Archive of Our Own

“Come now, Darling. You have a far stronger swing than that. It’s all in the wrist--”

“Oh, Jack! Stop!” Gaby shrieks.

It’s early evening. Illya has been staring through the sparkling glass coffee table for the better part of half an hour. The tape deck reels and reels, capturing this for him to listen to over and over again; pick it apart, transcribing, seething.

“I say,” comes the distant voice of their mark; an Englishman, barrel chested and a little breathless, from across the court. “This is a ranked game, Deveny. Control your wife.”

“Apologies, Burton,” calls Solo. “She’s a little tipsy.”

“I am not!”

“Well, come off it then,” says Burton.

“You said she was a champion, Mr Deveny,” chimes his wife.

“Oh, I am,” Gaby replies, and Illya’s lips quirk at the bite in her.

Solo huffs suddenly, staggering. The violent hock of the ball is punctuated by Gaby’s hiss of victory.

Solo’s voice is close in her ear; so lightening quick and intimate in Illya’s own he almost breaks away. “You’re to let them win, Gaby - we want him pliable.”

“Oh, I’ll make him pliable,” she whispers fiercely. “With my racket.”

“Save it for the room, honey!” A hurried save, their whispering likely caught by Burton’s watery eyes.

Gaby lets them believe they’ve won after that.

Illya listens through the post-game small talk and double entendres, awaiting the beep of the activated tracker planted in Burton’s duffel bag. Then, finally, he is able to turn off the receiver. 

Suddenly weary, he rubs a hand over his face and waits grimly for Solo and Gaby to return.

He isn’t supposed to be in the room. Or at least, he hasn’t been formally booked into the country club. Solo and Gaby are the newlyweds; he the athletic American magnate, and she his tennis playing trophy bride. They’d been perfectly matched, moulded to complement the Burtons, almost mirror images save the ten years in age between them. But that too had been orchestrated; the Burtons had a penchant for fresh game, playing away from home with young couples frequently and in more ways than one.

The entire country club has enjoyed a week of the performance; a thrilling summer romance starring Solo and Gaby, as convincing and magnetic as two Hollywood leads. Illya had only climbed up the trellis to his partners’ balcony three nights before, but in the four days he'd missed while waiting at HQ, a rise of sportsmanship had bloomed between Solo and Gaby with a ferocity completely uncalled for. At their best they were a pair of giggling children, teaming with inside jokes and quiet, knowing glances - this strange telepathy always escalates when Illya is in the room - but at their worst, they’d pour over one another with everything but kisses, as if competing to be the first arrested for public indecency. 

Two days has been enough. Too much. 

He hears the two of them coming down the hall now, laughing breathlessly as they often do. It makes something inside him murmur, and then tense to suppress it.

This is how it will go, he surmises. Or, at least, this is how it has all gone before.

Solo and Gaby will retire to the chaise or lie together on the floor, flick through glossy magazines. Cowboy will give his tasteless opinions on fashion, and Illya will interject to correct him. Sometimes he’ll be waved off, but others they will smile at him warmly, ask him to join them on the carpet. He’ll decline, sometimes with a pressed smile, but often without. He will always decline.

After a few glasses of thick red wine, Gaby’s laughter will descend into snorts and Solo’s hair will be dishevelled beyond redemption, marred by Gaby’s attempts to wipe off that eternally smug grin. Solo will meet her with a glittering wit, and another of the familiar slaps he'd land on her thigh with a sound that makes Illya stutter.

They will rub magazine perfume samples on each other’s necks and wrists until they smell the same; a huddle of clean spice and flowers, assaulting Illya’s senses until he excuses himself to go to sleep. Of course they will then stay up, hissing rapid German to one another in stage whispers. Of course they will.

They are quick and light. They never slow together. Never into the heated silence that Illya and Gaby do, at least; her peering up or down or across the room at him with a measuring glance that makes time stand still, her lowered lashes and tilted chin pulling a flex through his hands, bidding him to pace the room, leave it if he had the chance.

He’s never seen them share that. Perhaps that is how they laugh together so easily; lying over and across one another in various states of undress, drawing a confusion and a craving in him he doesn’t understand, isn’t certain he ever wants to look into. It is easy for them. For Solo, everything is easy, and when it isn’t, Gaby pulls at the strings of the world until it all falls into place.

They crash into the room then, dressed all in white and shining like a pair of unfinished figurines. Their laughter peters out at the sight of him, and he imagines he appears to be a dull and exhausting reminder of their work.

Gaby collapses on the chaise to slip off her shoes. Solo leans their rackets by the door.

“Pleasant evening, Peril?” he asks, sauntering into the bathroom to start the shower.

“Fine. Thank you.”

“Do you play tennis?” Gaby asks him suddenly, with an ease that suggests she’s been drinking. She is flushed similarly with exercise, having slumped opposite him with the knife pleats of her tennis skirt high on her thighs.

“No. Not in a long time.”

“We should play together.”

Illya shrugs.

“Peril would prefer squash,” Solo says from the bathroom. “Tennis for the lonely.”

“Napoleon!” She spins to fix him with a glare only to be met by a dimpled smirk, before he disappears into the rising steam.

Illya tries to flatten his frown, a strange taste in his mouth for Solo’s rare name on her.

“Don’t listen to him,” she says.

“I don’t.”

She lifts her dark hair from the back of her neck, fanning herself. “Pick up on anything?”

“The tracker will help.”

“Good. If I have to keep up with any more of Burton’s musings on hysterical women, I’ll not be held responsible for my actions.”

Illya begins packing away the receiver, amused. “You shamed him with your serve.”

“I did,” she begins, but soon trails off. He wonders if she’d forgotten he was listening in. Forgotten he was there in the room, waiting for her to come back. Whatever it is she’s thinking, it plucks her companionship out of his grasp like a quick snap of elastic, and it stings.

She stretches her legs then and picks up a magazine, begins to flick through it.

Since Illya met with Waverly to rehash his role in the mission, Gaby has been cold. At HQ it had taken him three full days to meet her eye, and even then she’d only turned her gaze back to her nails, of far more interest to her than his repentant smile. Had she been such a terrible partner in Rome? Such unworthy backup in Istanbul? Did he loathe to work with her?

Not at all.

Illya had needed methodical data completion for just that reason. Paperwork. Solitude. He did not want to forge a routine cover with U.N.C.L.E — did not want his legends to be shaped by the word Husband or Fiancé, and certainly not so soon after Rome. Rome is an island to him. Leaving Rome meant leaving the linked arms and the almost-kisses behind. He still hasn’t picked them back up. He doesn’t know how to.

Istanbul had been amiable, professional - with no help from Solo, tweaking and arranging them into increasingly improbable scenarios, forcing them to be alone together. The stake-outs in particular were his sort of masochistic torture; long stretches of hot, dry nights and white knuckles on gear sticks; terse, dangerously loaded questions. Nothing happened. Gaby’s frigid stares across the room are only deserved punishment for the quaking hands he still stuffs in his pockets; for his excuses not to be in the same room as her for longer than absolutely necessary.

He wants her, badly.

He’d once tried digging for a fear, an instinct, that would explain his retreat. Long strings of reports had beaded roughly through his head with words he didn’t want; abandonment anxiety, volatile personality disorder, Oedipal complex — and then he would abruptly stop, having threatened to unravel years of progress.

No. He would provide back up, and Solo would relieve him of front line work. He would let himself breathe for a while. Let the rag-tag team settle back down like silt, before both Gaby and Solo had stormed through his life and disrupted everything he knew in their wake.

She catches his wandering eyes then, then drops her own back to her magazine with a purposeful, punishing disinterest.

---

Solo returns from his shower in his pyjamas and plush dressing gown, his hair damp and boyish over his forehead.

“Gaby, be a doll and turn on the radio.”

“Do it yourself.”

“You’re practically a Brit,” he says, hitting a nerve. “You ought to know the stations by now.”

“Arschloch,” she murmurs, fixing him with a glare and sliding off the chaise. She crawls to sit on her heels at the console, fiddling with the silver dials and bobbing like a metronome.

Solo pours three glasses.

“Not for me,” Illya says, strangely nauseous. “I am going to bed.”

“Nonsense. It’s eight o’clock.”

“We are waking early.”

“Relax, Peril," Solo says, slipping around the settee. He holds the glass at arm’s length to shake it at him. The amber liquid lines the glass, dripping down thickly. "You’re off the clock.”

Gaby lands on a station playing something old fashioned, gaudy.

Solo flicks a lascivious look at her over his shoulder, still waiting on Illya to take his drink. “You cad.”

“You remember?” she asks, smiling a little.

“Of course I remember.”

Illya does not remember. He does not know the song and he does not want to know what they were doing the last time they heard it.

Solo shakes the glass at him again, a faint smile on his lips. Illya takes it, if only to get him to stop looking at him like a stray dog.

“I’m going to take a shower,” Gaby announces, rifling through her blush pink suitcase for her pyjamas, an assortment of cosmetics bottles. “You can start without me.”

“Start what?” asks Illya gravely.

“The party.” Solo relaxes into the chaise, crosses an ankle over his knee.

“What party?”

“Illya,” he says lowly, frowning, as if he ought to know better. As if he were a child, up past his bed time.

Gaby closes the bathroom door behind her.

“Alright, Peril,” Solo says then, tipping his glass at him. “What happened?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You look like you’ve seen a clip-on necktie.”

Illya reads him. He’s sincere, if a little lazy with drink and exertion. He holds Illya’s eye as he sips from his glass, the lines of his forehead crowding closer the longer he remains quiet.

“Long day,” Illya relents.

Unconvinced, he offers: “You and me both.”

Illya pretends to concentrate on arranging his recording equipment, organising his paperwork with a shuffling tap on the glass table.

He ignores his partner's prying stare. Those eyes are still too much for him even now, filled always with something under the surface, impossible to decipher. Even if he could crack it, he knows it would never bear good news. For some, to catch Napoleon's eye invites his disapproving frown; a furrow of the brow that makes the victim redden and shrink away if they aren’t his decided catch, if he isn’t interested.

Illya doesn’t have that luxury. For him, staring at Solo invites an open ended challenge, a dare to look away first, to let him win. Illya doesn’t like to lose. Especially not to an American. So he has stopped staring, dismissing the game as a pitiful display of machismo. In Solo’s head, it makes him the winner. It doesn’t matter. Illya decided long ago to stop wasting his time trying to figure him out.

“Gaby’s been spritely the past few days,” Solo supplies evenly, prompting.

“Exercise,” Illya returns. In truth, it’s a convincing excuse; he knows the effect well. At home he’d looped the barracks track more times than he could count; to shake the tension in his limbs, to calm him, help him sink thoughtlessly into exhausted sleep. He didn’t like to think too hard in the dark. Still doesn’t.

“Among other things.”

“What things?”

Solo beams at his attention, catching his glare. “Good food, wine, company. Will you join us tonight? We’re eating in.”

Illya shakes his head. “They will not cook for me.”

“You’ll share ours.”

Illya sips, finally, at his scotch. It numbs the pain in his cheek; almost chewed through, having been subjected to his partners’ ridiculous breathless lunging through the hot afternoon. He blinks. It’s the first time he’s found the root of the cause, an explanation. Until then he’d blamed it on idle boredom, irritation for their endless theatrics. Now, with the hot drop in his stomach, their torn gasps echoing in him still, he isn’t so certain.

He only nods grimly.

“You may have to hide beneath the bed when they arrive, though, given your little covert operation here.” He thinks for a moment, smiling fondly. “Crawled up that trellis like a regular Romeo, didn’t you, Peril?” Illya glowers at him and he takes it like a treat. “Perhaps you can be charmed after all.”

“You don’t charm me, Cowboy. ”

“Lighten up, Peril. The night is young,” Solo says weightily. Then, like flipping a switch: “Have I ever told you the joke about the six chickens?”

“What chickens?”

Solo’s smile is fond. “So, two communists walk into a bar—”

“I have heard it,” Illya growls. He swirls his scotch around the glass, impatient for Gaby to return; to release him from Solo’s charge. It is hard to be uncomfortable around off-duty Solo; clad in pyjamas and sipping amiably at a single malt.  Illya would hesitate only slightly when calling him a friend. But tonight, Illya’s nerves persevere. Some of Cowboy’s jokes are funny. Some. Their longer stake-outs have been eased by his wit more than once, and while his jokes are often at Illya’s expense, he’d soften the blow with a rare jab at himself or his countrymen to even the field.

The man is charismatic. Infuriating, but ultimately likable. Tonight, he is charming, and after this week Illya isn’t certain he knows what to do with that.

“No, you haven’t,” Solo insists. “Listen. Two communists walk into a bar. The first man says: Comrade, if you had two cars, would you lend me one?” He looks at Illya to see if he’s listening. Despite Illya's rapt attention being solely focused on the bathroom door, continues. “The second man tells him: Comrade, if I had two cars, I would give you one.”

“This is bad joke. No man has need for two cars.”

“Quiet, Peril. So then the first man says: Comrade, if you had two houses, would you let me rest in one?  The second man tells him: Comrade, if I had two houses, I would give you one. The first nods sagely. He says: Comrade, if you had six chickens, would you give me one?  Then the second says: Fuck off, Ivan, you know I have six chickens.”

Illya’s mouth quirks at the edges. He turns back to the man on the settee with a guilty, chastising glare. “That is not funny.”

Solo beams into his glass, having won. “Another drink, Ivan?”

“No. Thank you.”

Solo lets the silence hover for too long. He lets Illya hear the hum of Gaby’s shower and the occasional clatter of her cosmetics slipping into the tub, her resulting curses. When Illya looks from the door with a smirk, Solo is scanning him with an expression he’s never seen before. He imagines he has hundreds more he’ll never see. But this one is dark and unsettlingly transparent, as if he can read everything in Illya’s head, figure him out piece by piece; could hear his flitting, nauseating thought that Solo’s dark wet hair seemed primal; that the movement of him was nothing if not slowly predatory; crepuscular, patient.

“Your secret’s safe with me,” Solo assures him, and Illya almost jumps.

“What secret?”

Solo leaves the chaise to top up his drink. “Pick one.”

Illya stares into the gilded mirror over the fireplace, watching Solo tinker with the tiny glass bottles. With immediate regret, he tightly holds up his glass to be taken over his shoulder.

Solo’s brow quirks. “Attaboy, Peril,” he says lowly, careful not to brush his fingers.

 ---

Gaby emerges in her pyjamas. The perfumed steam of her shower hisses into the room, touching Illya with a brief, pinkish daydream.

“Hungry?” Solo prompts, waving the room service directory at him. He already holds the phone in his hand, twirling the cord.

Illya nods once.

Solo orders something lavish. ‘Anything rich with wine and cream’, he says, and, with a glance at Illya, a side of ‘something pickled’.

Gaby takes the phone thereafter, asking sweetly for apple crumble and ice cream. Delighted, she informs her partners once the phone has clicked dead that her crumble will be late - they have sent the kitchen boy to the local orchard to pick more apples for her. Both she and Solo consider it as romantic as Illya does ridiculous. 

Then the two of them fold down into the carpet, and so it begins.

Gaby lounges on her back while Solo lies on his front like a child, turning the pages of the magazine by her ear. She makes a game of nonchalantly splaying her hair to obscure the pages. Solo sweeps the locks aside, lifting them softly from the glossy editorials to drop back on her face, only for her to subject him to it again and again. 

Illya’s feet are planted firmly on the floor, his back flat against the sofa and a hand braced on his knee. He swills the scotch, burning down his throat and into his stomach like fire. This much is fine. He is careful with drink. Careful with what it does to the vaults inside him. He knows well enough when to slap away the golden tendrils that threaten to crack the combination; snapping and flaying him open for all the world to see.

 --- 

In fact, Illya is staring at the ludicrous crocheted toilet roll cosy when he realises he doesn’t know anything at all. Among the soft pink tiles of the en suite, alone in the quiet, Illya faces the encroaching slosh of his drink as it comes darkly out of hiding. He closes his eyes, swallowing thickly the curse in his throat. Behind the door a room service waiter is listing costly wines Illya has never heard of - can’t tell if they were red or white or both - and doesn’t seem to be nearing the end of the list.

So Illya turns to the marble counter, presses his palms to the cool edge, and breathes deeply to tame the swirling delirium in his eyes, his numbing limbs.

The perfume of Gaby’s shower still lingers, steaming the mirror in a pearlescent mist. A sweep of her palm has cleared the glass far below his eye level, having taken a peek at herself before dressing. Or perhaps it had been Solo, clearing the fog at chest height to admire himself.

Illya glares into the seashell sink and pushes his hips hard against the counter. Heated madness.

The counter top is wet, slicked with something perfumed. Has he been drinking schnapps? A sudden gush of peach floods into his mouth, real peach, and then the phantom texture of its skin breaking under his teeth. As a boy, only the senior officers ate peaches. Now they fill grocery shelves and line the green stalls outside, fresh or canned or dried, at his fingertips any day he wished. Pickled too, thinks Illya, with a reluctant amusement, and touches his lips, greedy for blinis and cream and kasha.

And then, strangely, he thinks of Solo. Of how his pulse hasn't raced the same way since he was a child at his father’s parties; having sneaked a fistful of rich cake under the table, where he was yanked out by his wrist, dangled in the air, and all the cake smacked out of his hand, scattered over the carpet, to be eyed suspiciously by a legion of bearded men and then by his own mother, alone, watching from the door and grinding her teeth in fear for him.

Red handed - it is a joke Solo could have made himself. Then he frowns. He washes those red hands, the water too hot, and waits for the coast to clear.

 ---

Solo has them sit on the floor by the coffee table, relaying instructions more to Illya than to Gaby. She already knows the rules of this game. Illya, consumed by silence and still reeling, sits on the floor. He arranges his long legs out in front of him. 

Playing maître d', Solo brings the serving trolley to them, lifts the heavy cloth to reveal two bottles of warm red wine beneath. He says something that meets Gaby’s approval, but Illya isn’t listening. The meal has come in two deep silver trays — some sort of minuscule poultry in a thin sauce, garnished with seared vegetables, dark plum jelly, fluted mushrooms. For the ludicrous price Solo had confirmed over the phone, Illya thinks a thief should better know when he’d been robbed. He decides to chide him for this when Solo holds a hand up.

“And, as a treat for moi tovarisch,” he says, resting a little silver platter on Illya’s side and sliding open the lid for him to peer in.

Pickled beetroot, dark and shining. Illya can taste the peaches again, and he frowns for how that black magic could leave the soft pink tiles and taunt him out here, too. Inescapable.

Gaby is German, he recalls suddenly, dumbly, and with a conflicting rush of affection. Perhaps she’s been drinking schnapps. He can nearly taste it in the air, which seems to waver around her; shimmering like heat waves, as blinding and unyielding as a desert.

“There are only two sets of cutlery,” she says. He focuses to find her holding her knife and fork, bound by a silver ring and cloth napkin, over the glass for him to take. Is she to share with Solo, then? He snaps his eyes away, feeling grossly lecherous. He brushes his trousers and readies himself to stand; to go to town, buy something to eat alone.

Whether he’d even make it down the hallway without falling is debatable.

“Illya,” Solo says slowly, pacifying him, before stabbing the beetroot with his fork. He slips it into his mouth. “Stop sulking. Try this.”

“No, thank you.”

Gaby takes back her silverware, not content to humour him. She doesn’t coax and tease like Solo does. She doesn’t wait for him; she gives her firm orders to calm down, to warm up, and if he won’t then so be it. Having faced more than her fair share of emotional, finicky men at the garage, she holds little patience for Illya when he slips into his more unmerited brooding. The withdraw only enriches her true concern when it reaches out to touch him, gold and genuine. When she cares and when someone needs her, she is an even haven. Illya craves her cold command now, a well-meaning rebuke, though it makes him feel like a petulant child when he picks at lesser things. Like cutlery, for instance.

But there she is with her butcher’s eye again, looking over him with a weighted intention that makes him itch to leave, to apologise to her for something he can’t even recall. The drink doesn’t help. He is already considering lying down to sleep; to close his eyes to both of them and think no more of mouths or showers or peaches or shining, pickled roots.

“Your spoon,” Illya says to her then, a revelation. “I will use that.”

Solo picks this up and runs with it. “Not like you to discourage sharing, comrade.”

“My dessert isn’t here yet,” Gaby reminds him.

“Then I will wait.”

Gaby pushes her fork so close it will pierce his lip if he speaks against her. She’d taken a carrot baton, paired it with a wafer thin slice of the poultry. “It’s good,” she promises, as if this could console him.

He lets her feed it to him, unsure where to set his eyes. He settles for the carpet.

“You see?” she says lowly, heavily accented. “That wasn’t so bad.”

It’s good. Delicious, even. He won’t admit it.

“Expensive,” he says, with what he hopes is level conviction.

Solo hums, smirking. He dips his fork into the beetroot again and holds it out for Illya to do with as he wishes.

Illya takes the fork, too rough, to hold it for himself. And that is good, too. The vinegar pierces, stinging the bitten wound inside his cheek and burning an invisible tenderness over his lips. Perhaps he has been biting those all day, too. With the sharp bite of vinegar, Illya misses Russia. But only for a moment — Solo is pulling the empty fork back into his own mouth, pressing it to rest between his lips and curve over his tongue as he pours another drink.

Illya thinks he must look like the beetroot then, the blood rushing to his face so violently he feels the flush of it prickling between his shoulders.

He stands as slowly as is natural, manoeuvring himself to the bar to fix another scotch. He has already lost. He might as well make the rest of the evening tolerable, if not forgettable. Perhaps he will settle in. Perhaps Solo and Gaby feel it too, all the time, this thrumming anticipation, and so they drink nightly to drown it. If all else fails, it will put him to sleep, thoughtless and untroubled, just as he wishes.

“I’ll have one,” Gaby calls. She’s looking at him more softly than he has seen in weeks. What has he done, he thinks, to deserve that?

“Make it two,” Solo says.

So Illya pours three drinks, shaking with something that isn’t fury.
 

---

They drink more after that.

Too much.

Solo and Gaby are down to their second bottle of red, and Illya has a congregation of single serve scotch bottles lined up by his side. 

“An army,” Gaby teases. His grey cap has mysteriously appeared on her head - likely Solo’s handiwork - and she leans close over him to flick one of the bottles down with her thumb. They fall like dominoes, and he longs to pull her easily into his lap and kiss her hard, congratulate her on her victory.

Then the knock comes. Her kitchen boy’s apple crumble. She beams, glassy and strong, then hisses for Illya to be quiet, intensely serious - they aren’t to be caught, she says. By the roguish kitchen boy of her dreams or by the waiter, he cannot guess. He only nods, lost in the closeness of her; glowing darkly at him in a way that makes the whole room buzz.

He shifts behind the high arm of the sofa, wordlessly beckoning her with him. It is a child’s game he’d played once, hiding from the German soldiers played begrudgingly by the other officers' sons. The NKVD had been the rightly preferred side, the heroes among them. His father's friends would pat his shoulder for that, if his side won. That is a grim thought; a black wisp of Russian back streets tainting all the bronze heat around them.

He’s dazed now with something that drink doesn’t usually bring to him; this low, warm mirth that makes secret policing a distant, impossible punch line. It’s becoming easier to forget. Where once imbibing would dull his senses and prickle at his flaws like needles, now it soothes them like a tincture, his nerves alight and numbing in glorious measure.

Illya braces his hand on Gaby’s bent knee, peering over at the scene unfolding at the door. There is no harm in Gaby being seen. They both know this. In truth, he doubts the waiter would pay much attention to him if he were to emerge either. But their hiding place is quiet and dark, champagne gold, and she is looking at him beneath the brim of his cap with a fondness, a surprise, that makes the tightness in his chest open up. In a very boyish way, he wants her to tell him all of her secrets, and for her to absolve him of all of his.

--- 

The three of them slump at their glass coffee table, a messy tea ceremony of their own making, to witness the dessert that took a village to craft at Gaby’s command.

“Like a tsarevna,” Solo tuts, as she twirls the heavy silver spoon between her fingers and readies to begin.

“A tsaritsa,” says Illya, and Solo gifts him a private curl of a smile.

Gaby breaks the crumble, the scoop of ice cream on the top melting inside. She savours the first bite, eyelashes fluttering theatrically. Solo grins. Vanilla streaks the silver where the plush of her lips has missed, but she loads the spoon again, lifts it to Solo’s mouth for him to taste.

Illya only watches.

“Tomorrow night—” begins Solo easily, sweeping ice cream from his lip with his thumb.

“Don’t,” she warns. She tries to tuck an errant lock back into his hairline, but the rest simply falls in a thick wave over his forehead. “Typical,” she mutters.

“We should make arrangements. Agreements.”

“Not now.”

“What are you talking about?” asks Illya, and they both turn to him at once, each a perfect reflection of the other with shining dark hair, impossible features. Gaby turns back to Solo first, a demanding quirk to her lips that reads: now look what you’ve done.

“The Burtons have made their invitation,” he says coolly. “We’re searching their room tomorrow, once the festivities are over.”

“Festivities.”

“For the mission,” Gaby says blindly, and it hangs around them as thick and blatant as smoke. She hunts for her glass of wine, and Solo peers at her as if she’s the most curious little creature.

Of course, thinks Illya distantly, all the little pieces clicking into place. Their marks are perverted. The Burtons chase young, lush Americans, and Waverly had provided them. Perhaps this is why he had been so compliant with Illya’s request; they don’t want a Russki — his partners and the Burtons both.

“Waverly did not mention this arrangement,” Illya says.

Solo grows serious, and Illya does all he can to hide the renewed ticking in his fingers, the tension creeping in his jaw, still ever present despite all the rosy haze he feels on looking at him. 

“It’s strictly business, Peril. It's not as if we're chasing that whole crescendo. Of course, we will be making all the right noises before slipping something in their champagne. If it takes a while to kick in, then so be it. We're all adults here.”

But there is an undulating mockery in Solo too, an easy one, picking at the edges of that forced frivolity and courtesy. Illya wants to hit him, he realises, with all affection set aside, but only once. Perhaps fall asleep shortly afterwards and forget. 

“I think it’s quite exciting,” Gaby tries, muffled into her glass. “They don’t want to watch us. They want us to join in.”

“It is unnatural,” says Illya.

“Like I said,” Solo shrugs, cracking the lid off another single serve whisky. “It's strictly business.”

“You would never…?” Gaby asks Illya incredulously. She holds the wine glass by the round, swirling the red hypnotically up the walls.

“No.”

She and Solo share a lazy, accusatory stare. “Have you?” she asks first.

“Gaby,” he drawls. “Please.”

“You have!”

“Well, I never kiss and tell.”

Illya snorts. “Perhaps if you lied so well on mission, you would not be such a terrible spy.”

Gaby snorts back, loud and delighted. Then, as if remembering something important, she stills and points the rim of her glass at him. “You’re scared.”

“Scared,” Illya returns with a snarl. He avoids her glare to accept the bottle Solo holds out to him, topping up his glass with a musical glug, glug, glug. Illya had hoped the bite would be all he’d need to weaken her resolve.

It wasn’t.

“Not even with two beautiful women?”

“No.”

Gaby hums, brow raised. “So you wouldn’t switch with Solo tomorrow night?”

That stirs him. He tries not to shift on the floor. “No. It is not necessary. A good spy does not need… does not have to become so intimate to overpower his mark, meet his objective.”

“But you have been trained to do so, if needs be,” Napoleon pries.

“Of course.” Illya’s ears are pink. He can feel them, and his partners are watching him with a wolfish attention, peeling back his every word to peek inside. “This is inappropriate talk. Needless. I am going to bed.”

It’s Solo’s turn to hum then. “Looks like it’s just you and me then, Gabs.”

“Seems so,” she says dully, returning to her wine.

“What are you talking about?” Illya hears himself say. His own echo. He wonders if all the liquor in all the world could make sense of the secret language they shared. All the perfumes of Arabia, he recites out of the blue, picturing his own red hands again and finding the irony in considering regicide. Cowboy is missing out on his best lines tonight. He is still so cramped up in his own head. What was he thinking, then? Perfume, he remembers, somehow. He frowns again at the thought of a sticky pool of peach schnapps — so that was the perfumed wetness of the bathroom counter. Where had it come from?

He has to stop himself from shaking like a wet dog to clear the nonsense reeling through him. They are staring at him, at one another, and back again.

“What are you talking about?” he repeats firmly.

“Consider it an invitation declined, Illyusha,” Solo says, and rises to stand. “Don’t worry that golden head of yours a moment longer.”

Illya stares up after him, his senses waking and stringing an anxious pull through his limbs. The urge to follow. Napoleon Solo has a way of making people swallow their words; tug regretfully on his cuffs to spin him around, beg him to accept their repentance. Illya has seen royalty pluck at Solo’s lapels to regain his lost favour. He will not fall for it now.

“Gaby,” Solo says then, cool and severing. “Dance with me.”

She lazily finishes her last spoonful and takes his hand. She’s pulled to her feet and then off them, as he lifts her and swings her about like a doll. Illya’s cap falls off her head and rightfully onto the carpet like a fistful of stolen cake.

“I’ll be sick!” She thumps his shoulder fiercely, but just as quickly succumbs to a laugh. Solo navigates around the chaise in his socked feet, drunkenly bobbing with her body clutched to his chest, and heads towards the radio by the bedroom.

Illya sips darkly at the scotch, wanting schnapps instead.

“Join us, Peril.” The radio is turned up, the appalling signal dismissed.

“Illya doesn’t dan- Oh!” Gaby’s voice jolts obscenely as Solo adjusts her in his arms. “He can’t dance.”

Illya doesn’t dignify that with a response. His head still spins with implications, suggestion. The thought of standing, dancing, joining them in that room… The spiking race of his heart assures him he is better off sitting. 

“He can, but he won’t. A fine line.”

“So he is scared,” Gaby says, having won.

Illya braces his palms on the settee behind him, lifting himself with great effort to stand. He sways there, and they stop to watch him as he breathes, trying to reach something close to sobriety.

“I am not scared.”

“Apparently not,” remarks Solo.

He does stumble a little, his feet much further away than he’s used to. He shuffles like a monster, he thinks, and tries to lighten the grip on his glass. But they do not look at him like one. Solo has turned to face him, his arm outstretched in invitation. Gaby is peering back from the embrace of Solo’s heavy shoulder, and Illya sees the low swallow in her throat before she can catch it.

“Put me down,” she tells Solo quietly, and he does. “Illya?”

“Da?” The drink puts a croak in his throat.

But she doesn’t have anything to say. She is still looking at him with thinly-veiled concern, that imploring care she must feel he now deserves. She hasn’t looked at him like that in a long time, but all the same the world slows and melts a little with the thought that he is in her mind; a worry for her to dwell on, as he does for her almost all of the time. His head throbs then, vision swirling. He hates it, loves it, but mostly wishes for sleep - wishes he hadn’t embarrassed himself so soundly, that his plan to grow closer to them hadn’t been thwarted by his twisted tongue and shaking limbs.

Stepping slowly around Solo, she takes Illya’s hand and holds it up. He can see how heavy it is then; how she braces her elbow at her waist to hold it. Her fingertips are four warm blushes, her thumb in the centre of his palm like a stone. There it is, he thinks grimly; that combination to open him up and ruin him.

She relieves him of his glass, gently dropping her gaze from his as if he is a wild animal to be soothed.

Solo takes the freed hand before it can drop back to Illya’s side.

“So the rumours are true,” he says. “You really haven’t touched a bottle of hand lotion in your life.”

“And yours are greased like a thief's,” Illya counters, torn between ripping away and gripping tighter. “For slipping into pockets, taking what does not belong to you.”

Gaby watches him carefully.

“I’m not scared,” he tells her, a little less indignant. Perhaps calling mercy.

This seems to be what she wants to hear. She flits a glance at Solo, whose impressed smirk has yet to fade. He is careful too, his grip on Illya’s hand no more intimate than a lengthy handshake. He makes it look casual, natural, nothing to question too deeply. But his head is discreetly ticking over - the master thief’s methodology; looking first for an exit before raising any alarms. This is higher risk than much of his work. Illya would not hurt Gaby, true, but he could hurt Solo - would hurt him if he moves too quickly, snapping the chain in Illya’s chest that binds him.

Gaby steps closer. Illya is fully aware of her body, her proximity, in a way that makes him soften and lower his eyes. He wonders if he looks as weak as he feels.

She presses a gentle kiss to his jaw. Somehow, he had always expected it would sting.

He bravely bends to kiss her lips then, once, twice, until she parts him with her tongue and he can taste her; the wine, the baked apple, the ice cream. Beneath it all, blissfully, the syrupy peach schnapps. She must have prized some from her pink suitcase; a richness, a secret from home, having stolen it away to gorge on all for herself. He blushes fiercely, and tries to take her face in both hands when he feels the tug of Solo’s grip like a leash — how had he forgotten? The strong fingers are tight on his knuckles, wholly different to Gaby’s but - Illya thinks, with a simmering dread low and hot in his stomach - no less pleasant.

Illya blinks at that, flexes his hands. Solo withdraws his grasp smoothly, and Illya is free to take Gaby’s cheeks, feel her melting into him.

Too soon she pulls away, flushed and blinking. She takes Illya's hand to push it firmly back into Solo’s before he can stop her.

“Dance,” she says, and takes his quarantined glass of scotch from the bedside table to sip at it herself.

Illya snatches his hand back, nurses his wrist as if she’d burnt him. “What game is this?”

The room drifts in full colour, swelling and echoing; the music, the clink of Gaby’s costume ring on his glass. Solo is deathly quiet. That’s the most unsettling of all.

“You don’t have joke to crack, Cowboy?”

“Nothing comes to mind.”

Only Illya is achingly alert, it seems, for how sleepily his partners are looking at him. How their joint gaze drops from his head to his toes and all the way back again like, he considers strangely, a pair of identical marionettes. That frightens him. Or at least it makes his pulse race and forget his whipped instinct as if it does. The knee-jerk urge to engage his thighs and set his shoulders has evaporated. Instead he trembles and tenses with nerves like a civilian, like a boy. His training slips away from him, water down a drain, years of it. They could topple him right there if they wanted to, with how open his body has become with drink and food, and the peach of Gaby’s tongue still pulsing in the chap of his lips.

But he isn’t scared.

“You can lead, Illya,” Gaby says, as if it’s all he needs to hear. She pushes Solo’s hand back into his for a third time, holds them up as if to waltz, and steps closer between them to kiss his tightly pressed lips. His scotch on her lips burns him, and his strange new grip on Solo’s hand tightens.

“I don’t want to dance,” he manages.

“Then what will you do?” She kisses him again. He takes her waist in his free hand, crushing the loose fabric there to feel again the gentlest curve from her waist to her hip, full of trained, flexed tension. She is molten, taut and liquid and rolling in his hand. She could slip through his fingers at any turn. How drunk his kiss must be, so fixated he is on touching her — and on her touching him too, steady and low on his hip where he thrums with heat.

He parts from her to breathe, to stare back at the man piercing into them like the glint of a scope. Solo is uncommonly drawn, dry of mouth. He is too American to be so quiet. Hard and shining; made without thought of human asymmetry, as if by some lusting idealist; perfect and, so, unbelievable.  Illya notes all of this with lingering, tugging dread. Then a strange flinch shudders in his side as Gaby hooks only the tip of her finger into the waist of his trousers, grazing over his bare skin.

Illya groans through closed lips, lets his eyes close for just a moment. He sways on his feet, feeling the broad flat of a new hand on his chest. Solo’s hand, he imagines, holding back the weight of him from collapsing with Gaby to the floor and covering her in his entirety.

“Peril,” Solo echoes, very far away. “You’ve had a lot to drink.”

“I know this,” he returns. Illya brings their joined hands down to his hip then, feels the point of Solo’s knuckle in the slim shadow of his belt. He breathes for a moment, swallowing. He dares to open his eyes only to find Solo staring at him, his pupils two sharp and blinding mirrors. Illya quickly tears his gaze away.

Gaby sweeps a finger along the oblique dip of his pelvis. He catches his breath with a shiver. How had it come to this? Following her lead, Solo flexes from Illya’s controlled grip as if from a pair of handcuffs, and traces the hidden crease of his thigh with his fingertips.

Illya falls into him, heavy breath and a clash of teeth to take his mouth. He should have caught himself at Gaby’s barely stifled gasp, but all the world is muffled by heat and crackling music and the rush of Solo’s cutting intake of breath, giving back immediately, his lips parted and precise.

Illya pulls away, feeling bruised. He dips his chin to his chest and almost falls to his knees.

By the ferocity of Gaby’s shove, Solo must have have said something droll. They both hold him up, pressing close to him to balance his substantial weight and pull him to the bed. He stirs low, the heat striking through his thighs and numbing a little, surging blood and pulse. But he is lain on the mattress alone, the duvet tossed over him like a shroud.

He mutters something incoherent, mutinous. If he were to sleep, who would defend them? The thought beats against his head, demanding an answer.

---

Illya wakes minutes later. Solo has evaporated. Gaby has turned off the light but still flits around in the shadows, a glitter of liquid following her with its occasional trickle into her glass. A little wind chime. He holds his open palm over the mattress to her, hoping she will see it. Gaby, with her back to him, braces both hands on her waist and breathes deeply. She goes to open the window, to let the sheers drift in the breeze and bring in a little fresh air. She drifts on her feet then too, almost dancing.

He wants to take her by the hips and draw her back into him, under the covers with sneaking whispers, just as she does with Solo. He touches his raw lips then. He wants her in front of him, and Solo at his back. All that strange new closeness, thrumming between them all in sleep, his thighs flanked by theirs, protected and protector.

Illya lets his palm fall on the flat of his stomach with a pained groan. “You tried to seduce me,” he says aloud, creaking.

“What?”

“You, Cowboy. Some sort of game of yours?”

Gaby is suddenly on the edge of the bed, a cool glass of water in her hand. An angel. “It wasn’t a game.”

“You should ask next time.” He sits up against the headboard to take the water. “More efficient.”

“We were trying to ask you,” she says. “Then you stood, wobbling all over the place. We didn’t know you’d had so much to drink.”

“I would have thought about it.” It falls out unconvincingly. In truth, he doesn’t know what he would have done. Whatever stirs in him is nonsensical, decadent, and he pushes it down to deal with later, when he would have time and mind enough to think of anything else but skin and mouths and heat.

“You wouldn’t. You’re very drunk.”

“I’m sorry.”

“We should have stopped you.”

“No, it was my mistake. It won’t happen again.” He hasn’t uttered something similar since his first years of training. He looks at her instead, trying to focus. “I mean to say that I am sorry for now. For this, and before.”

Gaby’s eyes are full and clever. He wants to kiss her lids, the soft skin of her temples.

“Thank you.” She just barely seems to soften, a well disguised relief. She takes his glass to sip from it herself, and he flattens his palm against the empty mattress. “Why did you drink so much?”

Like most of her questions, it is loaded.

“To rest,” he begins. His English is slipping, growing too tired. He switches to German; the hard stops and stresses closer to home, closer to Gaby. “To be with you as Solo is.”

“And how is that?”

“Easy, open,” he says simply. She measures him, eyes dark and darting. He doesn’t mind. As long as she can still look at him. “You make me nervous.”

Gaby lets her gaze slip up to the framed print above the bed. “Well, you make me nervous too.”  

“I don’t mean to.”

“I know.”

She is quiet for a long while, staring down the white sheets at Illya’s loose hand. She covers it with hers and he turns his wrist to catch her fingers, holds them. She is warm and soft, a little calloused around the edges.

“Did you drink schnapps in the bathroom?” he says suddenly, and watches the corners of her mouth curl up and then flatten again, like tilting a mirror.

“How do you know that?”

“It’s all over the counter. You taste of it.”

She stifles a smile, looking back to her lap. “You’re supposed say that you deduced it. That you’re the superior agent.”

“That too,” he shrugs lightly against the headboard. “Not tonight, perhaps.”

“No, not tonight.”

Illya shifts to give her space but she takes his forearm, pulls him back to her. She slowly sweeps her legs under the duvet, shuffling back against him.

“Is this alright?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“Are you going to throw up?”

He manages a smile. “No.”

She winds his arm around her waist, to pull him onto his side and flush behind her, as if she’d heard all his wishful thinking. “I don’t want you to choke on your tongue,” she says evenly.

That warms him. Though he thinks then, with her mother tongue still soft in his throat, if this might be the sort of talk she and Solo share in the night. Touching like this, imperceivable from Illya’s own bed on the floor, both chaste and unmistakably charged. Kissing, perhaps, once he had truly fallen asleep, with her hands on Solo’s chest and his on hers. The laughter he’d believed to be jokes could be breathed instead under the tracing of fingers; ticklish and skilled and lighter than anything he could ever offer.

Anger won’t touch him. Instead he stirs at the thought, his eyes closing with a lewd indulgence he knows he should immediately wash from himself and forget. It is inappropriate; she lets him hold her with a trust he would never overstep. But he had heard them playing tennis and breathing hard, shining, leaning bodily over one another with the smacks of thighs, with fingers grazing through hair. They both merge hot and low in him then, like the dark red wine he can’t name or bear to swallow.  

Illya feels Solo before he sees him. Smooth and untouchable as an apparition in the doorway. The air cracks around him like glass. Beneath the covers, Gaby grabs his clenching fist in her own to hold him down.

Solo steals to Gaby’s bedside and kneels there, his face close and shielded by the dark. Illya presses himself into Gaby’s perfumed hair. He can’t look into Solo’s eyes; pale, shining, all-knowing.

They whisper to one another, German. Solo is a skilled whisperer; susurrus in Gaby’s ear with a precision Illya can’t catch, and which fuels his private theory without doubt. She shakes and nods her head often, murmuring back. She brings Illya’s fingers to press over her stomach beneath the covers, grounding him like an anchor as they speak. Solo can’t see Gaby’s hands, or his on her skin as she guides him. For a moment, it is Illya the thief, Solo the prying intruder.

Gaby’s hair shifts out from under him as she turns in his hold. She doesn’t ask a question but waits as if for an answer. Solo has risen to stand, his fists curled in his dressing gown pockets and looking out with no intention over the tennis courts. The garden lamps line his profile with a pale amber pen, all sharp angles and waves, mathematically mapped. Waiting.

Illya nods only once, shallowly, and Gaby tightens his grip over her waist in reward, or in warning - it doesn’t matter which. It thrills him all the same.

Illya can’t guess how he’d seen the nod, but Solo rounds the bed to slip into the great sea of white behind him.

With his eyes wide open, Gaby tries to pull him sleepily back to her. He can’t wholly follow. He can only press his chin idly to her forehead as he feels the whole mattress dip under Solo’s weight, the shape of him solid and broad and full as the sun. They don’t touch. The duvet has risen; a bridge between their hips where nothing lies beneath, but which Illya wishes would be closed by skin, by touch, before he can think any better of the consequences.

Gaby touches his neck gently, chastely. He leans into it, trying to soothe the burning in his back with the affection he feels full in his chest, radiating out of him. Gaby, who saves him in commanding, beautiful measure. Solo, who ruins him when he needs it most.

 ---

Illya wakes on his back in the dark. He hasn’t swallowed his tongue. The air is thick with sleep, the breath and sweat of all three of them rising in the closed heat - he’s roasting, still fully dressed and tucked between them with his throat dry and head throbbing. Gaby’s arm is curled over his chest, her head soft on his shoulder. He’s tangled with Solo only at the calf, burning him fiercely from the inside out.

In the night, Solo had removed his pyjama shirt to cool down, and is gracing Illya now with a broad stretch of a deeply lined back and shoulders, tapering to a thick and naked waist.

Illya swallows, closes his eyes again. He splays his hand over the small of Gaby’s back and ruminates, straining through the clench of his jaw, on how it can be that even while sobering he still needs both of them at once.

Hedonism. Corruption. If his handler could see him now… the shivering consideration lingers always in his head; that Oleg is listening, is marking him around the clock. A side effect of the bugs, he supposes. It is irrational to be endlessly on form, focused, straining to remain pure of thought — intellectually he knows it to be the supposition of a mad man, an egomaniac — though he, more than most, has reason to be monitored.

“Trouble sleeping, Peril? Would’ve thought you’d be out cold by now.”

A siren, Illya dreads; both the piercing warning flare and the monster luring good men to their deaths. The American.

He ignores him, feigning sleep. It is a stupid idea. It had been the sudden tension in his linked calf that betrayed him, tight and conscious and as clear to Solo as a prod in the back. Solo exudes calm indifference, a faultless mask Illya fights endlessly to carve for himself. But where Solo’s is glossed, varnished, tailored, his own is crude and shaky, tied with brittle straps.

Solo makes no effort to break contact, and so Illya will not either, hoping that it might strengthen him. Perhaps he could grow stronger still, he thinks vehemently, if he would only stop comparing the man to a work of art.

“Maybe cold isn’t the right word,” Solo goes on. “Is Gaby serving bratwurst under there?”

“Go to sleep, Cowboy.”

Solo’s shoulder blades shift, a lake of warm muscle and skin. Illya flings his gaze away, but the man has already rolled onto his back, is looking levelly at him now across the pillow.

Illya’s eyes are glued to the plasterwork of the ceiling.

“Never double bunked before, comrade?”

“What are you talking about?” he hisses.

Solo shifts again and Illya flinches, every sense alight. He is met with a heartened glance and a roll of the eyes, as Solo finishes cushioning his head on his arm.

Illya lets his eyes drift shut, pulling Gaby closer. She makes a sweet sound, grabbing uncommonly weakly at his sweater. This comes naturally to him, safe and warm and deep in his chest. At his other hip, untouched, Solo radiates something maroon and forbidden; a weight he needs to get a hold of, see how best to carry it. Like a set of iron scales between them, he fights hard against his need to take both.

Mercifully, Solo’s eyes have already shut, his bare chest rising and falling evenly.

Illya’s questions bubble inside of him. Something about these questions are silver and small, easily lost if he should spill them, especially by the light of day. The dark is safe, with Gaby’s weight protecting him in a way he hasn’t known since he was a young boy. It melts him. In the same way, he hasn’t whispered in the dark with men since he was in training, sleeping by his comrades, but never like this; never with the lump in his throat and dreading. Intimate, frightening. Does Solo know what this feels like? Had Gaby proposed the scheme to him herself, or had he enlisted her?

From the corner of his eye, deliberately avoiding the rise of thatched chest beside him, Illya tries to read him. He is close to sleep; close to being fully unveiled, but still it is futile. Fully hopeless, like staring at an oil painting to glimpse the sketches underneath.

“Where did you go?” Illya manages finally, hoping he has fallen asleep.

“When?”

The blush crawls up his neck. He scrunches his eyes shut, a complete idiot. “When I went to bed.”

“To take care of it.”

The quiet hums, tangible and electric and sharp. It stings him from root to tip. Illya wishes he had never spoken at all.

“What does that mean?”

“You know exactly what that means.”

Illya gulps dryly. “I drank too much. I did not—”

“I know,” Solo finishes for him. Illya spots, with a rising anger, the smirk in the curl of his mouth. His eyes are still closed too, content, feeding on Illya’s struggle like a fat cat. “So I took it into my own hands, so to speak.”

He speaks through his teeth. “I would never.”

“Wouldn’t you?”

Illya presses his lips together, firm, and is quiet for too long. Solo is lower down in the pillows, peering up and back at him with those infuriating, pitying lines in his forehead.

“Your secret’s safe with me,” he reminds him.

“I have no secret.”

---

Gaby’s head is flush on his shoulder, but Solo is nowhere to be seen. In the thin light of dawn, Illya had stirred only slightly with the rise of the mattress, one of three bodies leaving it and cooling his side with the billowing of the covers. He palms across the sheets now to meet nothing but a warm imprint - the only proof that Solo had been anything more than a ghost.

“Cowboy?” he whispers, flinching for the exhausted strain in his voice.

“He’ll come back,” Gaby mumbles over him. He hears something similar in her too; a low, quiet doubt that clips her words close, in case she reveals too much.  He falls back to sleep restlessly, both their grips a little tighter.

 ---

When Solo crawls back into bed, Illya hears trickling water and the call of birds. It takes a while to settle again. Illya has slept alone for so long he doesn’t know how to dismiss groaning springs, the early sniffling of company.

"Taking care of yourself, Cowboy?"

“Don't flatter yourself," comes the deep murmur, somewhere low and close by. "Would never have pegged you as clingy.” 

 Illya hums and pulls the covers higher over all three of them. Solo rolls onto his stomach, his cheek to the pillows.

All around the light is a soft blue, almost sea foam. Solo would call it eau de Nil. Gaby would call it green.  

“Clingy? He proposed to me the day we met,” she protests quietly, splaying her hand over Illya’s chest. He tilts his head to look at her, at the lashes long and dark over her cheekbones. He rests his cheek on her crown, soothing his piercing headache.

“Morning.” Solo stretches over Illya’s chest to cover her hand with a pat, and then he leaves it there, his whole arm a heavy weight on Illya's stomach.

Illya has melted, still thick with sleep and the close warmth of the two of them. The open window lets in a dewy, chill morning air that prickles them with goosebumps. Under the covers they are touching, laying over one another and languorously drinking in the trapped heat. So this is all he’s been missing, he thinks lazily. How mindless he has been to hide from it for so long. How easy it is.

Solo slips his calf over Illya’s then, slow and tentative.

Illya lets him.

--- 

Gaby lifts her hair for him to secure the clasp of the necklace. It isn't necessary. He knows this. But she had barely rolled her eyes at his offer and had let him do it, which he considers to be one of her many cryptic tokens of forgiveness.

She wears a white tennis dress, her hair rolled into a bun at the back of her head, which wobbles as she chatters nervously to him. She covers anything and everything but her evening ahead with the Burtons. He nods when beckoned, smiles when he means it. Still, his head aches fiercely. He’d already been mocked for wearing his sunglasses indoors, but with all the new white light streaming in through the windows, he has little choice if either of them expect him to be even remotely active.

“I’ll try to keep the noise down on the court, for -” she gestures vaguely to his pained expression, cringing features “- all of that. Eat something. Drink a lot of water.”

“I will.”

“Alright.” She dawdles on the spot. When he doesn’t relent, she settles for flicking through his notes on the vanity, skimming over the blank pages he’ll spend all day filling in with her words. Almost as quickly, she flips the book closed and turns on her heel. “I should look for Solo in the lobby. He’ll be at the bar.”

“Gaby,” he starts, and she fixes on him, expectant. He warms a little, making his next words all the more difficult to voice. “There is tracker. In your shoe.”

“I know.”

He should have expected that. He gives a bow of his head. “If anything… disagreeable happens, you should alert me. I will meet you.”

She doesn’t say anything, only crosses her ankles and stands there, half curtsying.

He reddens. “It is one-way transmission, no microphone. I will not be listening. Tell Solo to keep jokes to himself.”

“That’s a lot to ask.”

Illya hums grimly.

“Thank you,” she says. Then, with the brief drop of her eyes to his shoes, “I’m quite nervous.”

“I know.” He stoops to hand her the duffel bag, needlessly lifts it onto her shoulder. “You’ll do well. Have Cowboy keep his hands where you can see them.”

She rolls her eyes.

He swallows a whole tirade; don’t drink the liquor, don’t leave Solo’s line of sight — she doesn’t need it. She is better prepared - better than Solo, anyway - to protect herself. Perhaps he ought to worry about Solo; with how readily he’d accepted the Burtons’ invitation, but how quickly he’d abandoned a bed he shared with his partners - his friends. Illya, trapping his hands behind his back, wonders if the man isn’t quite as well paired to the mask as he’d like to be.

“We’ll both be fine,” Gaby assures him, a saviour. “Stay here, drink water, think of the motherland. Tomorrow night, we will go out to dinner. The three of us, if you want.”

Illya blinks and darts his gaze to the floor, thankful for the sunglasses. “All right,” he manages.

“All right,” she echoes, and with her gentle smile he finds himself helplessly mirroring her, nodding for entirely too long.

“Shouldn’t you be peering lecherously from the balcony, Peril?” Solo appears at the open door, his racket tucked under his arm. 

"How long have you been there?" says Gaby archly.

Illya has already stepped away, still holding his wrist behind his back. He bites back his smile and nods at Solo in greeting.

“Long enough," Solo says, satisfied. He holds out his free arm for Gaby to take. "And Peril, if you won’t listen to me perform, you could at least watch me lunge.”