Chapter Text
Arrival
He stays silent.
The prison bars clang shut behind him. The rough cuffs of the prison uniform chafe against his wrists. Chains links tap deceptively lightly between his hands and between his feet – no chances for the professional thief and escape artist. Spies are apparently considered a threat to national security. Even those that worked for the C.I.A.
He really should have known.
The C.I.A. didn't loan him to U.N.C.L.E.; they just suspended his sentence. How ...nice of them to mention that only after the fact. After he stepped back onto American ground. Land of liberty. What a joke.
Five years since he'd been “loaned” to U.N.C.L.E, and he'd just been planning to take a short victory holiday – walk down the street a free man, on soil where he'd been leashed and collared for fifteen years. A short holiday, visit the old landmarks, take some time to get a grip on how everything and nothing has changed all at once before heading back to the team that had caused so many paradigm shifts for him that he can't help but smile. Paradigm shifts like how the thought of sticking it to his handlers – jailers – has nothing on the thought of returning to U.N.C.L.E. and meeting them wherever for their next death-defying, saving-the-world, I've-always-got-your-back mission; like realizing that freedom is worth much more because now they'll know this is his choice, and he's not letting them go until someone pries them from his cold dead fingers.
But he doesn't get a chance to grab onto them and hold. Doesn't even get a chance to explain that he's desperately not leaving behind everything they are with no regrets. Sanders and his agents pick him up as soon as he steps off the plane in New York. It takes all of one minute for him to understand what is happening, and seconds to inform Sanders of exactly what he thinks of the situation.
Turns out they're not really all that surprised. It takes a matter of hours for them to book him, run him through the system. They must have done the paperwork – jumped the hoops – in advance.
It takes less than a week before he's on his way to whatever complex they've deemed secure enough to hold the professional break-and-enter artist with a decade of federal intelligence and secrets floating around in his head.
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He can't say he's terribly surprised to be led past the general population cells. He wouldn't last a week, hedonist – spy, soldier, “C.I.A.'s finest” – that he is, and dead men are very hard to negotiate with – even the K.G.B.'s best loses when the odds are stacked against him, just ask little miss M.I. 6. But God help him, he is not going back to work for Sanders. Not even if it means the last five years of his sentence – and oh how that galls. The con conned. How very trite and cliché. Die slowly and ignobly, Sanders. – will be in this hole.
Working for the C.I.A. – being their best – would mean crossing paths with the others. The finest of other organizations. Like M.I. 6 and the K.G.B. (or, god forbid, U.N.C.L.E.) – Teller. Kuryakin. Waverly. No. – It wasn't even a difficult choice. Easy really.
Working for a competing agency would guarantee a repeat of his original orders, so long ago in Berlin, and Rome. He won't get back into the field except – no. Stop thinking that. No point dwelling on the impossible. Live in the here and now.
He blinks, focusing on what's around him as the prison guard and the C.I.A. suit walk away because it's the first time in days they've left him alone.
Concrete floor, three concrete walls. Bars behind and above him. Roughly four steps long, two and a half wide – nine feet by six.
How lovely. His own private room, amenities included. Solitary.
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Departure
They leave him there to “consider his options”, as if they don't know this is a forgone conclusion. And maybe Sanders hasn't figured it out, but he isn't going back into the field except with them at his back. He trusts them after all they've been through, but he certainly isn't – can't, and with good reason – going to trust whoever the C.I.A. line up to “keep an eye on him” – shoot him in the back.
Sanders can take his offers and shove them where the sun don't shine. Your Kansas is showing, soldier.
But three meters by two meters – too much time across the pond, Solo – is not a lot of space, and being confined will kill him just as surely as a bullet.
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He doesn't count the days. Not with a calendar, not by the meals, not by the rotation of lights, and definitely not by talking to the guards. The faster he can lose track of time, the faster it will stop being something that Sanders can try to leverage him with.
There is a lot of noise in Solitary. People screaming, people sobbing, people – some poor sod from gen pop – trying to fight their way out of the grip of guards dragging them into cells for punishment. It all reeks of a level of pathetic that he refuses to descend to.
He doesn't count the number of altercations he hears. He doesn't count the number of fights between the visits. He doesn't count the number of visits. The visits where the guards politely escort him out of his personal box, hose him down and hand him new prison blues before sitting him in an uncomfortable straight-backed chair across from Sanders or whoever else is representing the C.I.A. today. He doesn't count how many questions he doesn't answer, how many offers he doesn't respond to, even when they become threats.
He does count the number of guards that escort him, and he can't stop the feeling of satisfaction as the number decreases (four, then three, now the minimum two) and how those guards are at attention around the C.I.A. but at ease – or at least easier – as soon as it's just him and them and they're in charge in their own territory once again. He doesn't know how long he's been here, but he's gaining a reputation as one of the calmest denizens of Solitary. Calm means easy to handle; means they're getting comfortable and even if he doesn't plan to take advantage of it – yet – doesn't mean it's not a useful image to cultivate. Cultivating a specific image is never disadvantageous. It's what he does. It's easier to get what he wants – needs – if he controls what others know about him.
He'd always known he was rather egocentric. Freedom or death and all that nonsense. He really had made a perfect picture of the hedonistic capitalist American that the Soviets were so much against. And he'd thought that it made him better, or at least his something better – keep what you earn or some such thought.
He shouldn't be surprised that associating with two people from behind the Iron Curtain had taught him that there were lines to be drawn. A bit ironic that those two people, who would gladly step in front of bullets for ideals and each other, would teach him to value himself and not just what the world could give him. That his services were not actually something he had to whore out to survive in style. That he could actually thrive while holding on to some semblance of self-respect – that there were places that took only what you could and would give, and that it could be a goddamn honour to give freely. To step in front of a bullet for someone who would do the same, and berate you just the same as you berate them every time they do it for you.
The war had made him more of a cynic than he'd understood until he worked side-by-side with a man and a woman who had weathered conditions just as harsh and come out much better people than he had.
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He's not counting the days, so he doesn't know how long it is before he hears a scuffle on the other end of the hall that doesn't match the usual noise.
He huffs a laugh because either he's going mad or something is happening that he hadn't dared hope for. Because no one walks silently, so he hears the slight scuffle-step of felted shoes made to be as quiet as possible on linoleum floors designed to echo. He hears the soft impacts of flesh-on-unsuspecting-flesh, and holds his breath. He waits, and does not let loose the laugh that is building in his lungs.
He waits until a familiar shadow turns the corner, sauntering casually, and stops in front of his cell, key held in a hand attached to a tall, tall frame, below a wryly smiling – concerned – face.
“Cowboy, don't keep Chop Shop waiting.”
Illya. Gaby.
The bars clang as they slide open.
Freedom.
He laughs.