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Gravel slips under the wheels of his stolen motorcycle, and Gaby’s face, a glowing circle of fear, slips from his sight as the massive car slams into his side and sends him careening down the edge of the hill. He thinks he hears Gaby scream his name, but it is equally likely that he imagines it, after all, as he’s plummeting end over end with twisted metal searing his flesh and pounding into him; it is unlikely that Gaby has even noticed his fall.
Solo is there. There is at least the remote chance that the American won’t botch everything, that Gaby will be alright, that he won’t have failed her.
This is his last thought as he spins down the hill. He is conscious for several more minutes, but his mind is occupied with a haze of disjointed sensations, pain, brilliant shocks of light, and then nothing.
He wakes trapped under his wrecked bike. The ripped-off exhaust has seared into his calf, and he can smell burning flesh, and it is that smell, not the rain on his face or the sound of Gaby’s harsh, frantic cries, that brings him into full awareness.
His body is frozen as rain falls across his face, and he is no more able to blink to clear his vision than he is able to push himself out from under the wrecked bike and go to Gaby. Gaby, who is still shouting. His stomach lurches at the sound, and he is able, with an enormous effort, able to shift his blurry eyes to see Solo, on his knees, and Alexander, the bastard, striking him across the temple with a tire iron.
Napoleon goes down like a dead man, and Gaby is left exposed, unprotected, vulnerable in the wet grass. And then she leaps at Alexander; he throws her to the ground, and Illya sees red.
The motorcycle’s corpse is heavy on him, crushing him, and he scrabbles at it ineffectually. His hands burn as he tries to lift away the smoldering piece seared into his leg, and he only avoids crying out and giving away his position by willpower alone, willpower and the thought that Solo and Gaby are both depending on him, if they were still alive.
He heaves, vomits into the bush, and then, with the motorcycle still in his arms and outstretched like a lance, he hurls it at Alexander and watches with satisfaction as it brings him to the ground. But only for a second, and then the bastard is scrambling for his gun, and Illya’s own hand finds his the hilt of his knife.
The exchange is short, brutal, and ends as he knew it would: Alexander falls to the ground, and Illya watches him die in a haze of rain. It’s quick, more than he deserves. Blood mixes with rain, mixes with the mud, until he isn’t sure where one ends and another begins. He realizes, too late to do anything about it, that this is because his vision is shifting to gray.
The knife falls from his hands and, point first, into the soft, wet ground. He follows it. As his numb hands reach and scramble for purchase against the hillside, he hears Solo’s voice in his ear, and Solo’s hand on his face, and he is surprised.
*
Napoleon’s ears ring, and he’s dizzy to the point of questioning his vision when he sees Kuryakin rise from the hillside and take Alexander out, first with his crushed motorcycle, and then with alarming quickness of knife. It’s over in seconds, and his first instinct is to get his feet under him to look after Gaby.
She’s rousing already, blinking away the rain, fighting him on instinct. She stares beyond him, still squinting through the water dripping down her face. He’s reaching to the back of her scalp, feeling for a head injury, when he hears the thud of a second body hitting the ground.
“Illya!” Gaby calls out. Her voice is hoarse and pained, but with his help, they both stagger to their feet, and then stumble towards him.
Kuryakin is face down in the mud, and for a half second (a long half second, because Napoleon is surprised to learn just how much he’s come to enjoy Peril’s presence, unrelated to his usefulness or skill in the field) he thinks the man is as dead as Alexander. Gaby shoves Napoleon into action, and the two of them roll Kuryakin onto his back, wiping mud from his cheeks and forehead as they do. He’s alive, but shocky and pale.
Gaby’s hands are shaking as she runs down the length of his body, and she starts to cry as she sees the mangled mess of bubbled flesh that is Kuryakin’s lower right leg. It’s half raw. Napoleon has seen wounds like that kill a man, slowly, over the course of months of infection. “Water,” he says. “Water canteens from the truck.”
Gaby shoots up, unsteadily and picks her way over the wreckage. While she is gone, Napoleon sources the remainder of the damage, keeping his ears primed for rescue he is not at all sure will come. The skys are clear but for the rain; under Napoleon’s hands, Illya stares up at them, in some state of semi-consciousness.
“Off with the fairies?” he asks, and waves a hand in front of Illya’s nose.
To his surprise, there is a reaction. Illya rolls his head, looks at Solo, sucks in two horrible, wheezing breaths that absorb all of Napoleon’s attention, and then faints completely, going limp in Napoleon's arms. He looks down to see that Gaby has dumped two canteens of water across his leg, washing away the worst of the dirt and mud and sticks, and blood.
“He’s going to die, isn’t he.”
“Peril? No. He’s too tough for that.” Napoleon holds him close in an attempt to share warmth he doesn’t himself have to spare, a futile hope of staving off shock. He is half sure he's lying to her. All men die. All women, too. And dying in pursuit of something noble, like saving Gaby, might be exactly the sort of thing a man like Illya might do all too well.
They hear the choppers a few minutes later. Two of them, coming down from on high, bearing Waverly’s hand reaching to pull them in. There is a swarm of movement; medics in black combat boots pour out of the nearer of the two helicopters and pull Gaby away. When they try to pull him away too, one of their hands hits the burn on his wrist, the one where Rudi, the bastard, attached the electric node to, making him see white, then red, and then the crystal clear image of the medic on his back, his white uniform soaked with rain and mud, and his nose bleeding, prostrate next to Illya.
“Everything is going to be fine, Mr. Solo,” Waverly says in his ear, and then Gaby’s hand is on his wrist, somehow comforting despite the pain.
Napoleon is hoisted to his feet by two large men, and he doesn’t fight them because Gaby’s face, pale and beautiful, hovers in his vision. He lets them take him to one of the helicopters, lets Gaby buckle him into a seat, and tries to watch the medics still on the ground work on Illya.
From this distance, he can’t tell if Illya is breathing.
Not for the first time in his life, Napoleon regrets being as good a soldier as he is. The helicopter takes off, banks in a wide turn turn, and the view fades into the hillside. Illya fades into the hillside, and Napoleon’s thoughts necessarily fade to the mission at hand.
*
The helicopter takes them out to sea, and on back of a ship they watch the boat belonging to Victoria explode in pillar of light and smoke: her father’s grand finale.
When it’s gone, when the wreckage of it floats past their ship in shattered pieces, she feels the prickling, unstoppable sensation of grief welling up from her chest, threatening to bubble up and out. She is a strong woman. She has been many things in her life; survivor is all of them. She refuses to cry in front of Waverly, though, and pushes back, out, past, through the crowd of men in the cabin and onto the wind-whipped air of the middle deck of the aircraft carrier. There, with the plume of smoke to focus her attention on, she lets out her tears and weeps silently.
“Chop shop girl,” she hears Napoleon say behind her. He followed her out. She thinks that she should be bothered by this, but he hasn’t stopped following her since East Berlin, and maybe she doesn’t mind.
“Don’t call me that,” she hisses. “He should be here,” she says, and she hates that her voice is muggy with unshed tears. She turns the ring around on her finger and presses her hand into a fist until it hurts.
Surprisingly, Napoleon doesn’t comfort her, or touch her, or offer empty platitudes like, ‘it will be okay.’ Instead he comes to stand next to her by the rail and stares to the west where they both know land to be. Where Illya is. Gaby knows very well that the second helicopter didn’t take off after them; she knows also, that Illya was hurt quite badly. She closes her eyes when she thinks of that horrible burn on his leg, the even more horrible wheezing sound he made when he breathed; broken ribs, a punctured lung, internal bleeding.
And the second helicopter didn’t follow them. “He died on that hill, didn’t he.”
“I don’t know.”
“But you think so, too.”
Napoleon sucks in a shuddering breath. His hands are shaking, and it reminds Gaby of Illya.
“I think... soldiers die.”
She slaps him. “You think I don’t know that? You think I don’t think that?”
He holds a hand to his cheek but doesn’t react beyond that. Illya would have. Illya would have bit his lips, although he never would have hit her back.
They stand there awhile, watching lumps of wood float past from the blast, until Waverly walks behind them and clears his throat. She doesn’t wipe her eyes or acknowledge her tears, and neither does he.
“I suppose you are eager to see Mr. Kuryakin. I have no doubt he is just as eager to see you and be updated on your success deallig with the bomb.”
Gaby’s heart skips a beat.
“He’s--”
“Quite alive,” Waverly says. Gaby leaps out and hugs him, which catches all of them off guard, but she can’t help herself. Her father is dead, her uncle is dead, and Illya is not. “And exceptionally testy, so I think your presence, both of your presences, would be quite welcome before he does irreparable harm to the clinic he’s at.”
The flight to mainland is painfully long, and she feels Napoleon tense beside her the whole way, and tense still as they are shepherded into the Italian hospital, through corridor after corridor that feel like a series of traps, until, finally, they see Illya on a bed, eyes closed and dwarfing the cot completely.
“Illya?” Gaby approaches quietly, unsure, and knows without looking that Napoleon is keeping a discreet distance, trying to give them an unnecessary sense of privacy while keeping a watch on the door. Waverly has secured Illya his own room, and there is space for all of them, even with the various bulky medical machinery crowding around the bed.
His eyes flutter open and he tries to sit up. She rushes to hold him back, and he melts down onto the bed under her gentle pressure. “Gaby?”
“We did it,” she says. He’s still very pale, his right leg swathed in white bandages from his knee to his bare toes below.
“Solo?” he croaks, head twisting to see beyond her, looking for Napoleon and stopping when he sees the American’s shadow.
“Unlike you, Peril, I managed to escape without massive blood loss.”
Illya’s face breaks out into a wide, drugged smile. “You’re both here,” he says.
Finally, Napoleon approaches the bed, and Gaby slips her hand into his. He looks down at her, surprised, and she pulls him until he’s as close to both her, the bed, and Illya as he can be without falling over.
“We’re all here,” she says, kissing Illya on the forehead. “And we have quite the story to tell you.”
He smiles back up at them, sleepily. “That is nice. You are nice, too.”
Napoleon laughs, places his own free hand on Illya’s other shoulder, and Gaby breathes a long, deep breath. There is a chance, a small one, that everything is going to be okay.