Chapter Text
On a typical Saturday morning, Napoleon lets himself indulge a little. He cracks an eye open usually around eight, drifts in and out of sleep for the next hour, sometimes two if it’s been a shitstorm of a week, and then gets up to make a pot of tea to give his body a break after five days of office coffee that tastes like detritus left over from the Cold War.
On this particular Saturday morning, he’s awake and alert at 7:15, not by choice, but by being bodily flung off his bed.
His first thought is, I’m going to die in boxer briefs, wrapped in my bed sheets like a goddamn mummy.
Then his attacker says in a suspiciously familiar Russian accent, “Get dressed, we have work to do.”
For an undignified second, Napoleon struggles to sit up. His partner is standing by the foot of his bed, arms crossed, not one hair out of place, frowning like Napoleon’s the one being terribly unprofessional and breaking into coworkers’ apartments at the crack of dawn.
“Did you pick my lock?” Napoleon manages to say, albeit a little weakly because, if truth be told, he’d be perfectly amenable to having Illya in his bedroom under slightly different circumstances – all the authority, the aggression, the rough edges, and none of the clothes.
“In under three seconds,” Illya says flatly. “I thought you enjoyed taking calculated risks, now I know you are just stupid.”
“Your concern is touching, Peril,” Napoleon says, pulling himself to his feet. “Now unless this work involves imminent death or mass destruction, I’m gonna have to – ”
Illya cuts him off, looking grim. “It involves both.”
*
Illya brings him up to speed before they brief Gaby, who brings in Waverly. Then they spend the next seven hours coordinating a raid with DHS to flush out a Syrian sleeper cell with Illya assigned to run point. Illya, who operates with the kind of focus and competency that makes no one wonder why the FBI borrowed one of Interpol’s best and brightest, and then never gave him back.
Illya, who gets a message on his cell and abruptly tells them, “I have to take care of a personal matter,” before grabbing his jacket and turning to leave, knowing that even if they could fire him, they wouldn’t.
Napoleon stares stupidly for a second before stopping him at the door, thinking about lifting Illya’s cell from his pocket – one in a long list of tricks he learned on the wrong side of the tracks before he fell onto the right one – then crossing his arms instead.
“You’re joking, right? You have to leave now? This is your operation.”
Illya looks at him, the strength of his convictions like a goddamn steel wall, always.
“If I am not back in time, then it’s yours.”
Then after a beat, he adds, quietly, “I’m sorry,” as if he doesn’t give a damn about the Bureau but it’s Napoleon he’d rather not disappoint if he had the choice. And for a second Napoleon panics, feels a feverish urgency clawing at his throat that reminds him of his first year with the Bureau and the hour he spent talking a guy down from a ledge of the Empire State Building, feeling the thin unraveling line between life and death under his own feet.
But before he can say anything, Illya’s already out the door.
*
They clean the cell out on Sunday before dawn with Napoleon running point and cross two names off the FBI’s Most Wanted list. By the time the news breaks Monday morning, Napoleon’s left Illya five voicemails and a dozen texts.
At noon, he’s leaning against the door to Gaby’s office, glancing at Illya’s desk – immaculate, sparse, devoid of personal touches save for the mug Napoleon gave him for Christmas that claims This Is Probably Vodka.
“You’d tell me if Kuryakin’s in trouble,” he says lightly.
Gaby looks up from her paperwork, blinking, then studies him with something that feels distinctly like pity.
“If it involves you, yes. Otherwise, no,” she says frankly, reminding him, purposely or not, of his place in the pecking order, and it leaves a bitter taste in his mouth.
“Because if he were,” Napoleon pushes, “I know he’d be too damn proud to ask for help.”
Gaby’s mouth twitches into a small smile, the kind she used to fall into freely when they were side-by-side in the field, before she traded in her gun for a corner office with an obscenely generous view of the Manhattan skyline. That the pang of nostalgia still leaves Napoleon a little wrong-footed after 18 months is something he wouldn’t admit on pain of death.
“If I didn’t know better, Solo, I’d think you were going soft.”
*
By the time Napoleon leaves the office at a quarter after six, he’s mapped out upwards of a dozen scenarios to explain Illya’s absence – three involving Interpol’s reputation for having a stick up its ass, two involving torture, one involving male strippers, and half where Illya never comes back.
He takes a long hot shower when he gets home, to try to loosen up the anxiety that’s wound its way up his spine, then pads into the kitchen to scrounge for food in sweats and his CIA t-shirt that no one else thinks is hilarious.
He’s staring at the inside of his fridge, its sad contents suggestive of both his long hours at the office and his relationship status, when the doorbell rings. He doesn’t look through the peephole first, another one of those risks he takes that Illya would label a character flaw, and swings the door open.
For a minute, he just stares.
It’s Illya. Illya is standing on the steps of Napoleon’s brownstone, carrying what looks like Napoleon’s favorite pastrami sandwiches, hair a little windswept, cheeks beautifully flushed from the chill, eyes that familiar, lethal shade of blue. Only – he’s wearing slim fit jeans, a blazer with brass buttons, a skinny tie.
Then he says, “You look like you could use some company,” flirtatious, cocky as hell, with a flawless American accent to boot.
To which Napoleon responds with, “Who the fuck are you and why are you wearing Illya Kuryakin’s face?”