Another cab, and Illya had to face the embarrassment of not knowing which notes were which in his wallet, and just holding a sheaf out to the driver and trusting him to take the correct one and give him the correct change. He had woken up barely before nine, heart thudding with that awful feeling of having overslept, his internal clock having no idea what the true time was. He had forgotten to set the alarm clock. If it hadn't been for the battery powered clock in the living room striking nine as he stumbled into the kitchen he would have still had no proper feeling of the time, and he silently thanked Napoleon for getting that clock in the early days, before Illya had a tactile watch.

To compound matters there really wasn't anything he could find to eat in the kitchen. The last of the bread was beyond stale, and there was no milk for cereal and no time to cook anything. So he just resignedly called a cab and shaved and got dressed and was at HQ by nine thirty for his meeting with Waverly, hungry and full of dread.

'Ah, Mr Kuryakin,' Waverly said as he entered the office. 'It's good to see you looking so well. I'd rather feared you might resemble a colander.'

Illya managed a tight kind of smile as he tapped across the room and put a hand on the back of one of the chairs at the big round table.

'Oh, no, I thought we'd sit somewhere more comfortable,' Waverly said, coming to him and putting a hand on his arm. He steered Illya over to the low sofa and armchair, and Illya sat down, feeling rather disconcerted. Waverly wandered back across the room and called through to his secretary to bring coffee, which was the one small glimmer of joy in all of this. Illya needed coffee this morning.

'I'm sorry I pulled you out of that affair, Mr Kuryakin,' Waverly said in a rather confidential voice, finally sitting down. 'I really am. But honestly, gun fights in Irish pubs? That's no place for you to be. I should have trusted my first instinct and sent you home directly you were no longer needed in Cairo. There's no need to expose you to risks like that.'

Illya cleared his throat. He felt intensely awkward.

'Sir, I have spent my entire career as an agent being exposed to risk,' he said quietly. 'I really don't see how this is any different.'

Waverly huffed. 'Mr Kuryakin, I don't have to spell it out for you. You're blind now. We're both very aware of this. You're not armed. You cannot defend yourself. I cannot allow you into situations where you could be at risk.'

Illya felt his heart sink down to the soles of his shoes. How could he argue with this? The answer would always be you're blind now, and blind people were to be protected, cosseted, wrapped in cotton wool. He was not even to be accorded the faith that a sighted innocent was given in this type of affair. It didn't matter that he was trained and seasoned and fully aware of all of the dangers. He was blind.

The secretary came in with coffee, and Illya took his cup gratefully. The coffee was good, of course, and he felt like he needed the caffeine, but it didn't make things much better.

'Am I to assume that I'm restricted to the office and labs again, sir?' he asked, trying to keep his voice very professional.

There was a short space of silence, then Waverly said, 'No, indeed, Mr Kuryakin. Not at all. I was quite satisfied with your work in Cairo. You did excellently. You are sans pareil, I think, in monitoring audio equipment. But it is to be understood that you do not leave that duty. It's all very well you running off to that grain warehouse – '

'Napoleon might have been dying,' Illya cut across his boss.

'But he wasn't. You might have been shot.'

'I might have been shot a thousand times in my career,' Illya argued, knowing he was on shaky ground, but not able to help himself.

'Oh, have something to eat, do,' Waverly said rather impatiently. 'There's a plate of croissants in front of you. Mr Kuryakin, I cannot conscience exposing you to unnecessary danger.'

Illya was hungry, but he ignored the offer of food. He felt so frustrated. This was better than he had expected, if Waverly was going to continue to allow him on surveillance missions, but he was so close to snapping over the ridiculous protectiveness that said he was not allowed to get hurt.

'Mr Kuryakin, let me explain this from a different angle,' Waverly told him, then interrupted himself more impatiently still to say, 'Do have a croissant. You don't strike me as a man who's eaten this morning.'

Illya reached out and felt the heat rising from the plate under his fingertips. He took a croissant and tore into it an a rather irritated way. But, oh, it was good. Waverly only ordered from the finest bakers.

'All right, Mr Kuryakin. Perhaps now you have something in your mouth you'll stop arguing and listen to me. In that fire fight in the Irish pub, Mr Solo was up against two armed men, long-term Thrush employees, it seems. If there had been any hint that you were associated with Mr Solo you would have been a target as well as him. Now, you are unable to defend yourself. I'm aware that you still hold top ranks in physical combat, but only in certain full contact areas and only in offence. You cannot anticipate a punch, nor throw a punch, can you? And you are unarmed. In a gun battle you are defenceless. In that kind of situation any U.N.C.L.E. man or woman would be bound to defend you as well as themselves, as well as any innocents in the arena. They cannot be expected to do that – and you know that they would do that, no matter how much you protest that they need not. Your presence during combat is a liability for any U.N.C.L.E. agents who happen to be there. That is why I cannot let you be with Mr Solo in that kind of situation. It is as much for his protection as it is for yours, and I would have thought that would be a concept you could agree with.'

Illya held half a croissant between his fingers, and nodded slowly. No matter how much he wanted to argue, he knew that Waverly was right.

'Yes, sir,' he admitted. 'Yes, it is. I'm sorry, sir.'

'So am I, Mr Kuryakin,' Waverly said, and he sounded absolutely sincere. 'There are very few agents in this organisation who rival you and Mr Solo either separately or as a team. I've said it before. It was a great loss when you were taken out of active service.'

Illya crumbled bits of pastry between his fingertips. 'Do I have a plate, sir?' he asked, and Waverly said, 'Oh, yes. It's here, just here,' and he handed him a side plate, guiding Illya's hand to it with a firm touch of his own aged fingers. His skin was cool and papery.

Illya put the croissant down at last, then, and wondered how to broach what Dr Bruner had said to him.

'Sir, there was an ophthalmological conference in that hotel in Cairo,' he began.

'Really, Mr Kuryakin?' Waverly asked. 'Something of a coincidence, isn't it?'

'Yes, I – Well, I got talking to a doctor there, the Dr Bruner who came with me to find Napoleon. He – ' Illya swallowed. Why was he so nervous of saying this? 'Well, he believes that I might be suitable for a corneal transplant, sir. He thinks that sufficient healing has gone on to make it viable.'

It was the first time he had spoken about that out loud to anyone but Napoleon, and it made it feel almost real. His stomach lurched at the thought. It couldn't be real, he couldn't allow himself to hope. But there was hope. It crept in light like through the cracks, like a vicious betrayer inveigling itself into his mind.

'Really, Mr Kuryakin?' Waverly asked again. 'Then there is hope that your vision might be restored?'

'He can't give an absolutely positive prognosis,' Illya admitted, 'but he wants to put me down on the waiting list for transplants. If he does – '

'U.N.C.L.E. will foot the bill, of course,' Waverly said quickly. 'You were injured on duty and it is this organisation's responsibility to pay for your care. Well. Well, keep me posted, Mr Kuryakin. I imagine it will be a drawn out process, at any rate.'

'I imagine so,' Illya agreed. Drawn out, difficult, scary…

'I'm glad you came in so we could straighten out this issue, Mr Kuryakin,' Waverly said. 'But I expect that you're quite tired after your journey. I don't want to see you back in here until the day after tomorrow. After all, tired agents make mistakes.'

'Yes, sir,' Illya said. Part of him just wanted to go down to the office and throw himself into his work, but Waverly was right. Tired agents did make mistakes.

((O))

He took a cab out to Brooklyn despite the snow. He wasn't sure if it were nostalgia or sentimentality or just because with Napoleon away he had little to do with himself, but he had a fancy to go to the little Russian shop there and get tea and a few other things while the weather was clear. He would have to go shopping anyway, since he had nothing to eat in the apartment, and he refused to live on take out until Napoleon returned.

He stepped out of the snow and into the shop and called, 'Mrs Ponomareva?'

'Ah, Illya, Illya,' she greeted him, coming across the shop to him and taking his arm to guide him through into the little back room. It had become a ritual since that first time he had come in blind that she would take him through and serve him tea, and they would talk and talk in their own language.

'Now, it has been too long since I've seen you. Let me get the tea started. You take it with honey today, yes? You look like you need some good Ukrainian honey in your tea.'

As she lit the samovar the shop bell rang, so she excused herself to go and deal with the customer. She returned just as the water started to boil.

'So, Illyusha, how have you been looking after yourself?' she asked, leaning forward towards him in her chair. 'Not well enough. You look so tired.'

He smiled a little. He felt tired, so he supposed it was no surprise if he looked tired.

'Well, I just got in off a transatlantic flight last night, Mrs Ponomareva. Those things are tiring.'

'You've been travelling? With your Mr Solo?'

Illya inclined his head. 'Something like that. It was business. Mr Solo is still away. I don't have a scrap of food in the house, and I've run out of tea.'

'The tea, I can help with. And lunch, Illya. You must stay for lunch, and I'll feed you up nicely. What would your mother think if she saw you so tired and thin, eh?'

So Illya stayed and drank honey-sweet tea and ate hot, delicious food, but he wished that Napoleon were home. It was good to eat food like this and to talk in Russian with someone, but there were so many thoughts whirling in his mind and he desperately needed to vent them all.

'What is it, Illya?' Mrs Ponomareva asked him eventually. 'You are hardly talking. You look like a man with the world on his shoulders.'

Illya sighed and shrugged and turned his cup in his hands, feeling the heat through the thin bone china. 'I've been offered the possibility of surgery that will restore my sight,' he said.

'Oh, Illya, but that is wonderful. Why do you seem so sad?'

He shook his head. 'Mrs Ponomareva, do you remember my visits early on after I lost my sight? You remember me telling you I had appointments with various ophthalmologists, and then next time I would come to your shop – '

'Ah.' And she patted her hand on his knee. 'You would come in and you would tell me it had come to nothing. You seemed two inches shorter on those days.'

Illya shook his head, holding his hands around the delicate cup of sweet, strong tea. She always gave him tea in the same cups, delicate and contoured with little ripples of fluting that ran up to the rim. There was probably gilt on the edge and perhaps little transfers of flowers under the glaze. He had sat there before holding one of those cups, telling Mrs Ponomareva that another ophthalmologist had wiped away his fragile hopes, hardly knowing how to go on.

'I don't know if I have the strength to do it again,' he confessed. 'I just don't know...'

And this was where the breakdown happened, here in Brooklyn in front of this kind, motherly Russian woman, and he was shocked at himself for his weakness, but he couldn't stop the tears. He bent his head down to his hands and shook and tried to stay quiet, to give himself some measure of privacy. He felt her hand on his shoulder, and he straightened up, whispering, 'I don't know how to go through that again.'

And then her arms were around him, and oh, she felt like his mother, she even smelled like his mother. He shook against her and she stroked his hair and whispered things in Russian to him, and he remembered that Ukrainian doctor in the hospital all that time ago who had been so kind. This had been such a long, hard journey. He couldn't turn away from this opportunity. He just couldn't. But it was so hard letting himself hope again.

'I just – ' he tried to explain, wiping a hand over his eyes under his glasses. 'I don't know – I've built such a high wall. I've done everything I can to adapt. Every little thing, I learnt again. And the only way I could bear it was to tell myself that there was no chance that I would ever see again. If I think about seeing, if I think about what I've lost and what other people have, I hate what I become. I'm just a small, bitter, blind man.'

Mrs Ponomareva sat back from him and stroked his cheek, wiping away tears. Then she closed her hands around his.

'You want to take this chance to see, little boy,' she said. 'If you were my boy I would be telling you go, do this thing. Hope.'

The tears jerked through him again. Hope was such a hard thing. 'But when it's over and my hope is all gone again?'

'What if it is not?' Mrs Ponomareva asked him. 'What if it works?'

He pushed his hands hard over his face, knocking his sunglasses up onto the top of his head and rubbing the heels of his hands over his eyes.

'Ah, your poor eyes,' the Russian woman said as he dropped his hands. He realised she had probably not seen him without the sunglasses on since he lost his sight. 'You see a blizzard.'

He half smiled. 'Something like that,' he shrugged, pulling the glasses back down again.

'Illyusha, if there is a chance that this operation will work, you must take it, yes?'

'Yes, I know,' he sighed. 'And I will. But it's a hard road.'

'Many roads to beautiful places are hard roads,' she told him, and she brushed a strand of hair from his face and rubbed his arm. 'But you are a strong young man. And you don't take this journey alone, do you? You have your Mr Solo. When will he be home?'

'Oh, I don't know,' Illya shook his head. He felt tired. The jet lag was catching up with him again. 'Soon, I hope. Mrs Ponomareva, I'm sorry for such a display. I'm not usually so silly.'

'You have cause, Illya,' she told him. 'I feel honoured that you trusted me with your troubles.'

'May I trust you with one more trouble?' he asked, bringing out his wallet and a pocketful of change. 'My money is all mixed up. Can you separate it for me so I can put the foreign currencies away? I can't tell the difference by touch.'

'Of course I will,' she promised. 'And then I will get you your tea to take home with you, and a few other things that you will have as a treat. You said you have no food at home? I will tell Konstantin to stay in the store and you and I will go grocery shopping, and I will send you home with your arms full. When you are at home tonight you will think of me and know that you have friends who think of you, yes?'

Illya smiled at the scope of this woman's generosity, and he sat and finished his tea while she sorted his change. Then he walked with her to a grocery store that he had never been in before and let her help him buy a bag full of necessities to give him dinner and breakfast. She piled another bag with things from her shop and refused all payment, and saw him into a cab, kissing him on both cheeks and making him promise to let her know how things went with him. And he went home and struggled back up to the apartment with his two big bags of food, and sat down on the sofa for a few minutes, and woke up three hours later to his communicator warbling.

'Oh, oh,' he exclaimed, muzzily coming awake, patting at his breast pocket. As he moved his foot nudged into one of the grocery bags, and he remembered the shopping. At least there was nothing frozen in there, but he wished Napoleon were here, because Napoleon always helped him identify the tins after he brought them home if he hadn't packed them carefully enough to remember what each one was. It wasn't always possible to remember. Perhaps he could ask a neighbour if he needed to…

Oh, the communicator! It was still warbling, and he pulled it out and assembled it carefully.

'Kuryakin here.'

'Illya, Napoleon. Are you at home? I tried calling you an hour ago and you didn't answer, so I called HQ and they said you left ages ago. Are you all right?'

'Oh, I must have slept through it,' he mumbled, still blinking sleepily. 'I fell asleep right on the couch, Napoleon. The journey catching up with me. I'm sorry. I'm all right.'

He heard Napoleon's relieved sigh. 'Well, I'm finished up here, Illya, at long last. We found the place they were using as an airfield. We've cleared it out and shut it down. Nial, the guy from Dublin, he was actually very good. Not as good as you, but – '

'Napoleon, you do not need to qualify every compliment towards another agent against my abilities,' Illya reminded him.

'Well, it's true. But he was good enough. There were a handful of guys there, the pilot and some mechanics. They've all been taken back to U.N.C.L.E. Dublin, and I'll be on the next flight out.'

'From Dublin?'

'Yeah, from Dublin. Faster than driving back across the country to Shannon. You met with Waverly, didn't you? I couldn't get anything out of his secretary about what he said.'

Illya smiled a little then. 'It's all right, Napoleon, or as all right as it can be. He was – well – very firm about the thought that I shouldn't be exposed to any danger – '

'Well, I'm on his side there, Illya,' Napoleon interrupted instantly. 'I don't want to see you put in harm's way.'

Illya grimaced. 'Napoleon, you do remember my days as an active agent, don't you? The amount of times I was shot at, hung up, beaten up, broken, burnt? Do you remember that?'

'Yes,' Napoleon replied. 'I remember when they burned the palms of your hands with cigarettes, and I remember when you got knifed through the thigh, and I remember when you were shot and I thought you were going to die – more than once. I remember when both your arms were broken and when that Thrush man stamped on every finger of your right hand, and when you were whipped by Mother Fear. And I remember when that man threw acid into your face and you crouched there screaming at the pain, and I had to leave you there because I had my duty to clear out that rat's nest regardless of how badly you were hurt. None of that, Illya, none of that makes me want to see you put in harm's way again.'

'Because I am blind?'

'Because I love you,' Napoleon corrected him.

Illya sighed. 'I love you too, Napoleon, but you know that I don't want to be wrapped in cotton wool just because my eyes don't work. But this is all academic,' he interrupted himself before Napoleon could speak again. 'As I said, Mr Waverly was firm on the thought that I shouldn't be in danger, but he did say he would allow me to do more surveillance missions. So there's that. And I told him what Dr Bruner said, Napoleon. I told him about the possibility of surgery. He assured me that U.N.C.L.E. would cover the costs, if it happens.'

'When it happens,' Napoleon said softly, and Illya shook his head.

'Napoleon, please. If it happens. Let us leave it at that.'