The wind sweeping down from Lake Näsi along the path of the koski is bitterly cold, bringing with it the roiling fog that billows from the surface and blows south across the strait, but Illya has had worse, and there's something comforting about the way the air tastes of ice. The water in the koski is dark and choppy against the dam, eddying and swirling in unpredictable patterns as it's sucked through narrow openings in the locks and stepped down from one level to the next, but he wouldn't be finding it nearly as entrancing if he were any less drained.
It had been a tedious mission – not long, not particularly difficult, but tiring, somehow, beyond all proportion to the work they've done – and they have a few days to regroup before heading on to the next disaster in the making.
Perhaps it's the language. Gaby's proven surprisingly adept in Swedish, and Russian has been useful a time or two, but unlike in nearby Estonia, fear of the KGB here does not outweigh resentment of Russian occupation, and so simply getting by on the day-to-day level has been frustratingly challenging. Even Solo, who'd cheerfully expounded on the challenges posed by Uralic languages after their initial briefing, has been showing more and more his rumpled feathers.
Karjala is still a sore spot, apparently, as is Åland, and English has not yet gained a foothold beyond the core of academia, so of the half-dozen languages they speak between them, precisely none have allowed them the sort of ease they've enjoyed elsewhere. It's not like he needs to do more than glower and hold out money to buy food, and simply glower harder to avoid unwanted conversations, but it's hard to evade the nagging sensation that he's failing, somehow, just by being here.
He's tired. It's grey and cold and damp, and the clouds haven't seemed further away than a couple of arms' lengths in the week since they arrived, and he's tired.
But while the city's new Social University had brought with it from Helsinki a group of radical anti-Kekkonen activists, their nascent assassination plans had been thoroughly quashed and their connections rendered inert, so it's not as though he has nothing to show for it. If anything, he should be celebrating: for all his country's neutrality, Kekkonen is not very subtly on the side of the Soviets, and it's rare for UNCLE to not demand that he, Illya, skirt blatant treason to his homeland on its behalf.
Six months ago, he would have done this job without a thought to his surroundings, beyond the tactical. He would have worked quickly, brutally, and effectively, uncaring that his speech set him apart, content to menace his way through this small, frozen city until his task was complete and he could report in to his superiors, strung up between pride and shame as he always had been and always would be. He wouldn't have cared what kind of bread he bought, or whether or not he could read every single street sign. He would have settled for the cheapest option and memorized the necessary routes and never spared a moment for curiosity, never let himself flag under the notion of insufficiency. He would have returned to his solitary hotel room after his solitary mission and played a game or two of chess, settling in the silence and stillness of a space filled with no breathing but his own, and he would have been…satisfied.
Instead, he's leaning on a frigid metal balustrade, his face to the biting northern wind, waiting for something.
He doesn't wait long.
"I could see you from the room," Solo says by way of greeting, setting the balustrade to the small of his back, inches from Illya's hands. His own are tucked into the pockets of his barely practical coat. "Figured if you wanted to brood alone, you'd have chosen a different spot. Plenty of bridges on offer, here."
Illya smiles, just a little, even knowing that Solo can see it. "I thought it best not to come between you and your statues." The next bridge down, Hämeenkatu, is adorned with some interestingly brutalist interpretations of Greek statuary. Naturally, Solo had developed a morbid fascination with them almost immediately. Even more naturally, he had just as immediately proceeded to make it everyone else's problem.
Solo chuckles, a plume of white snatched away by the wind, and tips his head back as if to watch its progress. "Have you ever been this far north before?" he asks, after a while.
It's a careless question. Solo knows that he has been to the far north of Сибирь, knows what he has seen there.
"Москва is further south," he says instead. "Санкт-Петербург is closer, but no, not so far."
"I admit I've been hoping to see the aurora."
Illya…doesn't quite know what to do with that. Solo has never struck him as someone who looks at the sky. The beauty he chases has always been eye-level, within reach, human-made. He has to be able to take something, to want it.
"Gaby too," Solo adds, when Illya's silence has stretched past some unnamed point. "This is definitely her first time. Up north, that is."
"Too cloudy," Illya finally says, and looks up despite himself, perhaps hoping for a glimmer of color to dip through a break in the grey. His hope is unrewarded, as he'd known it would be. "And this time of year, lights would be low on horizon. January, they are higher, easier to see."
Solo nods, but keeps his eyes on the clouds above them. They're moving quickly in the wind, roiling along with the mist. Fog below and cloud above, with the wind and the darkness between them.
Illya pushes himself off from the balustrade and turns towards their hotel. "Come on," he says, more gruffly than he means to. "Let's go."
The hotel room is not silent, not still. Gaby's sitting up in bed with a magazine, one of Illya's sweaters over her customary pajamas, and this alone is enough to make the difference. Like an empty room looks smaller than when it is full, like sound is dampened against drapes and carpet and furniture. She does not need to make noise or movement to change the atmosphere into something closer, warmer, richer. Velvet curtains on a stage, he thinks, then flicks the thought away. It is a poor comparison, and no comparison is needed.
Solo, when they enter, simply peels off his coat, tugs off his boots, and wanders to the far side of the room to turn on the radio, leaving Illya to close and lock the door behind them. He does, only pausing for an instant when he sees what has replaced the privacy sign hanging from the door handle.
SIIN EI OLE MIDAGI
ЗДЕСЬ НИЧЕГО НЕТ
"Why," is all he says, and turns back to face the room. He doesn't pitch it loud enough to expect an answer, but Gaby snorts and shakes out her magazine.
"I dared him," she says simply. "You should talk to someone about the security, since apparently just anyone can waltz in and take it."
"I wish I could argue," Solo says absently as he fiddles with the tuning dials, "but it honestly wasn't nearly as hard as I'd expected. A couple of locks, a couple flights of stairs, and no guards or cameras in that hallway whatsoever."
"No cameras that you saw," Illya corrects, though it's mostly out of habit.
"Hm, if they'd seen me I think I would've heard about it before now. Or you would have, anyway. Ah, there we are." Soft music replaces the gentle static of the radio, something in the area between classical and jazz that Illya's never bothered to learn the words for.
"Besides," Solo goes on, checking first one window and then the next as he orbits the room. "I made most of their little tricks in that charming dining room after what, ten minutes?" He absolutely hadn't. Maybe half of them, after ten minutes. After twenty, and with help, he had guessed more.
Illya has his own coat off by now, and is working on the rest of the layers that Solo had brashly foregone. "You know rest of hotel is also bugged? Microphones in every room, cameras in most?" Mittens, gloves, scarf, hat, bundled neatly into one another.
"That's what electromagnets are for," Gaby says mildly. "Right, Illya?"
Illya keeps his face expressionless as he pulls off his heavy wool sweater and hangs it next to his coat. That had been the sort of near-treason UNCLE regularly expects from him: fashioning a coiled electromagnet and passing it along the door frames, window sills, light fixtures, and heating vents in their rooms in the Hotel Viru, destroying the cameras and listening devices the KGB painstakingly places throughout the westerners' wing.
He had not been openly KGB for that mission, and found himself oddly grateful for it. Estonia is a damaged country, its air heavy with fear and suspicion, and the totality of the hotel had been unsettling. The entire building, the entire micro-society carefully contained within it, had been to the country what the unconvincing sign on the door had been to the room behind it. Siin ei ole midagi. Здесь ничего нет. There is nothing here.
Illya is not blind. He is not naïve. He knows that there is suffering, that Russia is not a utopia, that Soviet rule maintains itself with violence. He has often been that violence, after all. But to try to hide that suffering with lavish architecture and sumptuous décor, to put up a screen of decadence and opulence so gaudy that no one would give a thought to whatever misery and despair lay behind it…he would have expected that from the West. That such a strategy was so quickly embraced by the Soviets is…troubling, to him. He has not yet parsed out all that it means to him, and doesn't get the chance to now, as Solo has taken off his suit jacket and tossed it at Illya's head.
"While you're just standing there," Solo drawls, eyes bright with something Illya has learned to distrust. Illya catches it reflexively and scowls, but hangs it up next to their coats, careful to make sure that the shoulder seams lie neatly on the hanger. Then he moves further into the room so that if Solo wishes to continue throwing things at him, he will need a better excuse. Solo is unrepentant, but lifts his hands in truce. "All right if I take the shower?" he asks, and actually waits for Gaby's hum and Illya's nod before he goes, pajamas and toiletries bag in hand. That's new.
"That's new," Illya says quietly once the door has shut and locked. Gaby looks up from her magazine and motions him closer with a tilt of her head. Illya goes. She looks worse up close, tired, eyes red-rimmed and shadowed, her usual make-up long since removed.
"I think I scared him," she murmurs, voice pitched low. "He was helping me with my." She raises a splinted and bandaged hand to gesture to her clean face and damp hair. With three fingers on her right hand broken and two on her left, she's had to rely on their help for more than she's happy about for the past couple of days. "I don't even know what it was, I think I asked him for a certain conditioner and he froze. Then he got…weird, and left as soon as he was done."
"Weird how," Illya has to ask, because he doesn't think Solo would do anything to take advantage of Gaby's unusual dependence on them, but if he were in her position, he'd want someone to ask.
"It's hard to describe. It was like…have you ever been doing something from memory and suddenly forgotten what comes next? And you have to try a few times before the memory takes over again? It was like that. Like he'd forgotten the next step of a dance."
Illya looks at her for a moment, taking this in. Her hair is too dry for this to have happened right before Solo met him on the bridge; he must have wandered around for a while before finally seeking Illya out. On a hunch, Illya goes to the window and pushes aside the curtain. Just as he'd thought: between the light in the room and the angle of the window, Solo wouldn't have been able to see him after all. He sighs and twitches the curtain closed again.
Part of him wants to think that they were past this, but the wiser part of him knows they never will be. They are who they are. Gaby will be steely resolve, and Illya will be a weapon, and Solo will be a liar. He knows this. They all know this. Or, at least, they should.
Gaby doesn't ask, but he thinks she understands what he saw and why he looked.
"Do you need anything else?" he asks.
She shakes her head. "I'm all set. See you in the morning?"
He can feel the way his eyes try to soften, his posture tries to slump, in response to such a simple question, such easy comfort. He does not think he succeeds in stopping them, but it is late and they are all tired. "Yes," he says. "See you in the morning."
She waves her splinted fingers with a little smile and goes back to her magazine, cautiously turning the page.
Illya unlocks the door, slips out past its lying sign, and goes to his own room down the hall.
His room is silent, is still. There is no one's breathing here but his own. His chess board is out, reset from the last game. He stands and looks at it for a long while before going to bed.
Illya is much less inclined to go on his morning run when the sun will not rise until after 9:30. Shameful, scowls a voice in his head, but he ignores it and goes anyway. Isn't that what matters? The action, rather than the reluctance?
He eschews the city streets in favor of the forest trails that skirt the northern lake, Näsi. They are lit only sporadically, but enough to avoid injury, and Illya is not unaccustomed to the taiga. The unpredictable terrain is a welcome challenge, as are the views he glimpses when he raises his gaze from the ground just ahead of him. The lake hasn't yet frozen over completely, that much is clear from the mists, but the ice cover is expanding, and atop it accumulates a thin dusting of sparkling snow that never seems to be blown away. Closer to the lake, the paths are cruder and the lights fewer; in the deep darkness, the snow and ice appear perpetually moonlit, a ghostly apparition beneath the velvet of the sky.
The clouds have cleared, at least for now, but he is still too close to the city to see any stars.
He leaves the lake, the woods, the trails, and the ground beneath him turns to concrete and pavement as he follows the road back.
When they meet for breakfast and coffee, Gaby is grumpy.
He doesn't blame her – she's been more or less cooped up in her hotel room since the mission ended, her newly broken fingers too painful for the cold, the splints too bulky for any gloves or mittens that fit, and her normal difficulties with sleep can only have worsened with the ache. He also suspects, but cannot confirm, that part of her mood stems from the sheer bad luck that had injured her. If she had been first out of that window, instead of Solo, would it have given way in its casing and dropped shut on his fingers rather than hers? Would she still have her freedom, her independence, while Solo moped around and ached instead? It's an uncharitable thought, perhaps, but Illya knows that Solo is thinking it, even if Gaby isn't.
"I've danced on broken toes for hours," she grumbles, trying and failing to get a good enough grip on a spoon to stir sugar into her coffee. "I don't see why this has to be different."
"More nerve endings," Solo says easily, and takes the spoon from her. "More joints and fine muscle attachments, too. There's more to inflame, and more nerves to feel it." He lifts the spoon neatly out of the cup and taps it delicately against the edge before laying it on the plate.
Gaby crosses her arms, elbows thudding loudly on the table while her hands dangle limply from her wrists, safely above it. "I hate it."
"I know," Solo says. It's what Illya has come to think of as his real voice, the one that says what he means and carries the weight that comes with it. "And I'm sorry. If we had anything stronger…"
"I wouldn't want it," she mutters, but Illya sees the quick flick of her eyes up to Solo's face, catches the understanding there. However extensive their first aid kits, they never stock anything stronger than aspirin, anything that could form a habit. It's a standard enough practice, but it would be possible to make an exception. They don't. Solo has made it clear that he doesn't expect them to toe that particular line for him, but there's no reason not to. It is, after all, a standard enough practice.
Illya folds a napkin into a small square. Gaby holds out a hand, her left, the less damaged, and he puts first the napkin and then the cup into her palm, the cloth shielding her from the heat as she supports the weight of it from below. She can balance it with her right hand without stressing her fingers too much, but it's still a bit clumsy. They've been taking all their meals in Illya's room since it happened, both to avoid attracting attention to themselves and to spare as much of her dignity as they can. Their room – Gaby's and Solo's – has two beds, but Illya's has a table and more space to sit at it.
They eat in relative silence, using their four good hands among the three of them as fairly as they can. Gaby's never been much for breakfast, but she has some bread with jam when Illya prepares it for her, and glares but doesn't protest when Solo doctors her next cup of coffee with far too much cream. Aspirin on an empty stomach is unpleasant, as well she knows.
"What I wouldn't give for a Berliner," she sighs when she finishes the bread, and Solo's focus sharpens the way it does when he's trying to recall something.
"I can't make any promises," he says slowly, "but I think I may have something that will suit. Give me an hour. You two all right on your own for a bit?"
There's no innuendo, no smirk, no amusement. Illya has long since learned not to read into those things in Solo's voice, but it's still somewhat jarring to find them absent.
"Where are you going?" Illya asks.
"Not far," Solo promises. "There and back again," he adds with the twitch of a smile. "So?" He looks to Gaby, who has given up staring desultorily into her pale coffee in favor of considering Solo like she wants to get under his hood.
"Go," she says after a moment. "We'll be here."
It's not quite an answer to his question; Solo notices, too, but doesn't push. Just looks to Illya next, and takes the nod he gets as permission. "Dress properly this time," Illya tells him. "It is colder than yesterday."
It's like watching a slide change in a projection, an overlay removed and then replaced. For a moment, Solo's expression goes blank as Illya has seen only rarely, lax and unperformative. Almost before he's noted it, though, the ease and familiarity are back, the slight tension in his features that holds the mask in place, only glimpsable when you know to look for it.
"If you insist," Solo says lightly, fully returned to himself, and stands. Illya doesn't watch him leave. Instead, he watches Gaby, her lips pursed and eyes narrowed as she watches for him.
"He'll come back," Illya says. "He's not running."
"He'll come back," Gaby agrees. "But he is."
The hour passes easily enough. Gaby lets him take off the splints to check that the layers of gauze underneath are still dry and properly wrapped. The metal of the splits can cause a rash, in some people, and while Gaby insists that she isn't one of them, it's good to be sure. It is also not comfortable to have metal pressing directly against skin, particularly when that skin is bruised and swollen from the trauma beneath it.
Some of the gauze had indeed gotten a bit damp, so Illya carefully unwraps all of her fingers and arranges them on a towel on the table to allow the skin to dry before he re-bandages them. He brushes and braids her hair while they wait, and she nearly falls asleep like that.
He suspects that it's more because she's exhausted than because she trusts him. They've been working together a while, yes, and even when they had just started she chose to get drunk and provoke him, but that was not a mark of trust, and he still catches her watching, listening, evaluating. She hasn't been able to trust anyone in a very long time, he thinks, and suspects that it makes her nervous to find herself wanting to. Most people who are paranoid, even those who are rightfully so, fear more to be among crowds, to be visible to many eyes at a time, but Gaby seems more able to relax in public, now that she is out from behind the pervasive scrutiny of the Iron Curtain. When she is alone, though, with one or both of them, she gets anxious. Standoffish. She fidgets, startles easily, pushes boundaries.
Solo is better at distracting her when she is like this, or perhaps he's just better at appeasing her. Illya tends to react to it rather than respond, bristling at her needling instead of dismissing it and letting her caged panther pacing twist his own tension higher.
She has been less anxious lately, but her irritation at her broken fingers and the dependency they leave her with has fanned the flames.
As much as she needs the sleep, letting her guard down so completely and so unintentionally would have her baring her teeth and snapping, so Illya gives one strand of the braid a slightly harder tug than necessary.
"Why did you say you had scared Solo?" he asks. "Yesterday. I have been thinking, and it is odd word to use."
She hums, rousing and shifting a bit in her chair. "He ran away, didn't he?"
"He left," Illya agrees, "but he is easily distractable. He leaves often, mostly to chase things. Perhaps there was something he needed to do."
Gaby hums again. Illya finishes the braid and ties it off with an elastic band, and takes her further silence to mean the discussion is over. She won't fall asleep while he takes care of her fingers, so he doesn't need to keep talking.
When he finishes laying out the fresh gauze, though, and looks up to ask if she's ready to begin, she's wearing that considering look again. "There was," she says quietly, almost to herself. "He forgot how to be Napoleon Solo, and needed to go away to remember." Then she shakes off her introspection, and glares down at the gauze and splints waiting on the table with grim determination. "All right," she says, voice its normal sturdy self. "Let's do this."
Solo comes back a little after the promised hour has passed, but in good spirits and not frozen, so apparently he had taken Illya's advice. "All right," he says brightly. "Who's up for a walk?"
He takes far more care dressing Gaby than he does dressing himself, although admittedly most of the care he takes is in the interest of pretending that he isn't. He seems a little absent, a little disinterested, and gets into a half-hearted argument with Illya about the merits of different material fibers in different climates. By the time they're all ready to go, Gaby is more herself than she has been in a while, and Illya feels some of the tension gone from between his shoulder blades. Even knowing that they have been handled, treated like marks and deliberately nudged into certain states, certain positions, Illya cannot deny the effect: this is normal, this is the dynamic they have, this is who they are. Solo, too, seems more at ease as he ushers them through the hotel's front door.
And then the crystalline air hits him, and such musings are forgotten in the moment it takes to recover his breath. At his side, Gaby squeaks a bit, but he politely ignores it, and doesn't comment when she presses closer to him. Her right hand, in one of Solo's gloves, one of Illya's, and a heavy mitten, is carefully rested in the crook of his left arm, where he will ensure that no further harm comes to it. Her other hand, similarly layered and better able to bear the slight jostling of her gait, is tucked into the deep fur-lined pocket of her coat. The heavy worsted wool and fox fur of the coat should keep her warm, as should the matching mink ushanka and the cashmere scarf nestled inside the fur collar. The rest of her outfit is a bit more haphazard but equally suited to the weather, and Solo had stressed that warmth would matter more than fashion for this outing.
Even having already been out this morning, well ahead of the sun, the cold is a shock. A shock, but not a bad one. Illya feels alive in this air, alive and grounded, like he belongs in this place, on this ground, under this sky. Like ice could form on his skin like crystals inside of a rock and make of him a statue that others would not fear to see. His breath billows out before him, and although he too is dressed warmly, he shivers in reaction.
The mist from the lake has not yet started building in earnest, so the sky is almost visible, pale and watery though it is, and there is a blueish tint to everything not washed in the weak golden light of the recently risen sun. Brick and stone, plaster and iron, water and sky, ice and light, all beautiful in a way he has stopped trying to deny. He can't help but look to his partners, hoping with a strange, misplaced pride that they can also see it, that the scene before them is lovely to them in the same way it is to him, that they will see this and somehow understand him better for it. Gaby is looking up, slightly open-mouthed at the fine shimmer in the air. Solo is not so accommodating, and is once more presenting an air of practiced geniality that says nothing at all.
"Is it snowing?" Gaby asks, reclaiming his attention and distracting from the momentary swoop of disappointment.
"It's the fog," Illya tells her. "It freezes, but is not heavy enough to fall, so it stays."
"There are better places for enjoying the view," Solo says, chivvying them into motion, "and it just so happens that we're going to one of them."
They walk briskly, but not hurriedly, moving determinedly through the cold but not so quickly that there is no time to appreciate the little details. The deep teal of the water in the koski as they cross the bridge Illya had waited on last night, the delicate lines of snow still balanced along the leaves and branches of the trees on the small island despite the wind, the brick and cobblestone of Finlayson district, the broad boulevard of Hämeen Park with its large, gnarled trees. The icy blue of the sky, just a shade off silver, mirrored in Gaby's coat. The wind grows less sharp as they continue west along Satakunta street, bordered on each side by low apartment buildings, and then more powerful again as apartment blocks give way to houses – more of the painted wooden cottages that Illya has seen on his runs – some standing alone, some lined up side to side.
Illya notices these, but finds himself more often watching Gaby as she notices, too. His memories of winter are mixed, great fondness with great misery, comfort with pain, and he hopes that this, for her, will be only good, only beautiful. She doesn't comment, doesn't gasp or point, doesn't do anything as bold as laying claim to a sight, a sound, a moment, but she has been trained to recognize beauty and grace as well as precision and efficiency, and he can tell that she has found it here. Whether that will outweigh the discomfort of broken bones and broken boundaries, he can't say, but she settles into the landscape as they walk, relaxes into the cold, opens her posture to the vibrant air, and he thinks that maybe it will.
Solo, as before, is making himself harder to read. He stays a pace or so ahead of them, and doesn't say much beyond responding if asked a question, turning as he does to take a few steps backwards, unconcerned. It is a weekday, and many of Tampere's residents appear to have better things to do than stroll the streets. They are far from the only ones around, but there is little danger of bumping into anyone. The crunch of snow and gravel under their boots makes most of the noise around them, apart from the occasional trundling vehicle, cautious of ice. They make only a few turns, one looking much like the next, from quiet street to quiet street, until they almost pass a set of stairs leading up into the forest that has crept up on their left. Solo stops and indicates the path with a slightly crooked smile.
"Take another left," Gaby says in a decent imitation of Solo's American accent, and Illya doesn't find the joke as funny as they do, even knowing the story, but he warms at the exchange nonetheless. This is the first time Solo has been real for them since that moment over breakfast. He's not sure when he started keeping track, or when his counts led to patterns and then to expectations, but he has been very…fake, lately. Pыбий мех, as much as his clothing is.
"After you," Solo says, and gestures up the steps. "It's a straight shot down the path from the top, so."
"Don't," Gaby says sharply, all humor abruptly gone, her face set and her eyes hard as she pins him.
Solo blinks. "Don't what?"
"Don't leave."
He's still for a moment, then smiles. It's not as real as it had been, but it's not quite a lie, either. "I won't, I promise. I know where we're going, after all, and I'm looking forward to it as much for myself as for you two."
Gaby considers him, and Illya looks between them, trying to see what she does. "Just stay where we can see you," she says at last, sounding tired. "You, Solo. Not whoever you're pretending to be."
He doesn't have anything to say to that, just raises his eyebrows a bit, dips his head in a fractional nod, and starts heading up the stairs.
The forest is quiet, the bare birch trees and snow-dusted conifers filling the space with silvery white and deep, deep green while the packed earth path softens their footfalls. Solo stays in front of them as they walk in silence, shoulders hunched slightly and hands deep in his coat pockets. Perhaps he is just feeling the cold, but Illya thinks that there is something chastised in his posture, something uncertain. He glances down at Gaby, only to find the gentle wonder slipped free of her control and full in her eyes as she looks around in something approaching reverence. It's a simple path through a short arm of the forest, bark and pine branches and stones and moss, but the wind has dropped away and the air is almost unnaturally still, the glittering haze of diamond dust harder to see but still breathlessly suspended above and around them.
"It's beautiful," Illya says softly. "It's— There is nothing like northern winter, I think."
"Oh, just you wait," Solo says, half over his shoulder. "It gets better, trust me."
Gaby hums a little, and tugs Illya forward to catch up. Solo steps off to the side, but Gaby slips her other hand through the open crook of his arm as smoothly as any pickpocket and hooks herself to him. "It's wide enough here," is all she says; Illya and Solo share a bemused look over her head, but she's not wrong. They walk side by side until they reach the edge of the forest and the path opens up into a narrow, oblong clearing. Solo gently turns them towards the right, and there not fifty meters away is a stone tower rising above the trees, free-standing but for the small square building squatting at its base, and with windows around the top. Gaby does gasp, then, and looks up with excitement in her eyes. "Oh," she says, quiet and heartfelt and pleased.
Solo carefully extricates himself, mindful of her hand, but doesn't step away. "I'd recommend the café first," he says, "and then the observation deck after."
His recommendation is sound: the café is warm and close with just enough people inside to feel friendly but not so many as to crowd it, and the smell of yeast and cardamom is rich in the air. Gaby almost bounces on her toes when she spies the donuts, glistening from the oil and rolled in sugar and spices, stacked high on plates on the counter.
Solo orders for them while Illya helps Gaby get her mittens and gloves off, and brings first a plate of donuts and then a carafe and three mugs to their little table. The coffee is better than what's served in their hotel, but the donuts are clearly what keep this place running. Illya doesn't have much taste for sweet things, but the dough isn't overly sweet, and the dusting of sugar cuts the sharpness of the cinnamon and the heaviness of the cardamom. They're warm, too – fresh from the fryer – and Gaby happily lets them take turns tearing off pieces and offering them to her in between sips of her coffee. The low hum of conversation and muted clinks of ceramic on wood seem to relax her, and if Illya's guard goes up a little, surrounded as they are by people he doesn't know, speaking of things he can't understand, at least it's in the service of something. So he sits with his back to the wall and his attention on the room, unobscured by anyone sitting across from him, and keeps watch while Solo and Gaby relax into this semblance of a crowd, where she can be invisible and he can take comfort in familiar performances.
By the time they've finished their coffee and pastries, they're all a little flushed with returned warmth and kindled good cheer, but Illya makes sure they're all assiduously well-wrapped before venturing into the tower. Solo pays the one markka entrance fee for each of them with an easy smile and no attempt at conversation, simply nodding when the attendant says something polite-sounding and motioning for Gaby and Illya to go up ahead of him. This time Gaby permits it, too excited to worry about who he might turn into when out of their sight.
The tower isn't all that large – the spiral stairs aren't divided into flights, but Illya would guess that there are no more than eight, and the spiral is fairly tight. Still, when they reach the room with all the windows, he feels his breath catch along with Gaby's.
He'd known that they were fairly close to the other lake, Pyhäjärvi, but the forest dips away below them and there it is, frozen and snow-dusted and dotted with small islands caught between the ice and the sprawling rays of the far-southern sun. They don't have long to gawk before Solo is behind them, ushering them on. "Come on," he says, "we can go all the way to the top. Let's get the full experience."
There's one more steep, narrow stairway, this one straight as the one before it had been, leading to a simple wooden door. Illya pushes it open, having to fight a bit against a gust of wind and yes, this is the full experience: stinging air, biting wind, and the spread of snow and ice beneath the blueish haze of the sky and the weak gold of the sun.
Gaby crowds against his side as they step onto the platform, ringed by a waist-high wall, and if there were anyone else up here it may have felt crowded, but with just the three of them it is all right. Solo shuts the door behind him and takes up his place at Gaby's other side. For long moments they stand in silence, simply looking, watching. The stillness of the land is broken occasionally by the wind ruffling the treetops, or by a bird taking flight, but those movements are easy to miss if you aren't paying attention. Illya is, and suspects that Solo is, too, unable to keep his gaze from flicking to any change, any motion, anything that stands out, anything that might not belong. If Gaby is, it isn't with their ingrained tension, but instead with the delight of witnessing something new.
"When I came up here earlier," Solo says suddenly, breaking the silence, "I realized something. Kaunis and kaukana. 'Beautiful' and 'far away.' That kau at the beginning... It could just be a coincidence, but I wonder if they're related, somehow. If something large and far away is more deserving of the word than something small within reach."
"Is that why you were looking for the lights?" Illya asks before he thinks better of it. "To see if something you couldn't reach could be beautiful?"
Solo shoots him a smirk, half amused, half startled. "Didn't think you had a poetic side, Peril."
"I didn't think you did, either," Illya returns, "but here we are." It comes out softer than he'd meant, perhaps, encompassing more than just the conversation.
Solo looks away again, back out towards the lake. "I knew they would be," he says after a moment. "I'm not quite that shallow, to think that they couldn't."
Gaby leans away from Illya to press briefly against Solo's side. "Did you see them?" she asks. "We'd talked, but you never said."
"No," Solo says shortly, but not shortly enough to hide the thread of wistfulness. "Too cloudy, still."
Gaby cranes her head back to look up into the sky. It's not clear, not really, but still not as cloudy as the previous days. "We should try again tonight," she declares, voice strained from the angle of her neck, the fog of her breath drifting up to merge with the sky. "Could we see them from here?"
"No," Illya says firmly. They have proper clothing for keeping warm for short periods of time during the day, but not for camping out under the night sky. "Too cold."
"And the tower closes at sunset," Solo adds. "But it's a great spot, isn't it? There's another tower up by the northern lake – if we go around to the other side, we can see it – but that one doesn't have the donuts. So. Not quite a Berliner, but how did it rank?"
Gaby bumps her shoulder into him again, but this time she stays, and this time Solo puts a cautious arm around her, gloved fingers brushing Illya's side as his hand settles on her shoulder. "I could have another."
They do.
That afternoon, Waverly makes contact to confirm that they'll be leaving the following morning.
That evening, when they've finished packing and the sun has long since slipped away, Illya joins Gaby and Solo in their room. There's a pot of tea waiting for him, strong enough for his tastes, and he knows he's being handled again, knows that Solo has noticed his preferences and provided this to put him at ease, but there's no good reason not to drink it, so he just shakes his head to himself and pours himself a cup. He notes the bottles of nail polish half hidden behind the larger bottles and glasses on the small side table next to the tea tray, and knows that Gaby has been similarly lulled. She, too, seems to have accepted it. She's loose and relaxed when he joins her on the bed nearer the window, and once more wearing one of his sweaters – this time, presumably, to offset the chill on her bare feet as her toenails finish drying.
Solo looks relaxed, but he's still in his daywear, minus only the suit jacket, and when he turns off the lights he goes to the armchair by the other window rather than joining them in sitting on the bed.
It's easier to ask, in the dark, looking through the window at the sky. "What do you need?" Illya says softly. "To feel at ease?"
"Nothing good for me," Solo admits eventually, just as softly. "Nothing I'd ask either of you to provide."
"Would you accept it if we did?" Gaby asks.
"No."
Gaby hums, considering, and Illya gets the sense that this is the tail end of something he hasn't been party to, that there is a meaning he hasn't yet grasped. "You could sit with us," she offers after a bit, cautious as if feeling for a trip wire, "if you want."
"No," Solo says again, but very gently. "Thank you, though."
They're quiet after that, except for the slight noises of fabric and breathing and the click-clunk of the radiator. When Gaby asks for her socks, barely a whisper, Solo gets up without a word to find them and bring them to her, but she takes them from him before he would have to decide and holds them gingerly between her thumbs and unbroken fingers to put them on herself, and Illya understands.
It is not just Gaby who has had her boundaries tested these past days.
Touch is not a hang-up he would have expected from someone in Solo's position, a thief and seducer and manipulator of charm, but then again, perhaps it is not so odd. Perhaps it is as Gaby said – that he has forgotten which parts of himself are truly him, and which are affectations. Siin ei ole midagi. Nothing behind the façade. Nothing important, anyway. Nothing worth knowing. Nothing worth seeking.
It's easier, in the dark, to say it. "You are a person, Solo. You don't have to try not to be."
Solo says nothing; in spite of himself, Illya turns to look at him, to try to read him now that his eyes have adjusted, but something stops him.
Gaby sees it, too, and sucks in a breath.
A ribbon of green swims towards them across the sky, a brief glimmer of color before it fades, but then there's a dip of cobalt, a hint of turquoise. Gaby's already up, crowding against the glass, bandaged hands cupped to try to get a clearer view. She doesn't need to. Between one breath and the next, the lights are there – low, yes, and not as vibrant as Illya knows they can be, but still beautiful and breathtaking in their silent dance. Even after so many years, the sight sends a shiver through him.
Kaunis ja kaukana. Beautiful and far away.
Solo is leaning forward, transfixed, still enough that he may not be breathing. At the window, Gaby makes a short, broken sound he's sure he wasn't meant to hear.
If he could do it silently, Illya would leave, return to his room and let them experience this new wonder together, unobserved. But that would break the near-sacred stillness, profane the reverent quiet, and for what? For darkness and loneliness, a room with south-facing windows and the ache of emptiness? And if he stands, they will remember that he is here, and the moment will be shattered, perhaps beyond repair. This is not yet so familiar that he can trust they will have it again.
So he stays, and watches the lights instead of his partners, and doesn't feel lonely at all.
...
This was written for the 2021 TMFU Winter Holiday Gift Exchange over on AO3; the prompt was "the team realizing that they've all been casually lonely for a long time." Title from "Fuel to Fire" by Agnes Obel.
I was gonna have actual detailed notes about people and places and names and background but then I was like hmm, no.
I must admit that Hotel Viru wasn't actually built until 1972, so I shouldn't have included it but I did, because I wanted to. When it was built, however, there absolutely was a KGB control room on the mostly-inaccessible top floor of the building, whose only door was labelled with the verbatim sign included in the fic. I saw it, I documented it, I will never not find it hilarious
Also, don't ask how Solo found out about Pyynikki Munkkikahvila despite a fairly solid language barrier. Don't know, don't care, but he did, and that's what matters.
Thank you for reading! As always, please feel free to leave any feedback you'd like to.