Illya could hardly believe he was leaving the Soviet Union like this, without Napoleon, not knowing if Napoleon were alive or dead, on his way to an operation he had never imagined having without Napoleon at his side. He stood there in the airport at Boryspil listening to all the sounds around him, itching to open his communicator again and call headquarters. But they would call as soon as they knew anything. They had promised that. And on the off chance that Napoleon arrived back at the apartment while there was no one there Illya had very carefully written him a note, using a ruler and his mother's watchful eye to be sure it was legible, and left it where Napoleon would find it.

Patriotic music was playing through loudspeakers as he stood there, moving restlessly from foot to foot. People all around him were milling and talking. Cases made dull thumps and dragging noises on the floor. There was tobacco smoke in the air, some of it from his father, who was having one last cigarette before boarding. And then the patriotic music quietened but didn't quite go away, and a voice droned in Russian, giving the last call for boarding their flight.

Illya's stomach clenched. He shuffled his feet a little and tapped his cane on the hard floor and said, 'Tato?'

'Yes, I have almost finished, Illya,' his father said easily.

Illya tried not to show his impatience. He knew his father couldn't be rushed over his smoking, but the staff at U.N.C.L.E. had pulled out all the stops to secure their travel documents and he really didn't want to miss their scheduled flight.

He turned his attention to his mother instead. Her hand had been on his arm all this time, and her upset felt thick in the air. So he turned to her and hugged her, breathing the scent of her and taking in the feel of her. Finally he said, 'Don't worry, mama. It will all be fine. I'm sorry you couldn't come, but I will speak to you on the phone.'

'I will pray for this operation to work, Illya,' she told him tearfully. 'I will make every prayer there is. For my boy to see.'

'I know,' he said. He had no belief in prayer, but he hugged his mother all the same.

'And you will come back sooner,' she pressed him, her arms tight about him. 'Don't leave it so many years again, Illyusha, please. Come back very soon.'

'I will,' he promised, kissing her on the cheeks. 'I promise I will. I love you, mama, but I must go. We cannot miss this flight. Please look after Napoleon if – when he comes home.'

'Of course I will,' she said, then she said more softly, 'I will give him your love, Illyushenka, and I'm sure he will be flying to you very soon.'

He kissed his mother's cheek again, appreciating her offer to pass on his love more than he could hope to express. If Napoleon were dead...

He gave his mother a final hug, inhaling her scent deeply into his lungs, and said rather pensively, 'Yes, I'm sure. Goodbye, mama. I love you. Tato, can you help me? Where do we go?'

He wished he could see his mother's face, but he was glad he couldn't see her crying. Just touching his hand to her face and feeling her tears was enough. So he took his father's arm and followed him, and her soft weeping was lost in the crowded noises around him. His father was a nervous but very attentive guide, telling him constantly what might be in his way and what was happening. He missed Napoleon's calm guidance.

'Here, Illya, the desk,' his father murmured, steering him a little to the left. 'Now we are queuing.'

Illya left it all to his father, except when he produced his U.N.C.L.E. identification and answered a few curious questions from the man checking them in. And then he was being led through into the cold of the airfield, hearing the sounds of aircraft engines and other vehicles, hearing the wind cutting against the edge of the building behind him and feeling the spattering of a few flakes of snow against his face. He smelt fuel and rubber and cold, and the tip of the cane vibrated as he passed it over the concrete underfoot. Then his cane clattered against the metal stairs just before his father mentioned them, and then he was climbing, taking his last lung full of Ukrainian air, and stepping into the enclosed space of the aircraft. He let out a sigh. It had been so good to be home.

((O))

It had been simple enough to creep through the corridors of the deserted facility, find the other U.N.C.L.E. agents, and release them from their bonds. The other agents had been beaten as he had, but not so badly that they couldn't travel. As a parting shot one of the Ukrainian agents smashed up every remaining piece of equipment they came across on their way out. Napoleon couldn't blame him, because he had been pretty badly beaten, but he wished that the man spoke enough English for Napoleon to impress on him the importance of getting out quietly. The place seemed deserted, but it was stupid to take chances.

They arrived back at the Kiev headquarters with the satisfaction of having accomplished their mission, although Napoleon would have rather have accomplished it with fewer bruises. He sat in a reclining chair in the place's small first aid room with a rather lovely Ukrainian lady dabbing stinging antiseptic onto his cuts, hissing at the pain. How much better it would feel to be sitting there with Illya next to him. No doubt Illya would be teasing him mercilessly about getting captured, but still, it would be so much better to have him there.

The door clicked open and Napoleon glanced sideways to see Dmitry Belousov looking in.

'Ah, Mr Solo! I heard that you had returned,' the man said with a broad smile, coming in through the door and looking between Napoleon and the other battered agents. He spoke swiftly to the other men in his own language, then looked back at Napoleon and asked, 'You have heard the news, no? About Tovarisch Kuryakin?'

Napoleon straightened up instantly, earning a tut from the Ukrainian woman who was busy applying bandages to his damaged wrists.

'The news? What news?'

'Oh! Then you haven't. Mr Solo, Illya received his call from the clinic.'

'What?' He tried to pull his wrists away from the woman and got a torrent of incomprehensible words from her.

'Now, Mr Solo, sit still, sit still,' Dmitry told him firmly. He pulled up a chair and sat down. 'You hold still for this beautiful lady and I will tell you, yes? Illya has been called to his operation in Munich. They have found him another cornea. So, he has gone.'

Napoleon's heart was thudding so hard his battered ribs hurt. He couldn't believe it.

'Illya's gone? Alone?'

'Oh, I think his father went with him. The office arranged travel documents for them both.' Dmitry patted a hand down on his shoulder. 'Don't worry, Mr Solo. I'm sure he's in good hands. You sit there and get yourself patched up, yes?'

'No.' Napoleon put his hands on the hands of the woman tending to him and said very carefully in Russian, 'No. Thank you. I will be all right now. I have to go.'

She protested, but he stood and shook his head and thanked her again, and left the room.

He wanted to go straight to the airport. God, he wanted so badly to go straight to Illya, but he couldn't. He took Dmitry by the arm and said, 'Tovarisch Belousov, can you act as translator? Are you busy?'

The man looked at his watch and shrugged. 'I can be available for a little while. You want to see Kobevko, yes?'

'Yes,' Napoleon said.

What he really wanted was to just walk out, but he couldn't. The weight of his position as the New York CEA weighed heavily on him. He had seen the duties at the Kiev headquarters as a useful way to allow him into the country with Illya, but now they were an annoyance. He couldn't just leave. He had to finish off what he had come here for. But he intended to make sure he could finish as fast as possible.

He spent half an hour with Kobevko trying to arrange to fit all he had meant to do into a packed day today and tomorrow. He got people working on securing his tickets for travel as soon as his duties were complete. He spent the rest of the day aching, his wounds throbbing, going through documents and talking to agents and trying to get as much done as possible. And then he returned to Illya's parents' apartment, exhausted.

Illya's mother was there, and the first thing she did was to pass on Illya's love in very careful English, and then she handed him Illya's note. Napoleon held it in his hands, feeling like a lovesick fool. He ran his eyes over Illya's words, smiling at the way the bottoms of the letters were cut off by the ruler he had used to keep his writing straight. Illya's handwriting had become a strange mixture of extremely precise and wayward. The dots of his Is and crosses for his Ts were never quite in the right place, but each word was very carefully spaced by the exact width of his little finger. He had formed every letter with great care, and he had signed the note with great care, simply, with IK.

Napoleon took that note off into the bedroom and pulled out the new communicator he had been given, and opened a channel to Illya.

'Illya, it's me,' he said as soon as Illya answered, and he heard Illya's sigh plainly through the microphone.

'Napoleon, you great, blundering, stupid – '

'Well, I love you too, darling,' Napoleon said ironically. 'Where are you, Illya? Are you in the air?'

'Moskva – er – Moscow,' Illya said, and he sounded tired, his accent thicker than usual. 'Waiting for our flight. Did you get my note?'

'Yeah, your mother gave it to me, but they told me at headquarters that you'd had the call. I'm sorry I wasn't there, Illya. I'm so sorry.'

'Well, where were you, anyway?' Illya growled. 'I suppose you got yourself tied up?'

Napoleon laughed. 'I was tied to a chair in a dark room, Illya. They beat me up a bit then left me there, but I managed to get out.'

'Are you all right?' Illya asked, and he wasn't entirely successful at keeping his level of concern from his voice.

'Yeah, I'm all right. I've just got a nice new crop of bruises for you to discover. Listen, Illya. I've arranged everything I needed to do at the Kiev office to fit into tomorrow. And as soon as I'm done I will be on a flight, I promise. I will be at your side, okay?'

He heard Illya laugh softly. 'I know you will, Napoleon. Don't worry about me. I have my father here and he's looking after me very well. I will be perfectly all right. And perhaps when you get to me I'll be able to see you.'

'I hope I'll be there sooner than that,' Napoleon said very seriously.

He heard the voice of Illya's father in the background then, saying something in Ukrainian.

'Listen, Napoleon, I have to go,' Illya said. 'We have just enough time for a meal before the next flight. I will call you again, all right? I'll call you from Munich.'

'Any time, day or night,' Napoleon said.

'Any time,' Illya echoed.

'Have a safe flight, Illya.'

That was as close to endearments as Napoleon dared get, with Illya sitting in a public airport and Napoleon having not yet swept the apartment for bugs. He lay back on the bed and capped the communicator. He felt enormously tired and he ached in so many places. His wrists were burning and itching where he had abraded the skin in wearing through those ropes. He wanted to just lie there and sleep, but really he needed to go back out into the apartment, to be social with Illya's mother, to share dinner with her, to share concerns about Illya with her in a mixture of Russian and English. It would be nice, sometimes, to just forget every responsibility.

He felt a sudden surge of longing for those old days when Illya had been able to see and he had been so very free, it seemed. He had still been tied to his work, of course. He was never free from that. But he had gone out with a different woman every week, sometimes every night. He had passed through a rainbow of dazzling smiles and dresses and names. He hadn't had to think so much about everything; about keeping his apartment rigidly in order so Illya could find things, about putting things in the right place in the refrigerator, about always looking out for Illya when he was guiding him, about giving him lifts, about making sure he was all right.

He immediately hated himself. He loved Illya. He was just so tired and so sore. He never wanted to be apart from Illya, and he chided himself furiously for that moment of feeling that Illya was a burden, even if those thoughts would never go further than his own head. It was just that he was tired, and they were so close to an end to all of this. So close to Illya being able to see…

He had to keep a rein on that too. He knew Illya wouldn't be miraculously cured with this one operation. He knew he would still have a severe visual impairment, he would still be totally blind in one eye, that his other eye would fluctuate greatly before it settled, if the transplant worked at all. He felt sick in the pit of his stomach thinking about what would happen if the transplant didn't work. Sick to think of what that would do to Illya. For the first time in a long time he wondered how it would be to retire; how perhaps if the operation didn't work he would throw away his job and just accept a reduced income, and live for Illya.

God, he was tired. He rested his head on the pillow and closed his eyes, and then suddenly he was waking up, looking up into Illya's blue eyes, and he gasped. It was Illya's mother bending over him, touching his shoulder, asking, 'You wake, yes? I have dinner.'

'Oh,' he said, rubbing his eyes. 'Oh. Yes. Thank you.'

He looked at his watch, tried to work out where Illya would be by now, tried to get his brain back into gear. He imagined Illya sitting in a seat in an aircraft cabin, with his father, travelling to the most important event of his life, and he itched with every fibre of his being to be there.

'Yes, thank you,' he said again. 'I will be out in just a moment. Thank you.'

((O))

It was odd for Illya, being in a hotel room with his father instead of with Napoleon. He had grown so used to either managing alone or having someone with him who was so used to his blindness that it almost didn't matter. With his father he was neither one nor the other. He could not just forge ahead and do things independently because his father stepped in, but his father wasn't so used to any of this and didn't know how best to help, and Illya was left in a frustrating kind of limbo.

'Listen, tato, I am all right,' he said as his father fussed around him when they stepped into their hotel room. They had gone straight from the airport to the clinic, where his health check had been passed with flying colours, and he was booked in for his operation the next morning. He could hardly believe that it was going to happen this time.

'Let me show you around the bathroom,' his father said to him. 'Shall I tell you where everything stands in the room?'

'All I need for now is to know where a chair or my bed is,' Illya said rather impatiently, 'because I'm tired and I'd really like to sit down.'

'Now, Illyushka,' his father chided him, putting a hand on his arm. 'You always did get crochety when you were tired. I suppose you don't remember when you were a baby. Your mother would try to get you to sleep and the more tired you were the more you fought it. It was as if you hated going into oblivion like that.'

'No, of course I don't remember that,' Illya muttered.

'Well, come over here and sit down, then, and when you've had a rest we can go to the dining room, have lunch, yes? There is an armchair here by the window, Illya. It's near to the radiator, so it will be warm. Come here.'

So Illya took his father's arm and followed him to sit down in the chair. The upholstery smelt of cigarette smoke, and he leant back into the cushions and closed his eyes tiredly.

'I'm sorry, tato,' he said after a few minutes of silence. 'I'm sorry. I am tired, and – I suppose I'm nervous too. It's been a very long few days and – Well, I hardly know when we began any more. I don't even know what time it is.'

'It is almost one in the afternoon, local time,' his father told him. 'You must let me change your watch, Illya. I know, I almost don't know which way I'm facing, we left Kyiv so fast, and all that time sitting in airports, and flying through the night… But it is past lunchtime and you must be strong tomorrow, so in a minute we will go and eat.'

Illya breathed out slowly, rolling his cane between his palms and feeling the tip turning in the pile of the carpet. His mind felt as though it were buzzing with all that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. It had taken a ridiculously long time to get here to Munich, and the vibration and white noise of the aircraft were still in his head. The stress of the hours building up to visiting the clinic had been enormous and now that part of the ordeal was over he was like a puppet whose strings had been cut. He felt as though he could sleep for a year, but he was hungry too.

'Yes,' he said after a long moment. 'Let's go and eat, tato. I will pay. American dollars will go further here than roubles, and I have a credit card. Let's go and eat.'

'All right, Illya,' his father said. 'Come, take my arm.'

So Illya followed his father down to the hotel restaurant and sat at a table, and his father quietly told Illya a little about where he was sitting and what was on the table. Then his father said to him in a low voice, 'I have not been in Germany in over twenty years, Illya, and you know why I was here then. The things I saw...'

'Tato,' Illya said softly. 'It's better to talk about these things in our room. Can you read the menu to me?'

'I never did learn very much German, Illya,' his father said awkwardly.

'Well, never mind. You can read it anyway, and I can translate and I will order for us. I'm quite fluent.'

His father was silent, and after a while Illya asked, 'Tato?'

'Illyusha, am I not allowed to spend a moment silently amazed at the brain of my little boy?' his father asked fondly.

Illya smiled in a rather embarrassed way. 'Well, I can't see you, tato. I can't read your expression if you're silent. Come on, read the menu. I'm hungry.'

'Well, you must eat well. You're only allowed a light snack this evening, remember, so you will eat your big meal now.'

So they ate and drank tall half-litres of beer, and then went back to the cosy room. Illya lay down on his bed with his book, but his father was restless and walked about the room, standing near the window, tapping his fingers, making huffing sounds.

'Tato, I am the one who is supposed to be nervous,' Illya said at last, and his father came back across the room to him and sat on his bed.

'Are you nervous, Illyushenka?' he asked, putting a hand on Illya's shoulder.

Illya gave a brittle laugh. 'Tato, I am terrified.'

His father's hand pressured on his shoulder then, and stroked a little. Then he said, 'Sit up, Illyushenka. Let me hug you.'

So Illya sat up and his father's arms folded around him, and he sat like that for a little while, smelling the scent of stale cigarette smoke in his clothes and feeling the warm solidity of his body. He had a little falling feeling then at the thought of seeing his father's face, if he could see when he woke from the operation. He had been imagining him all this time as he had last seen him, years ago. But he would look different. Everything would look different. And Napoleon…

He pressed his face a little harder against his father's shoulder. Eventually his father released him, stroked his arm again, then said, 'I am looking at my watch, Illya. It is half past two here, so it will be an hour earlier in Kyiv. You should contact your Napoleon, yes? I am going to take a bath after all of that travel, and perhaps afterwards we can go for a walk about the city.'

Illya was so grateful to his father for that little bit of tact that put him out of the room while he called Napoleon. He had tried several times earlier but his partner had always been busy, and he desperately wanted to tell him about the check up appointment. He waited until he could hear the taps running in the en suite bathroom, and then he assembled his communicator and opened a channel.

'Napoleon, are you free?' he asked.

'What is it you said to me once, mon cher?' Napoleon's voice came filtered through the speaker. He sounded very far away, and tired. 'No man is free who has to work for a living? Well, I'm working, but I'm alone right now, so I'm available. You're safely in Munich, I guess?'

'Yes, safely in Munich. We landed this morning. I tried calling you earlier but I couldn't get you. Napoleon, I have passed the medical. The operation is scheduled for eight a.m. tomorrow morning.'

'So early,' Napoleon said rather wistfully, but then he said, 'But you passed the medical, Illya! That's wonderful. Listen, I will be getting on a plane the first chance I get, but it won't be until very late. I'm going to have to stay in headquarters most of the evening, and then it's a case of what flights are available once I'm done. I don't know that I'll be there before you go in, but hell, if I can sit on the pilot and make him fly faster, I'll do it. I want to be there with you.'

'Napoleon, I will be perfectly fine,' Illya assured him. 'I'm a big boy. My father will be there with me, and you know I don't need hand-holding. I have been through plenty of operations.'

'I know,' Napoleon said gently, 'but I still want to be with you. I'll be there when you wake up, I pro-'

'Do not make promises that you might not be able to keep,' Illya cut across him. 'I know you will be there when you can be. That is enough. Are you alone, Napoleon?'

'Yes, I've borrowed a little office and I'm all alone.'

'Then, I love you, Napoleon,' he said earnestly. 'Don't worry about me. I love you, and I know you will be here when you can.'

'I would like to be able to kiss you before you went down,' Napoleon said wistfully.

'You wouldn't be able to anyway,' Illya replied pragmatically. 'I will be surrounded by medical staff. I must go, Napoleon,' he said as he heard the taps stop running in the bathroom. 'I think my father is finishing in the bath. We are going to take a walk around in a little while, but I will call you this evening – or you call me when you are free. And I will see you tomorrow. Perhaps I will really see you tomorrow.'

'From your lips to God's ears,' Napoleon said, and Illya smiled. He didn't believe in God and he didn't think Napoleon really did either, but his lover had sounded so sincere that he believed him.