. This was so frustrating. 'I need my cane.'

Then Napoleon was over by him saying, 'Here it is, Illya,' and as he got up Napoleon put the cane into his hand, and guided him with great care across a room that seemed to be strewn with obstacles. He wanted to feel over Napoleon, to check him for wounds, but Napoleon didn't seem to be in pain at all. He took him through into another space, and here there was the smell of blood and a scent of shit, a real scent of death, and Illya's nose wrinkled a little.

'They're dead?' he asked.

'Both,' Napoleon said, close to his ear. 'Which made our job short and sweet, I suppose, or part of it.' Then he raised his voice. 'All right, gentlemen.' He nudged Illya and said, 'Illya, there are two gentlemen here from the Garda. Gentlemen, we're with the U.N.C.L.E.. My name is Napoleon Solo and this is Illya Kuryakin.'

'And do you always bring gun toting maniacs into town?' a man's voice asked rather angrily.

'Er, no, I can assure you we try our best not to,' Napoleon said in a low voice. 'Listen, this might be easier at the station, don't you think? Perhaps your man can call someone to clean up here?'

It was raining again outside, and Illya wished he had a coat. He let Napoleon do the talking as they walked up the street with the officer of the Garda, because he was concentrating on not slipping on the slick flags of the pavement, and he had not seen anything at all, just heard the shooting.

'There were two of them,' Napoleon was saying. 'Leon Michea, the one who – er – well, I think he succumbed to a gut shot, was responsible for using your beautiful country as a stopping point for trafficking drugs into the US, officer. They ship them this far, then fly them over to America and sell them to raise money for Thrush. Are – er – are you aware of Thrush?'

'My wife's a birdwatcher, Mr Solo,' the officer said rather darkly. 'I'm an officer of the law.'

Illya could hear the smile in Napoleon's voice when he said, 'Well, we're both officers of the law, sir. Thrush are a nasty international organisation bent on world domination. They're the biggest threat to the free world since Hitler. I'm sorry for the chaos in that charming little pub – they must have gotten wind of our presence and come to sort us out. But, believe me, you don't want Thrush setting up their nests in your town.'

It was a relief when they turned in to the police station, which was not a great deal warmer, but was at least dry, and Illya sat in a wooden chair next to Napoleon as the officer fiddled with some kind of gas heater, and cursed under his breath. Finally the heat started coming out, and he sat down.

'So, you and Mr Kur- '

'Kuryakin,' Illya supplied quietly.

'You and Mr Kuryakin, you're both agents for the U.N.C.L.E.?'

Illya took out his wallet and found his card, assuming that Napoleon was doing the same. He was sure that the officer was questioning how a blind man was an agent, but he wasn't about to launch into long explanations. It was irritating and time consuming enough to have to sit here and explain at length to the Garda all about Thrush and how it had happened that a gun battle had taken place in a quiet pub. Although the officer eventually acknowledged their international jurisdiction and Napoleon's right to carry a weapon, he obviously was not happy with the situation.

When they were finally released, there were more explanations and apologies to be given back at the pub, where the Nugent wife and daughter were crying and the landlord was furious. And then Napoleon's communicator sounded, because apparently the officer had called U.N.C.L.E. to confirm their story, and another long conversation ensued, which ended with the words, 'Mr Kuryakin, a cab will be outside your location within half an hour. Your ticket will be ready to pick up at Shannon airport when you arrive. I'm sure you're capable of looking after yourself. You'll be met in New York by Miss Williams.'

It felt as if everything had turned to tatters. It was true that a gun battle in a peaceful Irish pub wasn't the best of situations, but that was hardly Illya's fault any more than was the fault of the twenty or so innocents who were there that morning. It wasn't Napoleon's fault either that Thrush had cottoned so quickly on to their presence; although there was the lingering, niggling thought that a pair of foreign tourists, one of whom was blind, was maybe too distinctive to slip past in the spy business.

Illya sat moodily in the armchair in the corner of their shared room, his thoughts turning in on themselves in a proper display of Russian gloom.

'Then this is it, Napoleon,' he commented, listening to his partner as he moved about packing Illya's things back into his suitcase. 'Waverly will not let me out of the building again, I'm sure. I will be office-bound for life.'

'Now, Illya,' Napoleon said in an infuriatingly rational tone. 'You know the old man. He's blaming himself more than us for sending you on to Ireland in the first place. He hates it when things go wrong. It's not your fault Thrush decided to open the gates of hell in this place.'

'It does not matter how it happened,' Illya commented dully. 'It is that it did happen.'

Napoleon came to him then and crouched in front of him and took his hands, kissing them. 'Now, my beautiful, gloomy little Russian,' he said, 'don't anticipate trouble. We'll get back home – '

'I will get back home,' Illya corrected him. 'You will still be here.'

The softness of Napoleon's lips on his knuckles was so nice, though, so sweet. His breath was warm and beautiful. He didn't want to leave him and go back to that big, empty apartment.

'All right, you'll get back home. And Waverly will calm down, and there'll be another surveillance mission – '

'And you will be on it, while I sit in the office like a glorified secretary in a position given to me out of pity, and – '

'Illya,' Napoleon chided him, kissing his hands again. 'You do not have that job out of pity. You have it because you are incredibly qualified to do it. Now, promise me, you're not going to spend the whole journey home in a proper Russian brood. The air stewardesses won't like it, for a start.'

That made Illya smile a little. 'Trust you to think of the air stewardesses.'

'Only to think of, not to touch,' Napoleon promised.

Illya reached out and carded his fingers through Napoleon's hair, brushing past the wound at the side of his head and wincing on Napoleon's behalf.

'It's only a little sore,' Napoleon told him before he could ask. 'I'll be okay, Illya. I'll sort out the leftovers of this Thrush airfield, and I'll be home. I promise. And you will go on the waiting list with Dr Bruner, and then – '

'And then we will see,' Illya said darkly, not unaware of the layers of meaning in those words.

'We will see,' Napoleon echoed.

He leant forward towards Illya and a hand touched the side of Illya's head, and then Napoleon's lips pressed against his, sweetly, chastely at first, but then deepening into a kiss of real passion, where Illya tasted Napoleon's mouth and sighed out his need. There was no time for more than this one hot kiss. The taxi would be here soon.

He slid forward with a groan and came to his knees in front of Napoleon, and hugged him so hard that Napoleon gasped.

'Easy there,' Napoleon said, but he was hugging Illya back almost as hard. 'You'll be all right,' he promised. 'They'll look after you on the airplane and Sarah's meeting you.'

'Oh, I don't have any fears about travelling,' Illya said, and he didn't. He had taken enough cabs to be confident that he could manage and that when he couldn't manage someone would help him. The aeroplane would be little different. What he feared was that after this one bright spark of living again he was going back to never being allowed out of the office. Somehow he seemed to see that so much more clearly than Napoleon.