"You're sure we don't need to worry about the loading bay."
Illya looks up from the blueprints spread out on the table between them, his finger still on the point they'd chosen for their exit, tapped in emphasis before Solo had interrupted his summary of their route. "What?"
"The loading bay – here." Solo points to the offending area of the map. It's a wide open space with terrible sight-lines from their surveillance point and too many interior doors leading into the network of hallways they plan to use, and it's a huge goddamn wrench waiting to be thrown into their exit strategy.
"Yes, I know where it is, thank you," Illya says tersely. "You have asked this four, five times, so do you expect answer to be different, or...?"
"I don't expect it to be, no, but I'd like it to be. We keep glossing over it like we can just assume it won't be a problem, so I'm asking if we know it won't be a problem or if we're just pretending it won't be for the sake of convenience."
Illya's lips thin, expression distasteful. He hates to be questioned, to have his judgement called into doubt. Sometimes Solo does it on purpose, just to rile him, but this time he's not trying to be an ass. There's something eating at him, some connection being made somewhere he can't examine too closely for fear of the thoughts scattering, and at the heart of it is cold concrete and buzzing lights and too many shadowy corners for a three-person team to clear. Hell, even his six-person team couldn't—
Oh. That.
His side aches between two sets of scars, and he doesn't quite manage to suppress the weird shudder that runs through him at the realization.
"We need to come up with a different route," he says. "We can't secure this one."
"Because of this loading bay you hate."
"Yes, Peril, because of the damn loading bay," he snaps. "The morning deliveries will be coming in, it'll be crawling with people—"
"So? Is good distraction, lots of noise."
"If one person opens one of those fourteen goddamn doors at the wrong time, you're dead if I can't cover you."
"I don't need cover," Illya retorts, "I can take care of myself, and this is most efficient exit." He jabs the blueprint again, wrinkling the thin paper.
"Since when do you take stupid risks just for the hell of it?" Solo demands.
"Since when do you not?" Illya fires back.
"Since—" He cuts himself off, takes a breath. Tries to relax out of the tension twisting through every muscle, every nerve. "Never mind. Look, just think about it. If it's really our only option, we can come up with contingencies, but let's at least look for another way. There's no reason to plan for a bloodbath."
Illya's wavering, he can tell, torn between pride and pragmatic good judgement, and so he gives that final push. "Would you want Gaby to take your spot, knowing the risks?"
"There are always risks," Illya reminds him, but he's already folded. It's in the way he looks over the plans with new eyes, seeing the breaks in the line-drawn walls as Solo does, as needless flirtations with disaster. He won't admit to trying to protect Gaby any more than Solo will, and truth be told she doesn't really need protection. But he won't commit to a plan that would expose her to the risks he's all too willing to face himself, should their roles need to change at the last moment.
That's something he and Solo have in common, even if it largely goes unsaid. It's also something Solo and Gaby have in common, with regard to Illya.
He doesn't know if Gaby and Illya conspire the same way for him, and he doesn't want to. What would be worse: if they trusted him to take care of himself, or if they put themselves at risk instead?
From Rome all the way through to Madrid, he toys with the idea of just telling Waverly.
Solo wants Gaby and Illya to live; Waverly wants his new team to succeed. Given Solo's history, both aims would be more reliably met if Solo were just...somewhere else.
Part of him wanted to follow Waverly off of that Roman balcony and tell him right then, but there's not really a way to phrase, "it won't be on purpose, but I'm definitely going to get these two killed because there's something fundamentally wrong with me," that leads anywhere helpful, so that part had been silenced with relative ease.
Istanbul is a longer game, more surveillance and less nuclear immediacy, and it gives him almost too much time to think about things. He stays out of their way as much as he can, which isn't much once Gaby comes storming into his room, demanding that someone go to the beach with her since Illya won't, and somehow he ends up spending the whole day with her, and then having dinner with both of them, and then splitting his surveillance rounds with Illya, and then and then and then.
Their covers require them to spend a certain amount of time together, but he takes to slipping away whenever he has a moment to himself just to try to put some distance between them. While he's never been able to come up with a clear calculation, the trend is obvious enough: the more time he spends in the field with someone, the sooner he has to watch them die. It's a thin distinction to count on, that time spent apart from them on missions is weighed differently than time spent in their company, but it's all he has.
Gaby trusted him. Illya came back for him. They don't deserve to be punished for it.
Istanbul wraps up without incident. Illya's finally stopped giving him those looks, like he's been waiting for some unnamed other shoe to drop since he scraped Solo off the floor in Rudi's little sanctum, but Gaby's picked up the habit. In her case, though, it seems more like the wariness of wondering if his distance is something personal.
Maybe it should be, but he can't bring himself to fault her for her choices. Given their meeting, he couldn't really have expected she'd do any less than everything. Besides, he'd survived and her father hadn't. He doesn't feel like broaching that particular unfairness, so he can hardly blame her for not wanting to bring up his brush with the electric chair.
From Istanbul they head west, albeit only as far as Porto. More sand and sun and salt water, and the paradisal complacency left over from the ease of Istanbul lingers until someone comes at Gaby with a knife and Solo only barely manages to interpose himself in time. Illya takes it from there, and Solo's happy to let him.
Back at their safe-house, Illya bullies him into stripping to the waist to prove that he's not about to bleed out. The blade had gotten snagged in the loose fabric of his jacket and lost some of its momentum, so the shallow cut across his ribs is hardly more than a scrape. When he sees it, Illya lets out a breath and loses a lot of the tension that Solo had assumed he'd been carrying in response to the attempt on Gaby's life.
"It's all right," Illya says, sounding relieved. "Just a scratch."
"I've been telling you that for twenty minutes."
"You said you were fine," Illya corrects, straightening from where he'd been bent down inspecting the cut, "and that means nothing, from you."
"Hey," Solo says, bizarrely stung.
"You lie a lot," Gaby says unhelpfully, coming out of the kitchen with the medical kit.
"Not to you guys," Solo protests, which isn't that strong a defense, considering. Gaby raises her eyebrows meaningfully and sets the kit on the table next to him. Then she does a double-take.
"That looks bad," she says.
"It looks like a scratch," he insists, glaring at Illya. "Come on, it's barely even bleeding anymore. How delicate do you think I am?"
"Not that," Gaby interrupts, and he startles as rough fingertips skate over the twin starbursts below his ribs, a few inches under the cut. "This." He leans back, away from her touch, and she withdraws her hand but doesn't apologize, just meets his gaze with frank curiosity.
"It's old," he says shortly. Then he startles again as Illya's cold hand lands on his shoulder and pushes him forward so that Illya can inspect his back. "Jesus, do you mind?"
"These are through," Illya says, ignoring him, apparently having found the even messier scarring of the corresponding exit wounds. "High-power rounds." He touches both sets at once, hands spanning Solo's torso, and that's. Well, it's not entirely unwelcome, but he's really not in the mood right now.
"Do you mind?" he asks again, turning to glare some more, but Illya's expression is more bewildered than anything.
"These are through," he repeats. "Cowboy, these are— This is deadly shot. One of these is deadly shot. Through the kidney, with large caliber bullets, the damage is—" he breaks off, looking at Gaby.
"It wasn't fun," Solo admits with a certain amount of forced lightness. "Couldn't stand up for a few weeks, but I guess I was lucky, huh?"
"Lucky," Illya echoes hollowly, still looking at Gaby. "Yes."
He doesn't care for whatever is happening here, so he removes Illya's hands from his person and snatches up the bundle of shirt and undershirt before pushing himself off of the table. "Okay kids, anatomy lesson's over. Go find something else to do."
He takes his own advice and spends the rest of the evening studiously pretending that Gaby and Illya aren't having entire wordless conversations about him behind his back.
The next morning he catches Illya before he heads out on his rounds – exercise and surveillance in one; always a go-getter, their Russian – and brings up the real issue that yesterday had exposed. "We have to get her trained," he says quietly. "She's okay with a gun and she doesn't hold back in a fight, but she needs to be able to defend herself at close range."
"Yes," Illya agrees simply. "I am also thinking about this. The two of us, we can do some, but we are not..." He gestures to himself and Solo, then holds his hand out lower, approximating Gaby's height. Solo grimaces.
"Yeah. I know some of the theory, but not the practice. You probably know more."
"Not much," Illya admits. "I train with some smaller agents, but all men, and balance, gravity, force, they are all different."
"Well, you definitely have more formal training than I do, so I nominate you as instructor until we can set something else up."
"Fine," Illya says shortly. "We will start after this mission – we should have time off, anyway. And you... You and Gaby, you're okay, yes? After Rome. You can trust her?"
Solo shrugs. "As much as any of us can trust anyone, I suppose. I didn't take it personally, if that's what you mean."
"In Istanbul, you were avoiding her."
Solo refrains from pointing out that he was trying to avoid both of them. His failure in that regard isn't something he needs to have rubbed in. "I'm used to working alone," he says instead. It's not untrue. "Back-to-back missions in each other's pockets was a bit much, that's all."
Illya's gaze is piercing, but he seems to be satisfied with what he finds. "Okay. We are a good team. We can be better." And with that, he heads out, locking the door behind him even though Solo's right there.
Huh. Who'd've thought that Peril would be their optimist.
The rest of the Porto mission is tense but ultimately ends in their favor, and they emerge mostly unscathed. Illya took a couple of hits, and Gaby had to shoot to kill. He's stiff, she's distant in a way Solo recognizes only too well, and Solo himself is starting to grow familiar with the particular adrenaline spike that comes in the last hours of danger, when he's keenly aware of how vulnerable they are to every horrible fate he's already seen and some more he still has to imagine.
That's the worst part, honestly. Knowing how close they are to the end and knowing too what kind of gauntlet they have to run to get there. It's the kind of tension that leaves him sore, after, even aside from the effects of adrenaline. Sore and scraped out and exhausted, and he sleeps late the next morning and stays in bed even longer, wondering if it wouldn't be better to quit while he's ahead. They've done good work for Waverly, so the CIA shouldn't have anything to complain about with regard to his performance, and while he doesn't particularly want to go back to Sanders, if it means that Gaby and Illya have a fighting chance then maybe it's a sacrifice he'd be willing to make.
But still there's the question of how to even go about bringing it up, and what would happen if he did.
He knows the CIA has the records, has his list. Sanders keeps it in his little file of leverages to use against him, and he knows that it wouldn't be hard to spin some of those names into conspiracy charges, if not outright murder. Of course the easiest thing would still be to just kill him – why bother with a trial when some piano wire or cyanide would do the trick? If Sanders decides he doesn't want Napoleon Solo anymore, Napoleon Solo will vanish just as unremarked-upon as he emerged. So that's not what the list is for. No, he'd figured it out somewhere during the second year, before they'd admitted the futility in giving him partners and he was still reeling from the sheer amount of death. If Sanders decides he doesn't want Napoleon Solo anymore, Napoleon Solo will die, but if Sanders decides he wants to keep Napoleon Solo, past the end of his federal sentence, he'll spend the rest of his life in servitude for a laundry list of only lightly fabricated crimes.
He doesn't hold out much hope that he'll ever be free, but that's an old conviction by now, almost as old as the holes punched through his flank. Almost as old, and just as well ignored.
Some things aren't worth thinking about.
Then the smell of burning food gets him up and out of bed with alacrity, and even if Gaby doesn't look very contrite as he stands before her in the clothes he hadn't bothered to take off the night before and salvages her breakfast, her thanks are quiet and genuine.
Waverly agrees to their request for some R , in such a good mood from their triple successes that he doesn't protest when Solo counters his suggestion of Toledo with a demand for Barcelona, instead. He sets them up in a series of flats in Sant Martí, but Solo barely sees the inside of his before heading back out to lose himself in the towering splendor of La Sagrada Familia. Gaby and Illya have their hand-to-hand lessons to attend to, after all – they won't miss him, and frankly he won't miss them.
He circles the exterior in languorous loops, as close as the fencing and scaffolding will allow, spending hours upon hours feeling out the texture of the concrete, trying to appreciate the play of light through the colored glass from every angle, making space in his mind to hold the massive density of the structure and the fine airiness of the details in balance. The wash of words and noise and movement all around, as human bodies scramble like ants across the surface, only adds to the sense of existing in two eras at once, watching this Gothic cathedral be brought to life in the modern age.
Then, once the light fades and the workers depart, he slips through the gates and fences and lets himself inside. It's a vastly different thing to see it in the sunlight than to feel it in the dark, to stand in the middle of it in the stillness of the night air, not another soul around to intrude upon his communion.
This is who Napoleon Solo was meant to be. A thief, a voyeur, running his hands over history and basking in the closeness forbidden to others. Not from the start, not from the age of sixteen with too many plans and too little understanding, but this is who he had discovered along the way and fallen in love with. This is who he would be with his freedom.
Eventually his neck starts to ache from craning up, so he lies down on the dusty floor with his hands behind his head to continue his contemplation of the overlapping angles of the vaulted ceiling, edges long since defined as his eyes have adjusted.
He's surprised by the sudden ringing of steps in the silence, and even more surprised to find that he recognizes their cadence. Gaby walks unhurriedly across the sanctuary, unbothered by the noise of her shoes, and comes to a stop standing over him. "I've been here for an hour," she tells him.
"Good for you," he replies. "Enjoying yourself?"
"You didn't notice me come in."
"You're quiet when you don't stomp around."
"Illya wants to know if you've eaten or slept since we got here."
"Illya can mind his own business."
"He's not very good at that."
Solo huffs a laugh. "He's not, is he? Good thing you're so much better."
"I gave you an hour," she reminds him. "Plus the sixteen you've already had. I'm bored."
That gets his attention off the ceiling, and he stares at her incredulously. "You're in Barcelona, how can you be bored?"
"I don't speak Spanish, and all Illya wants to do is stay inside and teach me to fight."
"So you want me to be your personal tour guide?"
She pokes him with the toe of her boot, not quite hard enough to be a kick but still enough to get a disgruntled, "hey," out of him. "Do you really prefer a building's company to ours?"
It's a casual question, meant to sound ridiculous and perhaps a little accusatory. It doesn't quite manage, so he catches the whiff of real betrayal buried under honest inquiry.
"It's Gaudí," he says a little helplessly, not sure how else to explain. It's Gaudí. Isn't that enough? "It's not just a building, it's— It's monumental." He gestures loosely to the vast space of the sanctuary, the huge columns supporting the weight of the ceiling and the mud-daubed spires above it. Can't she see it? "The architectural wonder of two centuries, a complete re-imagining of Gothic construction, the blending of organic and inorganic form, the culmination of a lifetime of study and work— I've wanted to see it my whole life," he admits without thinking, and then has to smother a scowl.
It's far too honest, far too revelatory, and comes dangerously close to acknowledging who he was before. The corpse doesn't get to want things, and he has no duty to oblige it, so it's a good thing that Napoleon Solo has also been waiting for a chance to see this.
"And I've wanted to see everything but East Berlin," she retorts. Fair point, and better than any follow-up questions she could have posed. "Take me out tomorrow. I'm going to go insane if I stay indoors another day."
"You can go out by yourself, you know. Nothing's stopping you."
She not-kicks him again. "Take me out," she demands. "I want company, and you're my partner."
"That doesn't mean we have to live together," he snaps, then regrets it. He sighs and sits up, scoots away from the reach of her foot. "Sorry. Just, you don't have to be stuck with us, okay? This is a vacation, you can do what you want, when you want to. You're free," he adds, only realizing the weight of what he's saying as he says it.
Right. She doesn't have a lot of experience with that.
He holds back another sigh, and tries to tread lightly. "If you want my company, you can have it," he tells her. "But you don't need my company to go do...whatever it is you want to do. I'm not—" In charge of you? Definitely not. Responsible for you? Unfortunately, in a way, but he's not about to say it. Your chaperone? Too many connotations he'd like to avoid, even in denying it. "We're not your tickets to the world," he decides. "Me and Illya. You don't need us to let you live in it."
"I know that," she says sharply. "But it's—big." The world? Yeah, it is. "And I don't want to do it alone."
Christ, does she even know how brave she is for saying that? Or does he just think she's brave, for saying what he's never dared to?
"It's a big city," he agrees, careful to respond only to the most surface-level interpretation of her words. "There's lots to do and see. It can be hard to know where to start, if you haven't traveled much before."
"Yeah," she says, sounding relieved. "So we'll go? Tomorrow?"
"Sure. Start with breakfast?" he offers, and she smiles, big and sunny even in the dark.
"Deal."
She turns and walks away, humming to herself, a bit of dance in her steps, and he watches her go. He'd meant to stay a little longer, drink in some more of the beauty, but suddenly his solitude feels more like loneliness. He gives her a head start, then follows her back to their building, carefully unseen in the shadows behind her.
They have a week in Barcelona, and just as in Istanbul, Solo finds it hard to get much time away from his partners. It's enjoyable, though, to play the tourist – sampling cafes and restaurants, wandering through parks and historic districts, catching glimpses of lives lived very differently than his own, yet also still fundamentally the same – and he enjoys introducing Gaby to the game. He can't tell how much Illya has traveled, but he suspects he's mostly operated within and along the edges of the Soviet Union. Illya needs less introduction to the art of leisure, if only because he has no interest in pursuing it in earnest and knows how to fake it well enough to pass.
He's finally abandoned his darker clothing in the face of the unrelenting Mediterranean summer heat, and the figure he cuts in his amber sunglasses and light-colored shirts is something in-between. Not a tourist, not a local, but someone who'd easily be mistaken for one by the other. Not entirely at ease, but not obviously out of place. He's starting to relax a bit around them, too, starting to trust them with himself out of the field as well as in it. Solo learns that he's picky about seafood (he distrusts mollusks on principle but has a weakness for crab claws), that he appreciates guitar music, and that he freckles in the sun.
They have a week in Barcelona, and Solo thinks about telling Waverly that it'd be best for everyone if he went quietly back the CIA, but he doesn't. Instead he watches his partners, and doesn't watch them watch him, and tells himself that he can stay with them a little longer.
After Barcelona is Madrid, and Madrid, well.
Madrid starts fine. They're rested, they're confident, they're building trust with one another.
In other words, Solo forgets to be worried. He doesn't quite forget about his list, because he never can, but he does go a few days without actively imagining what it will be like to add Illya's or Gaby's name to it.
Then Illya is taken, kidnapped out from under their noses, and Solo remembers who and what he is. There's no hesitation, this time, about going back for Illya. No argument with himself about whether it's worth the risk. It is.
Whatever else he's made himself, whatever else he's become, Napoleon Solo is meant to be alone. That's how he's safest, and that's how those around him are safest. He makes one plan with Gaby, convinces her to get some sleep, and then contacts Waverly with his own. It's not a request for permission, just an update about the situation so that resources can be distributed appropriately. If he fails, Gaby will still be able to complete the mission on her own. If he fails, she won't be dragged down in his wake.
He doesn't fail.
Gaby's pissed at him, slugs him in the stomach hard enough to make him glad he hadn't eaten anything in a day and a half and leaves him doubled over and wheezing while she goes to examine Illya for herself. Illya's not too badly hurt, nothing that won't heal up in a few weeks, but those few weeks are going to feel like forever. It'll be a good opportunity for Gaby to get some formal training, though. Waverly will spirit them off to somewhere secure for the duration of Illya's recovery, and in the meantime Gaby can continue her peculiar education under their handler's tutelage.
For his part, Solo goes back to his hotel room, packs up his belongings, and goes to sleep fully dressed. He expects to be woken up by Waverly, if he's feeling polite, or a CIA recovery team if he's not, but instead it's Gaby's pointy elbows forcing him to one edge of the bed in the middle of the night so she can fit in beside him.
"They kicked me out of the hospital," she tells him – or rather, tells the wall – once she's settled in and yanked the blankets around herself.
"Okay," he says, still half asleep.
"I'm not sorry I hit you."
"Okay," he says again. It was a good hit. She'd only been working with Illya a week.
"I would have helped you, you know. You didn't have to do it alone."
"It's safest alone," he mumbles, now three quarters asleep. If she replies to that, he doesn't hear it.
He wakes up first in the morning and finds Gaby star-fished out across the middle of the mattress, no hesitation in taking space from him, no self-constrained uncertainty, no tensely radiated distrust. He's still sore from the hit, and he doesn't imagine she's forgiven him overnight, but she's deeply asleep in his bed, flagrantly at ease in his company. He can't explain it this time, and doesn't try. He just gets up and starts making breakfast.
Waverly doesn't send him back to the CIA, which is rather forgiving of him, if not entirely desirable. He doesn't let him work any missions while Illya is benched, though, which is much less charitable.
"I understand you're an extremely effective operative," Waverly had told him, "but frankly I can't afford to reward this sort of behavior. I'm grateful you managed to extract Kuryakin in one piece, don't get me wrong, but my gratitude for your efforts to keep the team together would be rather pointless if I let you go breaking it up again, wouldn't it?"
"I'm not asking to be reassigned," Solo had said. "I just assumed you'd have a better use for me while Illya's recovering and Gaby's training. It doesn't even have to be fieldwork." He can't say he'd ever grown fond of working off of paper trails or archived files, but he'd made a certain sort of peace with it in the many hundreds of hours he'd spent shut in some windowless room or other churning through them. That's what downtime meant to Sanders, and so he'd learned to find it restful.
Waverly just smiled his extremely British smile, the one which gave nothing away. "Not this time, Mr. Solo. Consider yourself grounded."
He should have just told him. Offered it up as his move of last resort. But he'd known in that moment that Waverly would never believe him, would refuse to consider the information as anything other than a ploy – and not a very good one, at that.
Telling Waverly the truth won't work. So he'll have to find another way to leave before he kills them both.