Disclaimer: I do not own Man From U.N.C.L.E., and make no profit from this work.


In The Blink of an Eye

Chapter Eight

A week passed, in which Illya dreamed of Stepan, and in Russian, every single night, and spent his days taking Stepan's advice and looking for...well, inaccuracies, he supposed.

The problem was that Illya didn't really know what he was looking for. On the surface, everything seemed normal. Napoleon had taken a leave of absence, he knew, to look after him. The apartment and its surroundings were as they should be – when Illya insisted on being taken somewhere else, the parts of New York he saw were as they should be as well, even when he made allowances for three years in absentia.

But as the week dragged on, Illya began to spot glimpses of, perhaps, Stepan meant.

The first signs came from Napoleon himself. He was...almost too attentive. Either Illya had been lied to about what had happened – and he couldn't imagine Napoleon lying to him about something so important – or Napoleon carried some serious guilt about the incident. He...fussed, maybe, was the right term.

Illya had been injured on plenty of missions, sometimes very seriously. And Napoleon had never fussed. He had looked after him, cared for him, but he hadn't fussed. When Illya had one of his tempers and told him – harshly – to go away, he would, and would come back only when enough time had elapsed that Illya had calmed down. With lesser injuries, he wouldn't come back at all, and Illya would see him again in work when they were healed.

But now...Napoleon was constantly there. He couldn't even sit in the same room without watching over Illya, talking to him, checking everything was fine. It was oppressive and it wasn't like Napoleon.

Maybe Stepan had a point.

By the end of the second week, Illya was...unnerved. To put it bluntly. Although his strength was beginning to return – albeit only to the point where he could function – he was still housebound, and sleeping most of the days and nights away.

And yet, Napoleon was still always there.

But it was when, one week and four days after Stepan's declaration, Illya woke to see the man himself leaning in the bedroom door and smiling like a particularly mischievous ghost, he knew he was in serious trouble.


"It's not enough," he demanded of Stepan that night, "that you're in my dreams, but now you're in..."

"Your other dreams?" Stepan shrugged. "Surely that's proof for you. It's not the right place out there."

"So where is it?" Illya demanded.

Stepan said nothing.


Therein was the problem. If Stepan was right, and Illya was not currently in the real world, then where was he?

Had he never woken from the coma? Or had the mission that Napoleon had told him never happened at all? Was he merely asleep (though why a mere dream would cause all this hassle, Illya didn't know) or had there been another accident?

He had to admit, with the number of times that he'd been struck over the head in the past, it wasn't exactly crazy to think that he could have sustained a serious head injury from somewhere else. And it certainly explained the headaches that had dogged him since leaving the Medical section.

Had he even come to America in the first place? He had been knocked around a fair few times before, in London, in Paris, in Georgia, and in Moscow. Nevermind going as far back as his childhood. Children growing up in towns battered by war seldom come out unscathed.

If Stepan was right, then Illya could have dreamed literally everything about his life.

Did Napoleon even exist?

"Illya? Everything alright?"

He became faintly aware that he was frowning, and smoothed it away again at Napoleon's anxious face.

"Fine," he said.

He didn't realise until later that he had spoken in Russian again.


Napoleon was frightened.

The lapses were getting worse. Illya was speaking more and more in his mother tongue, and going off into brooding silences. He was sleeping more, as well, and deeper than he had been in the first few days out of the hospital. While he wanted to put it down to the man not being afraid to sleep any more, he couldn't.

He knew that there was something wrong.

Some part of him didn't want to tell the doctors. They would take Illya back, back into the Medical section, and then it would be like they were back to square one. But not to tell them would be like...if anything happened to Illya because Napoleon hadn't told them about these lapses, then he may as well have pulled the trigger himself.

And that idea was simply unbearable.

He had to tell the doctors. He had to take Illya back in. And while under ordinary circumstances, Napoleon would rather go for best out of three with that Colonel Nexor persona than try and get Illya within twenty feet of a doctor, he knew, too, that Illya would not be able to put up much of a fight now.

So when he went into the spare room on Friday morning to wake Illya, with the intention of taking him to the doctor, he had not expected the bed to be empty, and Illya's meagre possessions to be gone.


Stepan materialised in the passenger seat of Napoleon's car, which Illya had 'liberated' for the time being.

"That was quick," he observed, and Illya was disturbed to note that he couldn't tell if Stepan was using English or Russian. And he only knew it wasn't French because Stepan had never spoken French.

"You know me," Illya muttered.

"Yes," Stepan agreed. "Once you made a decision, you always went with it. Stick to your guns."

He eyed the handgun that Illya had likewise 'liberated' from Napoleon's gun safe, and wryly added:

"Literally."

Illya said nothing.

"What is your plan?" Stepan asked.

Truth be told, Illya wasn't entirely sure. All he knew was that if he voiced his concerns to Napoleon, or the doctors, or (God forbid) the shrink, then he would be at the funny farm faster than Napoleon's head turned after a pretty girl.

So the first step was to get away from the U.N.C.L.E. and go into hiding. And if nothing else, Illya had been a very good spy. He still had his aliases, still knew how to escape, and if his hands were shaking on the steering wheel, so what?

He would get away, regroup, and figure out what to do.

After all, how did one prove that one was alive?