Fic: The space between

[terresdebrume]

Fandom: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (Movie)
Series: Sequel to Rakuen
Rating: General audiences
Wordcount: 2 191 words
Pairing(s): Napollya
Character(s): Napoleon Solo, Illya Kuryakin.
Genre: Sometimes things are better when they’re not what they’re supposed to be.
Trigger warning(s): None that I’m aware of.
Summary: Solo can’t possibly understand what it’s like for a werewolf to be stuck in one form for years and years, but he suggested a wolf holiday anyway. Somehow, what Illya gets from it goes beyond what he expected.
Note(s): Here, have an unexpected sequel (to a fic I completely forgot to crosspost here from AO3) that goes in an unexpected direction. Honestly, I wrote all of it in two days between 9pm and 2am: I have no idea anymore.
 

 

The wolf emerges, floating from a dream into the soft warmth of wakefulness. Familiar smells blanket him, shooing the rest of the world away even as something lumbers on hard wood somewhere in the distance. The ground is soft under it, something not-quite-sheep anymore weighing pleasantly on its shoulder. The wolf finds something not-quite-plant under its snout, pulls it closer with its teeth, and sinks into the thing’s faint smell of oily product with a contented sigh.

 

Darkness comes to it so softly he doesn’t remember greeting it at all.

 

***

 

It opens its eyes to the rich brown of fallen trees, ground as soft beneath it as it ever was. The smell of pine wood and winter-cold clinging to spring fills its nostrils, and he breathes in when he realizes something is rubbing against his stomach, steady and firm over the curve of his rib cage. The once-sheep-fur thing is gone, but the air glows warm with firelight, and when the wolf looks away away from the wood overhead—just shy of seeing his own body—the pink mountain on two legs rubs at his lips with its strange pink paw.

It is cold with snow, still, and it shies away when he tries to lick it in greetings, but the pink mountain rumbles, and pushes Illya back until it can resume the belly rub. Illya knows better than to complain, by now, the wolf too thoroughly addicted by the easy closeness of human hands to go back to its solitude without a fight.

Besides, after a year, even the mountain grew used to it enough to stop teasing.

 

They stay like this for a while, long enough for the light to go from mid-morning to early afternoon, Illya luxuriating in the easy physical affection until Cowboy asks:

 

“Water?”

 

It takes Illya some effort to manage a real nod, content as he is to remain in the hazy limbo between wolf and man now that he has someone who can be trusted with it again. He lets Cowboy prop him up for a drink, paws still too clumsy to maneuver a—a—thing for drinking, and yawns hard enough to make his jaw crack as he is lowered down on soft—on the mattress.

 

“Thank you,”” Illya says after some mental preparation.

“I like wolf you,” Cowboy says even as he takes the glass away again. “He’s polite.”

 

Illya grunts in protest and flops back onto the mattress, cheek landing just shy of Napoleon’s knee. He can feel the heat of him on his skin, smell the remnants of his usual cologne and last week’s Brylcreem through the unusual roughness of sturdy pants and a thick sweater over a flannel shirt. Outside, the pines are close enough to fill even human nostrils, and the lingering wolf still manages to pick up on the clean chill of Lake Superior, off to the East. Birds haven’t come back from their yearly migrations yet, and things that sleep through the winter won’t quite awaken until April, and the hush of it makes it feel like there is nothing in this world but Illya on a soft bed, with fire warming him up and Napoleon’s hand rubbing at his belly like he’s sporting fur and four legs and a tail.

 

It’s a wonderful thought, and Illya takes the time to savor it before he speaks.

 

“I’ve never asked—”

 

Illya’s sentence dissolves into another yawn, and Napoleon is far too consummate a pretender to allow his fingers to clench around the thick wool of Illya’s jumper, but his hand does come to a stop, just under Illya’s heart. Around them the air tenses, just enough to send a prickle of warning racing along Illya’s spine

He gives it a moment’s consideration—a heartbeat, if that—but he always did prefer tackling things head on, and his relationship with Napoleon, working or otherwise, has always been built on leaps of faith anyway.

 

“I never asked,” he starts again, voice breaking the quiet like a lone walker on freshly fallen snow, “how you knew what to do. When I came back. First time.”

 

Napoleon’s hand shudders, just the once and then it resumes its rubbing motion in a way that only feels stiff because Illya has been waking up to the gesture two times a weeks for the past six months and, at Napoleon’s insistence, every morning since they got to this modest but comfortable cabin in the northernmost parts of Minnesota.

 

“Well,” Napoleon says, practiced nonchalance too thin hide the tension in his words without the polished back up of high-quality suits and carefully arranged hair, “I do know a thing or two about dogs.”

 

Illya foregoes the habitual, playful swat at Napoleon’s shoulder in favor of a steady glare. It must appear lopsided, laid out as Illya is by Napoleon’s side, head level to the man’s stretched out knee…it does get Illya’s point across, though, and Napoleon’s features flicker into a self-deprecating smirk before he turns to look at the window to his left, away from Illya.

His hand doesn’t stop moving, though, and Illya sinks into the gesture the way he would lean into his father’s welcoming licks on his snout after a run; the way he’s rub his nose against his mother’s lips for hours on end as a child until she caved to the demands of human society and forbade him the gesture when he was not a wolf. His father left soon after that and, for the longest time, nothing of the wolf could be allowed to linger in Illya’s human life…then came Berlin and the smell of too many women mixing together over Brylcreem and sharp cologne. An amused rumble that so rarely allows itself to become a laugh. A pair of blue eyes, concerned but unafraid as its owner asked how Illya felt after turning back.

 

Illya squirms on the bed until his cheek touches Napoleon’s knee, eyes at precisely the right angle for the fading light to line Napoleon’s face with silver.

 

“You know dogs,” Illya prompts, unsurprised when Napoleon tries his very best to make his hum noncommittal.

 

It doesn’t quite meet the mark, but falls close enough to it to make Illya shiver with the sudden chill of it, the abrupt bone-cold of unexpected ghosts that makes up so many of his and Napoleon’s friendship. It isn’t the first time they have reared their heads at such a simple question: Illya has a graveyard in its chest but it knows its place. Napoleon’s ghost seem to hover all around, and take some sort of sadistic pleasure in catching at his heart at the most innocuous inquiries.

 

“We always had many of them,” Napoleon tells the window at last, “half a dozen, at any given time.”

 

An image bursts to life in Illya’s mind: Napoleon, shorter and much narrower in the shoulders, thrones on an elegant baroque couch, Darya Kuryakin’s favorite carpet absorbing the sound of six borzoi determined to grab a piece of their master’s attention. Napoleon, Illya must admit, has always seemed more like a cat person to him.

 

“You had good relationship with them?”

“They weren’t supposed to be pets.”

 

Napoleon shrugs, far too brittle for comfort and Illya has to restrain himself from pressing his cheek harder against the man’s knee, for fear of making him flee if he realizes just how much of him Illya has become able to see.

 

The conspicuous absence of the man’s suit is, after all, almost as much of a delight as the ‘wolf’ part of what Napoleon insisted on naming ‘their first annual wolf holiday’.

 

“They weren’t supposed to be pets,” Illya says, once silence has had time to settle between them, careful not to put emphasis on any given word, even though he knows Napoleon must hear it anyway.

 

“I was lonely,” Napoleon tells the window, fingers coming to a halt on Illya’s ribs again. Then, non-sequitur: “one of the bitches had a litter with a wolf.”

 

In his mind, the landscape outside of young Napoleon’s window changes from a generic city  to an equally generic forest, albeit one with quite a lot of pine trees. The borzois are gone, replaced with sturdy, thick-pawed mutts running in a large garden.

 

“There was a run,” Napoleon continues. “Not sure why it’d been cast aside, but it would have been a pity to lose that kind of protection for the house.”

 

“You think five half-wolves are not enough to scare burglars?”

 

Overhead, Napoleon blinks and look back at Illya, as if remembering he is was even here to being with.

 

“Burglars?”

“You were too poor to steal from?” Illya asks before he can think better of it.

 

Napoleon doesn’t gape, far too well trained for that, but even he hasn’t mustered enough control on his body to prevent the slow, crimson creep of a blush up his neck and onto his cheeks. He turns away again, ears flushed even redder, before he mutters:

 

“I think even amateur burglars had more sense than to come and look all the way here.”

 

Illya, while not as practiced as Napoleon in the art of deception, is also a trained spy and so he does not gape. He does, however look around the room again as the image of young Napoleon, in his mind, flops on the very bed they are using now, shirt pulled out of thick winter pants, and is joined by a creature that looks far too much like the photographs Illya’s mother used to take, sometimes, when he stayed out later than she did in later years.

A minute passes, maybe five, while Illya digests the revelation, warmth flooding through his vein like a bath drawn at the end of an exhausting winter day, prickling at every frozen extremity of him until he can do nothing but swallow, shift under Napoleon’s hand, and let his head rest on Napoleon’s knee.

 

The wolf has gone back to sleep by now, and the proximity turns Illya’s throat dry but Napoleon doesn’t seem to notice or, if he does, to mind.

 

“An outcast, hm?” Illya prompts, quieter than even he expected to be.

 

Relief expands in his chest when Napoleon huffs.

 

“I was the only one with the kind of time it takes to nurse a dog. So, I did.”

 

A pause, thin and brittle, and Illya is all but holding his breath by the time Napoleon speaks again, barely above a whisper:

 

“The others wouldn’t teach him how to be a dog. So I watched. I taught him. Eventually, he integrated.”

 

There is a cold spot on Illya’s rib cage, Napoleon’s jaw tightening even as Illya sits up until his right shoulder bump into Napoleon’s. They sit close enough together for Illya to feel even the slightest shift in Napoleon’s posture, the care he puts into not stiffening, not breathing too fast, not sighing. He does close his eyes, but even then, only with reluctance.

Illya watches him; thinks of the lunches he shares with agents who aren’t Napoleon or Gaby now, in U.N.C.L.E.’s canteen. None of them are connections he made through his American friend, but none of whom would have approached him if not for the tangible proof that once could tease Illya Kuryakin and live to tell the tale.

 

“He didn’t forget you.”

 

It isn’t a question, but Napoleon answers it anyway, head turning so he can look straight ahead of himself. Illya watches the glow of the firelight turn the bridge of his nose to gold and is not, in the end, surprised by how beautiful he finds it—ridiculous butt shape and all.

 

“No,” Napoleon says. “He got shot because of me, too.”

 

He breathes in when Illya’s fingers close around his wrist, shoulders tensing again as if to run away, but Napoleon Solo doesn’t run. He didn’t run away from a giant with more fighting training than him in a public restroom of West Berlin, didn’t run away from the world after who knows how long in and electric chair in Rome, didn’t run away from anything they have encountered in the past two years of working together.

 

Illya has been present through enough of Napoleon’s not-running, by now, that pressing their shoulders a little closer together fills him with the relief of taking necessary but long overdue action.

 

“It’s okay,” Napoleon says, trying for nonchalance and mostly just managing to hit ‘strained’, “he wasn’t a pet.”

“No,” Illya confirms.

 

Then, emboldened by the turmoil of emotions swirling in Napoleon’s eyes when he turns to look at him, Illya adds:

 

“Neither am I.”

 

This time, it’s Napoleon who increases the pressure between their shoulders, Illya’s rifle wound from Japan an ache barely loud enough to register through the blood rushing in Illya’s ears, the delicious sting of his own breathing, caught in his lungs for too long.

 

“No,” Napoleon says, breath ghosting over Illya’s lips, “most definitely not.”

 

The wolf has gone to sleep, and soon Illya and Napoleon will have to return to the world of men, but it doesn’t matter.

 

Here, in the space between, they will always be free.

.