He feels – is it shellshocked? There were no shells. It can't be that. He feels underwater, as if he were sitting in a tank. Everyone feels far away, muted, distorted by the currents. Everything is very clear, but very far away.
The table moves under his elbows. For a moment he can't work out what's happening, but it's just Waverly turning the table, sending some papers around to Napoleon. Waverly is speaking, and Illya should be listening, or at least looking as if he's listening. He realises that he was looking right at Waverly, seeing his lips moving, but not listening at all.
' – some sleep,' Napoleon is saying. 'What do you think, Illya?'
'Hmm?' he asks, turning his head sideways.
Napoleon is in the seat right next to his, but he still feels a million miles away.
'I thought you could do with some sleep,' Napoleon says, his words spaced and patient.
He slept on the plane, didn't he? He's sure he slept on the plane. He doesn't feel sleepy, just – distant. Far away.
Waverly is saying something about debriefing. His mind feels as though it were humming, as if a swarm of bees had set up inside his skull. How can he hear through that humming?
He remembers the cling of the cloth over his face, his mouth gasping open, full of wet cloth. The cloth sopping and contoured to his face like another skin with the water being poured over it, cutting out all air. Drowning. Struggling to breathe and getting nothing. Nose, mouth, lungs, filling up with water, a searing feeling that seemed to be tunnelling into his brain. His arms pinioned along his sides, tied to the plank. That awful, awful feeling of drowning on dry land.
His lungs jerk. Something is flashing in front of his eyes. He's not lying with a drenched cloth over his face after all. He's sitting in Waverly's office, and Waverly is asking him something. Somehow he manages to answer, and the answer must satisfy Waverly, because he doesn't ask the question again.
'Want to come down to the Commissary for a coffee?' Napoleon is asking him. 'I think we're all done here for now.'
How can they be all done? He looks up at the clock, startled, and sees that two hours have passed. He must have been sitting here answering questions all that time, but he doesn't remember. Waverly is writing something down on paper, maybe his response to the last question, and Napoleon is touching Illya's arm with his fingertips.
For now. That means more questions later, a longer debrief. He's not sure what he'll say, or be asked to say, given that he doesn't even remember what he said this time. He racks his memory to think if he gave up any sensitive information during his captivity. He's sure he didn't. All of the codes, at any rate, would have been changed as soon as he was confirmed as captured but alive.
He taps his fingers on his wrist in a steady tattoo. His wristwatch was taken, along with everything else of value or use. He'll have to get a new one. In the cell he tried to gain a semblance of time by tapping his fingers on his wrist, once a second, where his watch should be. The skin of his wrist was smoothed and a little shiny from the constant touch of the metal back, but the watch was gone, no doubt dumped in a trash can somewhere because he's not stupid enough to wear an expensive or meaningful watch on missions. He could feel that smoothness on his wrist but he could hardly see it, because it was so dark in there. Those little beats of his fingertips became a heartbeat, became the only thing that made him feel alive.
'Coffee?' Napoleon asks again. 'Illya?'
'Not – really thirsty,' he says, then becomes aware that that's not a proper sentence. 'No,' he says. 'Thank you, Napoleon. I'm not really thirsty. I think I'll go and lie down in one of the off duty rooms for a little while.'
'Why don't you go home?' Napoleon asks. 'I can drive you.'
'I don't want to go home,' he snaps, suddenly, unaccountably, furious.
The idea of going home is horrifying to him. He doesn't know why. Maybe it's the space in his largely open-plan apartment. The clutter and the chaos of possessions. Pretending everything is normal. He feels like throwing up at the thought.
Then he breathes and says, 'Sorry. No, I need to get some reports done. There's no point in going home. I'll only have to come back in again.'
He's walking, walking away from Napoleon, aware that he's stretching the distance between them until an invisible thread will break, until there's no turning around and smiling and agreeing to go for that coffee after all, or saying, yes, please drive me home. Thanks for offering. He takes another step and the thread is snapped, and he leaves Napoleon behind in the corridor outside Waverly's room, just watching after him, he supposes. He doesn't hear footsteps, so Napoleon must still be standing there, but he doesn't turn around to look.
((O))
He opens the door into the first of the little off duty rooms and steps inside. Inside, he breathes. Once. Twice. Deep, deep into his lungs. He closes the door. He spent so long in a tiny room behind a closed door, so this place should make him feel terrible, but it doesn't. It's oddly, horrifically, comforting to close the door and slide the bolt across and have those narrow, flat walls all around him, so close to him.
He takes off his jacket and lies down on the bed, on top of the blanket. He stares up at the ceiling. This bed isn't soft, but it's a lot softer than the bed in the cell. He didn't have a blanket in there, or a pillow, and he could feel the metal struts of the frame through the padding, what padding there was. He feels reassured by the closeness of the walls. He doesn't want to feel that. He knows he should be revelling in light and space and fresh air, but the sky feels too high outside and the air feels startling and unpredictable, and the milling of people is just too much. It's easier in here. He doesn't have to think about anything.
Lying on the plank with his arms pinned against his sides and his ankles roped down, tilted a little, head down. Lying with a wet cloth over his face, over the cloth of the bag they always covered his head in when they brought him from the cell. The chill, sodden press, the weight of that towel or blanket or whatever it was, and the water trickling, entering his nose, his wedged open mouth. Lying there, trying not to breathe, then having to breathe, and his lungs making a spasmodic jerk. Then the water filling him up, burning, filling him up. No air. No air. The pressure, the screaming horror of drowning on dry land.
His hands are clawed into the blanket beneath him, his breath shuddering as the panic washes through him. He isn't there. He can breathe. He isn't there now. He's in a little room in U.N.C.L.E. headquarters. The light is on, the walls are butter yellow, the mattress is firm beneath him. He's not there now.
The cell was a relief. Even with the screeching noise they played to keep him awake, even with the stink of the bucket and the permeating stench of damp and mould, no one was trying to drown him there.
He turns on the radio by the bed. There's a similar radio in every rest room. Music blares out, some popular music from a local station, and he physically recoils. He turns the dial. Classical is the scratching, screaming of violins. Jazz is like falling apart. Speech is the worst of all. He turns the dial onto white noise, and there's a strange comfort. It is almost, almost, like the screeching sound they played into his cell to keep him awake. Almost, but softer. It's a noise that fills his head and does something to push the thoughts away.
He lies there trying to breathe in slow, measured breaths. His lungs are burning and he feels peaked and ill. He taps his finger on his wrist, a tap a second. Tap – tap – tap – tap – tap. Sixty is a minute. Three hundred and sixty is five. He never managed to count to an hour. How many would that be? His mind fails him. He should be able to calculate that without thinking, but there's nothing in his mind but a static that echoes the radio noise.
He finds himself on the ground under the bed, lying on the hard, cool floor. He drops the blanket down over the edge of the bed so that it makes a curtain, so he has just this little, low coffin space, the light cut out and the soft shush from the radio pushing around him. He tries to stop himself from tapping out the time on his wrist, and lies there, looking at the underneath of the bed. He tries to breathe, and every time he breathes in he remembers breathing in water, and the awful feeling of drowning. He wants to scream.
He wants to scream, but somehow his steady breaths are getting more ragged. They're jerking into little sobs, and then they're full and rich, breaking out of his chest, huffing out into the little space, his eyes hot and his chest heavy, still with that burning in his lungs from all those sessions on the board. He feels flattened into the floor, too exhausted to not cry, too utterly spent. He loses all sense of time. Then he must be asleep, asleep in his little cave beneath the bed, because he finds himself waking, the room filled with that static sound, no idea of the time because there are no windows in this place, and nothing to show the march of the hours.
His face feels pinched and stale, his cheeks salted with dried tears. He rolls out from under the bed and his body aches and sears. Too many bruises. Too many strained muscles. All up and down his body, arms and legs, stomach and back, everything ended up bruised, strained, exhausted. His head aches. He coughs and the ache sharpens to a juddering pain, because you can only cough so often before it starts to make your head feel like a drum.
He's lying on his side now, just out from under the bed, his eyes fixed on the bottom of the door. He realises he's watching the little crack of light, waiting for some sign of human life, just like he did in the cell. There he clutched at any sign of there being human beings outside, someone who might spare him an ounce of pity, someone who wasn't one of those brutes who put the bag on his head and took him to the room with that plank and the pouring water. He could open the door of this room any moment he likes, but he's just lying there, watching for the shadow of passing feet, desperate for human company but sickened by the thought all the same.
He makes himself get up and set the bed back to rights. He dusts off the sleeves of his shirt and tightens up his tie again and rubs his hands over his face, then steps towards the door and silently draws the bolt open. Outside he will have to pretend to be a sane human being again.
It must be obvious that he's been crying. It must be obvious on his unwashed face.
He walks stiffly down to his shared office. Everything hurts. He opens the door and Napoleon is in there, sitting at his desk, reading through some papers. At Illya's entry he looks up, blinking, as if he had been lost in what he was reading.
'Illya,' he says.
'I slept on the plane, didn't I?' Illya asks. That question has been needling at him.
Napoleon stares at him for a moment as if he isn't sure how to parse the question. Then he says, 'Uh, yes, you did, in fits and starts. You ate a good meal too, mine and yours. Remember?'
He thinks. Yes, he remembers that tray of aeroplane food. Mashed potato, he thinks, but he can't remember what else. He doesn't remember eating Napoleon's too. He can't remember sleeping.
'You had a nap just now?' Napoleon asks, conversational but somehow tentative.
Something spikes in him, a reaction as if he's just been stabbed with a pin. He has no idea why.
'They didn't let me sleep at all in there,' he snaps. 'Weeks and – '
He doesn't know how long it was. He has no idea. Was it weeks or months or days? He's not sure what date it is now. He can't remember when he was captured. His brain is stuttering and he doesn't even know why he was angry.
'I'll get you that coffee,' Napoleon says, as if Illya hadn't snapped at all.
He feels sick. How can he do this? He wants to scurry back to the off duty room and press himself back under the bed again, against the wall. He doesn't feel able to sit in here and make normal conversation with Napoleon, even with Napoleon, with whom he has always been able to talk about anything.
'Thank you,' he says, because at least that will get Napoleon out of the room for a few minutes. 'Coffee would be great.'
The silence spreads and expands after Napoleon leaves the room. He stands there for a moment near the door, then makes himself walk over to his chair and sit down. Nothing has changed at his desk. The typewriter. The trays of inconsequential paper. Anything important is locked away in the filing cabinet. He suddenly has a ridiculous urge to squeeze himself into one of those filing cabinet drawers, to be locked away again. He has an urge to crouch himself down under the desk. He sits at his chair, though, looking at the painfully ordinary sight of typewriter keys, pens, bits of paper. There's a ring on the desk to the right where his last cup of coffee sat. That must have been in another time, another world. He scratches at it with his fingernail and some of the coffee flakes off.
Napoleon is setting down a new cup of coffee just to the side of the dried ring. Illya moves it so that it fits exactly, and that feels pleasing to him. This cup now, fitting so perfectly into the ring of his last cup of coffee, his last before all of this happened.
'You don't have to stay and do any of the paperwork, you know,' Napoleon mentions, leaning himself on the corner of the desk. 'You're allowed some time out.'
He knows he shouldn't attempt the paperwork right now. He knows he's not in a fit state. But he doesn't know what else to do with himself. He can't bear the thought of the normality of his apartment, the wideness of the walls, the slotting back into everyday life. The fridge will probably be full of mould. There will be mail piled up in the box downstairs. Everything will have that stale smell of neglect.
The buzz of the intercom is so harsh he almost spills the coffee. It hits a nerve in him, reminding him of the noise they played to keep him awake, and just for a moment his heart rate surges.
Napoleon reaches around him to answer. Illya's heart is singing in his ears and he doesn't catch what the woman on the other end is saying.
'Yes, he's right next to me,' Napoleon says. 'I'll send him down.'
He releases the button and looks at Illya, expectant. When Illya says nothing Napoleon tells him, 'That was Medical. They want to see you.'
It was inevitable. He stepped off the plane into a taxi and out of the taxi into headquarters, and went straight up to Waverly's office. Of course medical want to see him.
'Want me to walk down with you?' Napoleon asks.
Illya takes a sip of the coffee and holds the taste in his mouth. He remembers the sparing cups of water he was given in the cell, the sparing food. He remembers the cloth being forced into his mouth to hold it open, and the water soaking it, the taste of mildew overwhelming any water taste. Water running down the back of his open throat, into his gullet, into his lungs.
He takes another swallow of the coffee, too much, and it feels like swallowing a brick. The pain is sharp and intense, and he wants to cough.
'I'll be fine,' he tells Napoleon, putting the cup down and trying to swallow away the pain in his throat.
'I'm going that way anyway,' Napoleon says, putting a hand on his arm. 'Where's your jacket?'
Illya looks around vaguely.
'Oh, I must have left it in the rest room,' he remembers.
He took it off before he lay down. It's not even his suit. None of those clothes are his. They're something they thrust on him after they got him out, so he could change out of the stinking jumpsuit and look like a normal human being. All the clothes had been a little too big.
'I'll stop in and pick it up on my way back,' Napoleon says. 'I'll leave it in here for you.'
((O))
There's something about the infirmary that makes him feel drawn in and tense. He doesn't know what it is. Maybe it's because they conducted the waterboarding in such a clinical way, because they always had a doctor there to be sure he wasn't actually in danger of death. It didn't help to know he wasn't in danger of death, because he knows enough about these things to know that there's always a danger when you're strapping a man down and filling his lungs with water. It doesn't help to know there's a doctor beside you when you're suffocating, can't breathe, can't take any oxygen into your lungs, and all the animal reflexes take over, your little animal brain screaming and screaming for survival. It doesn't help when the doctor is on their side.
The doctor is kind and softly spoken, but he still feels that shiver of fear. He takes his clothes off as directed and stands there while the doctor tuts at the bruises and abrasions and looks at the marks on his wrists where he struggled. He steps onto the scales and the doctor tuts again because he has lost seventeen pounds on his previous weight. Some of it is fat, he's sure, but a lot must be muscle.
'How long were you in their hands for?' the doctor asks, and Illya shakes his head.
'I – I'm not sure,' he says.
He should know. He should, but he doesn't. He taps his fingers on his wrist, on the smooth place where his watch should be, and thinks of the little window in the face that showed the date. He can't remember what it said when he saw it last.
He stands there, naked on the scales, because the doctor hasn't told him to get off. The doctor slips a thermometer into his mouth and leaves it there while he opens the intercom and speaks to someone.
'You were released yesterday?' he asks when he's got the information he wanted. He slips the thermometer out from between Illya's lips and examines it.
Illya blinks. He looks down at his thin chest, his thin legs, the ridiculous little bush of hair down there. He's suddenly aware of how naked he is next to the clothed doctor, and he doesn't like it. He feels like a snail without a shell.
'I think,' he says, because he can't be sure.
How can he work out the time difference, what was yesterday, what is today?
He remembers lying there on the bed in that cell with the awful noise screaming, cutting off, staying quiet just long enough for him to get used to the quiet, then starting up again so that no matter how tired he was he could never, never get any restful sleep. Something rises in his throat. He can't be sick, not here. He swallows hard, clenching his fingers into his palms.
He remembers lying there, dimly aware of a commotion. He remembers the door suddenly swinging open and a light that felt dazzling slicing into the dimly lit cell. Men standing there, their faces lost behind gas masks. It wasn't Napoleon. He didn't see Napoleon until later. These were strangers grabbing at him, pressing a mask onto his face, jerking him onto his feet and pulling him out into the corridor. He had been dazed, tottering, so tired, so wretchedly undone from the lack of sleep and food and warmth, that he had barely understood how to walk.
'Seventy three days,' the doctor tells him. 'Give or take. You did well.'
He blinks. He feels dizzy. He had no idea it was so long, and suddenly he feels as if something had been stolen from him. All that time. Two and a half months, almost. He feels an anger so strong that he totters backwards off the scales. He wants to scream at the doctor, something incoherent about those three words, you did well, as if he were running in a competition, most tortured agent or something, as if he should be congratulated for managing not to die despite his body eating away his own fat and muscle, despite being drowned over and over, despite being kept just on the edge of sleep, and never allowed to fall all the way in.
'You were waterboarded. Do I have that right?' the doctor asks.
Surely that surge of feeling must have been visible? It must have manifested itself like a blaze of light. But the doctor doesn't seem to have noticed.
'Yes,' he says, his eyes on the wall.
'How often?'
He shakes his head. 'I – I'm not sure. Three, four times in a day, maybe.'
'Every day?'
'I'm not sure,' he says again. 'I don't know when the days started and when they stopped. There were long – I don't know...'
Were there long gaps? Did they just feel long, sometimes, because he was alone and unable to sleep? Was it three or four times in a day, or two or three, five, six, seven? His mind flails when he tries to think. He feels a little hysterical. He wants to laugh.
'Sleep deprivation?' the doctor asks.
He nods.
'Anything else?'
He doesn't know where to start. It must be mapped out on his body. It was the waterboarding and sleep deprivation that overshadowed everything else. Wasn't that enough?
'Your temperature is a little high, to start with. Can I have you on the bed?' the doctor asks, gesturing towards the side of the room. 'I'll listen to your lungs then do a fuller whole body exam. Just sit down for now. I want to listen to your chest.'
He eyes the narrow couch, with its strip of cloth to protect the surface from his naked body. He steps towards it and lowers himself down. His buttocks touch the surface. He remembers being led into that room that smelled of dampness and, weirdly, pencil shavings and coffee. He had never seen it because there had always been a hood over his head, but that scent had become a terrible thing that made his heart start racing the moment he stepped in through the door.
The plank in the middle, the plank he had never seen. Maybe it was in the middle of that invisible room. That was how it had felt, as if he were the centrepiece for a renaissance painting, his counsellors clustered about his deathbed waiting to hear what he had to say. They had made him sit on it, then lifted up his legs and pressed him down to lie flat, his head always a little lower than his feet. Then they had strapped him down, arms and legs, belts over torso and neck, his head wedged between blocks. They had lifted the hood enough to force the cloth into his mouth, then pulled the hood back down and laid cloths over the top, and –
He is breathing in jerks, fast and shallow. He feels dizzy. The doctor's hand is on his shoulder, trying to make him lie down, to –
He can't breathe. He can't –
'No, just like that for now,' the doctor is saying. 'Stay sitting up. I want to listen to your chest.'
He hands Illya a towel and he isn't sure what to do with it, until he realises it's to lay over his lap, to cover himself up. He feels grateful for that, but then the doctor is slipping the stethoscope into his ears and bringing the metal disc close to his chest, and he tries to sit still, and just breathe.
The stethoscope is like a cold coin near his heart. It brings him immediately to the cold of the stethoscope in that room, slipped in through the open front of his loose, wet overalls that stank of piss because he could never control himself on that board, never, and it always ran down, down the plank, down along the line of his back to meet the water that was drenching down from his collar, the water they poured over his face. The doctor's hand on his shoulder, that calm voice so out of place in a torture room where all the other men shouted and cajoled and whispered into his ear and offered him deals he could never take.
'There's a little crackling,' the doctor is saying calmly. 'If you can breathe a little more slowly. Just in and out.'
He jerks his hand, almost reaching out to bat the stethoscope away. He manages to carry on holding onto the edge of the bed, his fingernails clawing into the black faux leather, trying to breathe in and out, in and out, as steadily as the doctor wants. The feeling of that round, cold disc on his chest makes him want to lash out and scream. It is awful to lie there with a man listening to his heartbeat, checking he is just on the right side of alive, just alive enough to continue with the torture.
The stethoscope is on his back now and he's trying to breathe, trying to breathe. He taps his finger on his wrist, tries to tap it once a second, but it's going faster than that, too fast, in line with his ragged breathing. The doctor is saying something about him lying down, and suddenly he can't bear it. He's scooting across the floor, towards the door, aware suddenly that he's naked still and he can't run out into the corridor. But god, he wants to. He wants to wrench open that door and run away, all the way through to the front entrance, out into the street. He wants to run back to that little four walled cell with its tiny brick sized high up window, and he doesn't know why, because it makes no sense.
He's dizzy, so dizzy. His knees are buckling, and he's back on the bed. His breath is coming so short and fast. He can't get enough in. He hasn't felt like he's been able to breathe properly in weeks, and now he can hardly breathe at all. Somehow that doctor is managing to get him to lie down after all, and he feels the length of the table underneath him, the panic ballooning into something that fills the entire room. There are blotches in front of his eyes, dizzying neon yellow, a blotchy vomit colour, the colour of bile. The doctor's hand on his shoulder, holding him down.
'Mr Kuryakin. Mr Kuryakin.'
He blinks, looking up at the doctor's face. It's a surprise, almost, that he can look up, that there isn't cloth smothering his face.
'Try to slow your breathing,' the doctor tells him, laying the towel back over his middle. 'In and out.'
He's trying. He's trying so hard. He is in an examination room in the U.N.C.L.E. Infirmary. He isn't in that torture room. He isn't in that prison. It is light and dry in here, and there's an examination couch under the lines of his back, not a hard wooden plank. He is safe and alive. This man isn't going to press wet cloth over his face and pour the water over him until his lungs fill up and he knows he's going to die.
'Try to calm down a little,' the doctor says. 'You're all right. I'm not going to do anything you don't want me to do.'
He taps his finger on his wrist. He remembers lying on the plank, tapping his finger on the rough wood, trying to keep himself calm, trying to time how long it had been between the first trickle of water and the time when they would rip the cloths off and let him breathe. He couldn't do it, though. He couldn't concentrate on anything but the drowning, anything but that awful knowledge of imminent death. His hands would start to jerk and shake, his whole body shake, and everything would spiral down and down and down and –
'In and out, Illya,' the doctor says. 'That's it.'
He's still got that stethoscope in his hand, as if he's trying to resist the temptation to listen again. Illya tries to breathe. He's in U.N.C.L.E.. This man is a doctor he's seen before. He's always been professionally kind. He lets his eyes focus on the ceiling, moving from the strip light to the flat white expanse and back again. His eyes blotch, showing him the line of that light again and again everywhere he looks.
'Are you finding your breathing a little shallow?' the doctor asks him.
He doesn't know. Nothing has been right with his breathing since the first time they led him into that room. He has been coughing up phlegm, his lungs have burnt. Nothing has been right.
'I'm going to send you for a chest x-ray to confirm a diagnosis of aspiration pneumonia,' the doctor tells him in a very matter of fact way. 'I don't doubt they used clean water on you if they were doing it properly, but probably you aspirated some stomach contents at some point. Do you remember vomiting?'
His mind is buzzing. How can the doctor talk about it so calmly, as if this were done to him in a rational and calculated way? Clean water. A doctor on hand every time. He feels like collapsing into himself and sobbing, because his hours of torture have suddenly been reduced to a clinical experiment with all safety measures possible in place. He shouldn't have been traumatised by it at all.
'Yes,' he says, and he's surprised at how normal his voice sounds. 'Yes, I remember vomiting.'
He remembers the sharp acid taste. He remembers it being forced back into his mouth by the cloth. He remembers choking and hacking until they pulled the cloth out and turned him over and let him retch onto the floor.
He lies there while the doctor talks to him, his breathing getting slower and calmer, the room beginning to solidify around him into something real, a world away from that torture room. The doctor palpates his abdomen and examines his bruises and checks for signs of breaks, and all the while he is concentrating on breathing, concentrating on being alive.
'You can get dressed now,' the doctor tells him as he writes something more on the sheaf of notes he has been taking. 'Go down to x-ray. I'll call ahead so they'll know you're coming. I don't doubt aspiration pneumonia. I expect to prescribe you antibiotics. I don't think you need oxygen, but you may still find yourself feeling short of breath. I want you to come back immediately if any of your symptoms grow worse. Come back after the x-ray, anyway, and we'll see about that prescription. I don't think you'll need to be kept in.'
'All right,' he says. 'Thank you, doctor.'
He sits up and starts gathering his clothes together. His body feels ridiculously thin and weak. As he pulls his shirt on he notices the smudges of dust and dirt on the back, and his face flushes. That must be from lying on the floor under the bed in the off duty room. The doctor must have noticed. Wouldn't Napoleon have noticed? He tries to discretely brush away the dirt but there's not much he can do. His jacket isn't here.
'I'll put in a referral to the Psychiatric Department, too,' the doctor says, casually, as Illya bends to put on his shoes.
He feels his spine lock for a second. It was inevitable, of course. How could he imagine that he's got away with it? The doctor has watched him all through this exam. There's nothing else he could have done.
'Thank you,' he says. What else can he say?
((O))
He feels like a shell when he steps back into the office. Napoleon is there, sitting behind his desk, and he looks up and smiles.
'Jacket's there, on your chair,' he says. 'Get it on. I'll drive you home.'
He doesn't want to go home. He doesn't know what he's so scared of, but he doesn't want to go home. Napoleon is standing up, though, and locking things back into filing cabinets, and picking up his jacket for him.
'You were a while down there,' Napoleon says.
'Lots of tests,' Illya replies.
Napoleon looks him up and down, and Illya knows he's noticing the bruising on his neck and face and remembering it's the tip of the iceberg. He knows he's seeing how much weight he has lost, and how frail he looks. When they had got him out of that place and into a safehouse Napoleon had been the one who had helped him in the bathroom to strip out of the filthy jumpsuit, and sat there on the other side of the curtain as Illya had showered, trying to control the panic when the water neared his face. Napoleon had been the one who had put a hand over Illya's shaking hand as he tried to shave and said, 'Here, let me do that for you. Don't worry about it. Let me do it.'
He had sat on the closed toilet and let Napoleon ply the electric razor across his face, ridding him of an inch of beard. Even with that going on he had found himself sinking in the warm and blessed oblivion of sleep for a moment, then suddenly come awake again, sitting there with Napoleon holding the still buzzing razor, smiling at him.
'You'll get a proper sleep soon,' Napoleon had told him, patting his newly shaven cheek. 'Need to get you presentable, then we can get you to the plane. You won't be really safe until we're in the air.'
'Are you doing okay?' Napoleon asks him, here and now, in the office. His face still feels naked, although he could do with a shave again.
'Yes,' he says. 'Uh – yes. The doctor diagnosed aspiration pneumonia.'
He touches a hand to his pocket, to the rattling bottle in there.
'Antibiotics,' he says. 'He told me to get some rest.'
'Come on,' Napoleon says, putting a hand on his arm. 'Let's get you home.'
((O))
He was right about the stale smell of neglect. There's nothing forgiving about an apartment left empty. As they walk in through the door that smell hits him, the smell of a place that's been left a little too cold for a little too long.
'The contents of the fridge will probably be able to walk into the bin on their own,' he murmurs as he shuts the door behind them. They'll be able to walk better than him, he is sure. He feels knocked out and breathless from walking up all those floors.
'Don't worry about that,' Napoleon tells him, holding up his bag of groceries. 'We won't need anything from it. I have your milk here and we'll get take out for dinner.'
It feels surreal. He feels, again, as though he were underwater, looking through the rippling distortions of the current, everything hyperreal, and everything a little off. He's standing just inside the doorway, dizzy and shaking, and he doesn't know which way to go.
Napoleon puts a hand on his arm and steers him over towards the sofa.
'Sit down,' he says. 'I'll go make a pot of coffee, hmm?'
So Illya goes and sits down, and Napoleon goes through into the kitchen, and he is all alone again. He sits there, and he stops hearing Napoleon's movements in the kitchen. He stops hearing anything. There are the four walls around him, hard and flat, and it's as if the space between were filled with clear resin. He is motionless, without sound, hardly with any moving thoughts. Somewhere beyond that void a memory is playing. The bag over his head, blinding him. The restraints tight over his body and limbs. The water pouring, filling up his nose and throat until he knows he's about to die. Everything dwindling away, and his body jerking as if controlled by strings. Panic ballooning into something that fills every particle of the universe.
Somehow all of this is trapped in a resin globe, in a ball of silence. Somehow, while he is sitting frozen on the sofa, he is also there on the board, drenched and terrified, lungs screaming, waiting to die.
Napoleon puts down the pot of coffee on the table, and the resin globe is broken. It's like surfacing from a deep dive.
'Refrigerator is all cleaned out,' Napoleon tells him as he pours out two cups of coffee. 'The only thing in there now is the milk. It wasn't too bad.'
He blinks. His lips are tingling, as if not enough blood or oxygen is reaching his extremities.
'Hey,' Napoleon says. 'Are you okay?'
'Yes,' he says, blinking again.
He reaches out and takes the cup closest to him. He curls his hands around the smooth, warm sides and feels the reality of that heat. It's nothing like the little tin cup of water they used to push through the slot in the cell door, with the chunk of dense, plain bread.
'Are you okay?' Napoleon asks again.
'No,' he says.
He doesn't even realise he's crying until Napoleon's hand is touching his shoulder, until Napoleon is taking the cup from him and putting it back on the table. Then he hears the sounds of his own sobs.
'All right,' Napoleon is saying, as if calming a frightened animal. 'All right.'
Napoleon's arms are around him, holding him, and he sobs against his shoulder. It's as if the ice he was trapped in is melting around him. He can hear his own sobbing. He can feel the wetness and heat of the tears on his cheeks. He feels as though his chest is going to explode, and the sobs turn into hacking coughs, before blending back into sobs again. Little rills of dizziness run through his head and lips.
'All right,' Napoleon says again. 'All right. Hey. Is your breathing all right? You're breathing all right?'
He nods his head against the solidity of Napoleon's body. His lungs feel short on air, and burning, but it's all right.
Napoleon's hand moves up and down his back, strong and broad. He would have done anything to have the reassurance of that touch when he was in the cell, or on that board.
'It's all right,' Napoleon says again. His voice is close to Illya's ear. 'You know I've been through it, don't you? A long time ago.'
For a moment his breath catches. He had forgotten. It was a long time ago, early in their acquaintance. He remembers Napoleon coming back from a mission, looking haunted and shaken. He remembers there had been a lot of appointments in the psychiatry department. They hadn't been so close then.
Suddenly he feels less ashamed.
'I wasn't held for as long as you were,' Napoleon says. 'Not tortured with it for as long as you were. They pretty much broke me out the next day. But I will never forget what it was like, Illya. I will never – '
He trails into silence, and, for a moment, Illya knows that they are both in the same place.
Napoleon's arms tighten a little, and suddenly it's too much. He's on that board, jerking like a marionette, arms, legs, body jerking against restraining belts. He's choking, drowning, and the strap across his throat strangles him as he tries to thrash, to spit out the cloth in his mouth, to breathe air. He's trying to tear away, Napoleon's arms fly open, and then Illya is over on the other side of the room, near the window, gasping in air. He pushes up the window and lets the city air flood in. He breathes and breathes and breathes.
Napoleon doesn't say anything. He doesn't come to him. He just waits until Illya's breathing has slowed, until he pushes the window closed again and walks slowly back to the sofa.
'Chinese?' Napoleon asks. 'Korean? Italian?'
It takes a moment before he realises Napoleon is asking about the take out food.
'Whatever you want,' he says. His mind feels too full of cotton wool to make decisions on food.
'I'll get Chinese,' Napoleon says. 'I know what you like. I'll choose for you.'
'Okay,' Illya says.
His lungs are burning. He feels so tired. He sits down and watches Napoleon going over to the phone to order the food. He listens to him speaking on the phone but he doesn't hear the words. It's just a babble, far away. He's so tired. He's holding his coffee in his hand, and then Napoleon is back next to him, hand around Illya's wrist, steadying him, because the coffee has slopped a little onto his knee.
'You don't have to wait for the food,' Napoleon is saying. 'Just go to bed if you want. The food will still be there when you wake up.'
He feels so incredibly hungry. He's so tired but he's so hungry, too. He puts the coffee cup down and lets himself slip sideways onto the sofa. His eyes are burning with tiredness.
'No, wake me up when it comes,' he murmurs. 'Napoleon, promise you will wake me up. I'm starving.'
'All right,' Napoleon promises him. 'Nap. I'll wake you when the food is here.'
He's hardly aware of anything then, except the feeling of something, a blanket, maybe, being tucked over him where he lies. Then the warm, warm clutch of sleep pressing over him, through him, until he's deep and gone.
Then there are the dreams. He's drowning. He's deep down, drowning. The water is thick around him. He tries to breathe in and the water goes into his lungs like syrup. He's trying and trying to breathe in, in, always in, and he can't, he can't –
'Illya!'
His eyes jerk open and for a moment he doesn't know where he is. There's a figure leaning over him. He remembers lying on the plank, the figures of men around him, unseen, but still there. He could feel them even if he couldn't see them, bending in over him to ask him questions, to pour the water. He tries to breathe in and something catches and blocks his windpipe. Then he's sitting up, hacking, coughing, Napoleon banging a hand on his back as he clears the phlegm.
His heart is beating so hard it makes his head hurt. His lungs are burning. It's as if he's never been away from that plank. As if he's still there. Every time he sleeps…
'Illya,' Napoleon says again.
He starts to see further than the awful cloy of the dream. He sees his room, the white walls, the shelves of books. He's here in his apartment, on the sofa, but his lungs burn as if he's still back there, still being tortured. He gives an involuntary moan of distress, because this is all so awful, so terrible to be away from the place, but to still be there.
'Here, Illya. Open up,' Napoleon says.
He's holding a spoon with something viscous and brown in the bowl. There's a strong smell of menthol. Illya opens up like a child being fed, and the spoon is in his mouth. The cough medicine burns as it goes down, the menthol rising through his sinuses, leaving a kind of numbness behind.
'Better?' Napoleon asks. 'You can follow it with scotch, if you like?'
He's not quite sure how to speak, how to make decisions. Napoleon makes the decision for him and passes him a tumbler. He takes it and drinks, and that burns too, and leaves a different kind of numbness.
'Have I – Long – ?' he says, looking around, trying to work out how to form a sentence, trying to see the clock.
'About twenty minutes,' Napoleon says. Illya didn't need to form a sentence because Napoleon understands him anyway. 'Food isn't here yet, but it should be soon.'
'Oh,' Illya says. Then he murmurs, 'I'm sorry.'
'Nightmares are inevitable,' Napoleon tells him dryly. 'They'll be with you for a while.'
But he didn't have nightmares while he was in there. Then he remembers that's because he was never allowed to sleep long enough to dream.
He sits himself up a bit more, looking around at the reality of his apartment. Why had he been so afraid of coming back here? It feels comforting now. It's so good to be home, where everything he knows is around him. He feels a determination to wake up, to anchor himself in this place, to not succumb to nightmares or memories or the burning in his chest.
'Food will be here soon,' Napoleon says again. 'Why don't you try to get yourself a bit more awake, and I'll go fetch plates and flatware. If they ring downstairs, call me. No need for you to trek down and carry it all up four flights.'
'No, of course,' Illya murmurs.
He looks down at his clothes, at the smudged shirt that they bought him in whatever country it was he was being held, at the trousers that are a little too long in the leg, the cheap fabric of them. They aren't his clothes. They don't feel right. They remind him of something but he isn't sure what. Something about being on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Something about poverty.
'I'm going to get changed,' he says.
'Good idea,' Napoleon smiles. 'Get back into your own skin.'
His skin has always been his own, but he knows what Napoleon means.
In his bedroom he discovers it isn't necessarily that the clothes they bought him were ill fitting. They probably bought them to his measurements, kindly supplied by the U.N.C.L.E. girls from his file. The slacks he draws on that fitted perfectly last time he wore them are too loose around the waist. The poloshirt feels baggy on his top.
As he's drawing on the clothes he can see the thinness of his body, the bruises on his skin. He only has vague memories of them hitting him but there are more bruises than can be explained by the restraints he fought against. Maybe he knocked himself on things in the cell, but he doesn't really remember moving about in that cell. He just remembers staggering in and dropping onto the hard bed and lying there, wet and spent and shaking. He only got up to use the bucket on the floor. Maybe it was while they were taking him to the room, to that awful room. Maybe that was it. They were none too gentle with him, coming into the cell, pulling the bag down over his head, still damp from the last time.
He suddenly remembers it with horrifying clarity. How could he have forgotten? How could it blur away? The sharp orders. Stand up, arms at his sides. So he would stand passively while one of them came forward and pulled on the bag, and everything went dark and muffled, and the stench of mildew was in his nose. That was where the bruises came from. If he even motioned to move his hands from his sides they would hit him, and it was hard to walk while blinded by cloth without sometimes lifting a hand. He remembers them knocking him sideways, him stumbling into the wall, falling to his knees, groping with his hands to orient himself, to get back to his feet.
So. The bag over his head. Another man entering the cell so there was someone either side of him. The instruction to walk forward, then turn right. The feeling of the corridor about him, the corridor that he couldn't see. Twenty three small, stumbling steps, then another turn to the right. Five more steps, and then the stairs. The stairs always felt like too much. Every single time the effort of climbing those stairs felt beyond him as he struggled to lift his feet, knocking them into each tread, until he had climbed one flight of ten steps, turned, up another flight of ten steps, and was at the top. Turn left. Another corridor, and he had the sense of other rooms, of places with people in them. Twenty steps this time. The sense that perhaps he was above his cell, on the next floor up, that perhaps this was just a municipal building, and he had been taken from one level to the next, that he was being walked through an ordinary office building and taken into an ordinary room turned to a horrific purpose.
Yes, the bruises were from those walks. Perhaps they hit him more than he remembered as he stumbled and wavered, too exhausted to focus, to be able to walk steadily without sight to help him.
When he comes back from his room, cinching a belt he doesn't usually wear to hold up the loose slacks, the living room is empty.
'Napoleon?' he calls.
'Bathroom,' Napoleon calls back. 'I'll be out in a minute.'
At that point the intercom buzzes, and Illya goes to press the button. It's their food, a man with a Spanish accent, and for a moment Illya is thinking in Spanish. It's what his brain does, always has done. He latches onto a language and absorbs it. It just happens. It's been invaluable in his career as agent.
He doesn't think, just says in Spanish, 'Give me a moment.'
He wants to slip on his holster and gun and cover it with a jacket, but he lost his gun when he was captured, and it hasn't been replaced. He slips a knife into his waistband instead, the handle concealed by his shirt, picks up his keys and some money, and leaves the apartment.
There's a slight scent of damp in the corridor outside, something that pricks at him, that gives him flashes of being back there in that place, in that room with the plank. He swallows and walks to the stairs, down and down and down again, until he's at the front door of the building and the man is there handing him the food. He passes over the money, speaking with him in Spanish without thinking, without even really knowing what he's saying. It's small talk, that's all. Then the door is closed and he hasn't had to use that knife, and he's holding a deep paper bag of hot, fragrant food.
He starts back up the stairs, one at a time, holding the bag. He makes it up one flight but he's suddenly exhausted. He stumbles over to the next flight and sinks down on the bottom step. The knife jabs at him, so he pulls it out of his waistband and lays it on the stairs beside him, and just sits there, trembling, chest burning. The stairs behind him feel like an Everest.
'I told you not to come down,' Napoleon says from behind him.
He's taking the stairs two at a time. He's fit, healthy, fresh and well, and Illya feels a spike of jealousy.
'You were in the toilet,' Illya murmurs.
Every breath feels so shallow, as if he can't fill his lungs, as if his lungs were still half-full of fluid. Every breath burns, and there's a dizziness running through his head, a tingling in his fingers and lips. He leans his head down onto his knees and just sits like that, breathing slowly, trying to get enough oxygen to revive.
'I told you not to come down,' Napoleon repeats, putting a hand on his back, spreading out his fingers as if he's feeling the crackling when Illya breathes. He picks up the knife and examines it. Illya watches him obliquely, head sideways on his knees. 'Planning on doing some filleting?'
'Don't have my gun,' Illya says.
'Another reason not to come down.'
Napoleon sits down beside him, blocking the stairway, and just waits. After a while he nudges his knee against Illya's and asks, 'Doing any better?'
Illya lifts his head from his lap, straightening up, and feels that some of the dizziness is gone.
'Better,' he says.
'Let me take that bag,' Napoleon says firmly. 'And that knife,' he adds, dropping it into the bag. 'I have a gun, at least. Think you can make it back up?'
'Yes, of course,' Illya says, and he stands up, but he has to hold onto the bannister rail, and for a moment all that thin, dizzy feeling floods back.
'Tell me again why you prefer living in an antiquated brownstone with no elevator?' Napoleon jibes him.
Illya doesn't reply. He firms his hand on the rail and steps up, one step at a time. His thighs ache. His arms ache. His muscles are so sore, so ridiculously sore. The tingling is starting to come back, spreading from his fingertips and lips. Each flight feels so high, so long, and he has to stop every few steps and stand there, just breathing, while his lungs burn.
Whenever they had finished on the board he would lie there as they pulled the cloth out of his mouth, as they undid the straps, then roll and slip to the floor. He crouched, desperately trying to pull in air as his lungs fought to cough out water, his limbs shaking so hard he could hardly hold himself on hands and knees. If he reached to pull the bag from his head they would kick him, so he learnt to just leave it, to let gravity pull it down from his face, to make do with the mildewed air that filtered in because it was better than breathing water. They would ask him again if he were ready to talk, but he couldn't control himself enough to nod or shake his head, let alone produce coherent speech. Everything was about holding on to the simple spark of being alive, and nothing else mattered.
Then there would be the walk back to the cell, when his legs shook and gave out beneath him, when the hands holding his arms bore most of his weight. The stumbling down the stairs, not afraid of falling because it would hardly matter, because if he broke his neck at least the torture would stop, at least he would die quickly, instead of in a slow drowning. Being shoved in through the cell door, the bag pulled from his head, and falling onto the bed, shaking still, lying on his side and coughing and retching desperately over the edge onto the floor. Panting, so tired he could melt into the bed, and never allowed to escape it all with sleep.
'All right, come on in and sit down,' Napoleon says at last, fitting the key into the lock and opening the door. 'Go on. Back to the sofa. There's nothing you need to do. I'll plate this up and you can eat.'
He doesn't have the breath for talking. It's ridiculous. Four flights of stairs that he could run up on a normal day, and hardly lose his wind. Now here he is on the sofa, shaking, coughing, all his skin beaded with sweat. All the time Napoleon is sorting the food he's just sitting there, trying to recover enough that he'll be able to lift his cutlery to eat.
'Food, shower, bed,' Napoleon tells him succinctly. 'That's your only schedule for this evening.'
'I'll skip the shower,' he says. That last shower after he was rescued was enough, standing there under the water, feeling like he couldn't breathe. 'I can't – I don't – '
'Yeah, okay,' Napoleon nods, and Illya knows he understands.
The food is plated up and they're about to eat, but Napoleon just lays his hand over Illya's for a moment and leaves it there, warm and comforting. He squeezes a little, then lets go.
'I didn't think – ' Illya says, picking up a forkful of food, inhaling the scent.
'That you'd ever eat like this again?' Napoleon finishes for him.
Illya shakes his head. 'Maybe,' he says. 'It feels – You know how it feels. It's like another life. Like you've lived all your life like that…'
'I know,' Napoleon nods. He's quiet for a moment, then says, 'It was a long time. A long time to be held. Did you have anyone to talk to in there?'
'Talking's all they wanted me to do,' Illya murmurs.
Napoleon tuts. 'In there, sure, but what about the rest of the time?'
'The rest of the time – I was in a cell about – ' He creases his forehead, remembering that cramped space. 'About six feet long. Four wide. So – It was so small sometimes I felt like I couldn't breathe. I didn't hear another human voice except when they came to get me.'
He can feel the walls pressing around him. For a moment it takes his breath away. Then he's seeing his apartment again, smelling the fragrant scent of the hot food in front of him, feeling the hard metal of the fork in his hand.
'Eat,' Napoleon urges him. 'You need to put some fat back on those bones.'
Illya turns back to the food, and eats.
((O))
The morning is clear and bright. There are birds singing somewhere outside his window, somewhere in the trees below. He lies in his bed listening to that light, lilting sound, his eyes on the plain white of the ceiling. It feels as though there were a brick on his chest, pressing him down. He tries to take in a deep breath, and then he's coughing and coughing. He sits up, curling over, hacking, and spits unhealthy green mucus into his hand. His lungs burn.
Napoleon is there in the doorway within a few seconds. He's wearing a pair of Illya's pyjama trousers, a little too short in the leg, and no top.
'Y'okay?' he asks, his voice slurred with sleep. 'Need me to pat you on the back?'
Illya sits there for a moment just trying to catch his breath.
'Coffee,' he says after a while, sinking back down into the bed. He feels as if he needs something hot in his body.
'All right,' Napoleon nods, smoothing a hand over his morning hair. 'Coffee, black. And your antibiotics, too. Then you need to wait an hour for breakfast, I'm afraid.'
He feels hungry again because he's been starved of good food for so long, but he also feels as if the heaviness in his chest were taking over everything, as if food would have no taste.
'I can wait for breakfast,' he says.
His head is heavy on the pillow. He feels flushed with heat. He waits for Napoleon to leave then rolls heavily out of bed and pulls on his blue towelling gown, suddenly chilled as soon as he's out of the covers. Everything feels dragging and heavy, his muscles still sore, his bruises tender, as he stumbles through into the bathroom to empty his bladder.
When he catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror he looks like another person, like a refugee dragged from the water after a harrowing escape. He doesn't feel like himself. Two days ago – was it two days? Three? – he was in that dark cell, lying on the thin mattress, drifting into sleep, waking up with that terrible noise screeching from the speaker that was just out of his reach, waiting to be told yet again to stand, to have the bag put over his head, to be taken up to the interrogation room and laid on that plank. Just the thought of it makes his heart start to beat faster, makes that instinctive panic start to flutter in his mind. He looks about, searching for a means of escape, and sees the walls of the bathroom, the shower curtain, the toilet with the seat still up. He knocks it down, flushes, cleans his hands and leaves the room.
Napoleon is in the kitchen, waiting for the water to boil. If they were in Napoleon's apartment the coffee percolator would be coughing and spitting, but here Napoleon has to wait for the kettle to boil on the gas ring, before he can pour the water into the pot. He feels tired, and sinks down onto a chair at the little wooden table. Napoleon turns at the sound of the chair pulling across the linoleum.
'You should go back to bed,' he says. 'You look terrible.'
'Thanks,' Illya says dryly. 'You don't look at your best either.'
Napoleon huffs a laugh. 'I look like I have a little jet lag and had a long few days. You look like you've been tortured.'
It's like being slapped. He knows he was tortured. He knows that's what it was. But to have it stated so boldly is like a slap. It's odd how you accept what happens to you in your life, and only really start to analyse it when that phase has ended. That time spent between the blank, stinking cell and the awful, unseen interrogation room had been his life for a time. It had begun to feel like his entire life, as if the child and man who existed before that time had been a dream, and he had woken up into a reality that would never end. Then had come the bangs and the men in gas masks, the door being smashed open, hands grabbing at him and dragging him out of his terrible reality and back into the dream of being another person, a normal person who lived like any other man. Now this is reality and the other time has become a dream, but it's a dream so real and vivid that it keeps coming back, keeps flooding over him, and threatening to drag him away.
Napoleon puts a cup of coffee down in front of him, and places the bottle of antibiotics next to it, then sits down at the table with his own cup. Illya presses his hands around the cup, inhales, and takes a mouthful of the hot drink. It burns in a good way as it passes his lungs. It burns in a healing way. He slowly unscrews the lid of the bottle and takes out a pill. Another burning mouthful of coffee, and the pill is gone.
'Illya,' Napoleon says, meeting his eyes. His voice is very serious. 'You will be okay,' he says. 'I promise you that. You'll feel for a while as if you'll never get away from this. But you will. You have a whole team behind you, waiting to help. You have me. You will be okay.'
Illya smiles. For a moment there's a very distinct line between those two dreams, the nightmare of being held and tortured in that place, and the dream of his current life, sitting here in his apartment on American soil, in the life he has built for himself. They are both there and they are both very real, but there's a sharp line between them, and neither one can touch the other. The lines are going to keep blurring together again, separating, and blurring again, like images seen through water. Time will help to strengthen that line.
'Were you okay?' he asks. 'When it happened to you, were you okay?'
Napoleon's smile is thin. There's something haunted behind it.
'I'm okay now,' he says.
'Now,' Illya echoes. 'What was it? Six years ago? You're okay now.'
'Six years,' Napoleon nods. 'Yes. It was spring. I remember lilac, the smell of lilac as they dragged me into that place. Sunshine, but I couldn't see. They'd put a blindfold on me, cuffed my hands behind my back. But I remember the scent of lilac so strongly, and the sun on my face, and birds singing. It felt so at odds with what was happening.'
'You were in East Berlin,' Illya remembers.
He read the details of the report. It was like looking at the bones of a skeleton in an effort to reconstruct the body of a victim. It had told him facts, but little more.
'Yes, East Berlin. Undercover. I guess my German wasn't as good as I thought it was. They noticed something off. The next thing I knew I was being taken in for questioning. And you know what their questioning is like…'
Even after six years, Illya can tell that Napoleon doesn't really want to talk about it. He wants to talk but he doesn't want to talk. The memories are like the shreds of a bad dream, and he's trying to stop them from billowing up. But Illya wants to hear about it. He feels an almost desperate hunger to hear about it, to know that he's not the only one, that his memories aren't a unique pain.
'I know what their questioning is like,' he nods.
He knows from experience. He knows from reports. He knows from seeing the victims, or from never seeing them again.
'More coffee,' Napoleon says, and he pours out another cup for both of them. He's stalling.
'They took you in,' Illya prompts him.
Napoleon holds his cup of coffee, his eyes focussed somewhere between his cup and the kitchen wall. The clock ticks into the quiet. There are cars outside, horns sounding, but the kitchen is very quiet.
'They took me in. Beat me up a little, just to gauge my tolerance, I suppose. Then they dragged me into another room, took the blindfold off, let me see it. It was an ordinary office desk. They'd propped two of the legs on blocks so it made a slope. They didn't even take the cuffs off, just slammed me down on the desk and used ropes to hold me down. It was all very makeshift. Making do with what they had. I don't know, maybe officially they weren't supposed to be using things like that. They wanted to be able to turn it back to an office. It smelled of – '
'Pencil shavings and coffee,' Illya says, and Napoleon looks at him sharply, then laughs. It's an odd little laugh, bare of humour.
'Yes,' he says. 'Yes, even after all that time. It's funny how scents remind you of things, isn't it? Lilac on a spring day. Pencil shavings and coffee.'
'And that's where it happened,' Illya says.
'I could see leaves on the trees through the window,' Napoleon says. 'We were up on the second floor, I think, so I couldn't see the lilacs, but I could see the trees waving in the breeze. It was surreal, lying there upside down with my hands cuffed and pushing into my spine, seeing a spring day and green trees outside. Blue sky up above. I could hear kids playing, I think. Kids playing somewhere. Just surreal…'
Illya smiles thinly.
'You don't have to talk about it,' he says. 'I know…'
'All right,' Napoleon says. He's not holding his coffee now. He's holding his hands clenched in a knot on the table, and Illya can see how white his knuckles are. 'All right. I – thought it might help you, but – '
'It's all right,' Illya says. He can see the haunted look in Napoleon's eyes. 'I don't need you to. I understand.'
It's an odd thing to share. Usually it's a favourite musician, or a love of a certain novelist, or a similar sense of humour. It's odd to have something like this as a common between them. But it's all right. It helps, even if Napoleon still can't talk about it, still after six years. He knows that Napoleon is all right, day to day. That he functions. That he isn't plagued with nightmares. He knows that Napoleon isn't keen on ducking his head underwater, but he'd never really understood why. He does now.
'I want to be able to scuba dive again,' he says abruptly, and Napoleon snorts.
'Rather you than me,' he says, then he adds, 'but I know that swimming is your passion, Illya. It's always been something necessary for me, rather than a joy. I much prefer being on the water, to in it.'
'A man doesn't get sea sick when he's swimming,' Illya points out, and Napoleon laughs again.
'I will never understand how you managed a successful stint in the navy, considering how green you go when you step on a boat.'
'Big ships and submarines. It's a different ball game.'
How odd. Just like that, he's thinking about other things. He's remembering his first day in the navy, feeling so small and so nervous in the line of men. He's remembering his first tour in a submarine. Then the memories of the torture flood back, but for just a moment they weren't there at all.
Napoleon looks at his watch. 'Well, I think you've had long enough for that pill to be absorbed. I'll start making breakfast. What would you like? Everything?'
The hunger is back again. He still feels peaky, his chest still rattles when he breathes, but he feels enormously hungry. He wants to make up for two and a half months of starvation.
'Everything,' he says. 'Yes, I want everything.'