Chapter Text
“Stay,” she whispers in the darkness of the early morning.
A breeze floods through the open window and reaches her bare skin, sending goose pimples down her spine and arms. With closed eyes, she searches for a quilt, until a pair of large, warm hands folds it over her shoulders.
Illya whispers as he smoothes her hair away from her face. Gaby feels stubble and soft lips against her cheek. “It’s almost five.”
Gaby sighs as she leans into Illya. Her eyes remain closed but she feels him, catches the smell of his deodorant and toothpaste as he plants a kiss on her forehead before standing and leaving. The wooden floorboards of her apartment creak under him as he walks, slowly and quietly, to the bedroom door.
“ Душа моя ,” Illya says softly to her from across the room, shutting the door behind him.
“And you, mine,” is the last thing Gaby mumbles before turning onto her other side and falling back asleep.
“Lovely day, t’isn’t it?”
It takes a few moments for Gaby to realize she’s being addressed.
“I’m sorry?” Gaby asks. Standing in the middle of the tube with people packed on all sides of her, she turns to her left, to a hunched older woman seated at her side.
“Lovely day,” the woman repeats with a nod.
Gaby smiles hesitantly before going back to the copy of The Guardian open in front of her. Please do not talk to me , Gaby thinks, craning her neck over the clusters of commuters also crammed into the car, hoping to make herself look occupied. She has always hated chatterers, those Underground occupants that insist on speaking with anyone in their radius. Gaby winces when she hears the old lady speak again.
“I’ll be right happy when it’s all over.”
Gaby looks back and smiles brusquely. “Pardon?” she asks, leaning down to hear the woman over the dull, mechanical roar of the London Underground. The old lady smiles and tilts her grey, crinkled face to the newspaper in Gaby’s hands.
“Tories, Labourers, it makes no difference to me,” the old woman says again. She looks up at Gaby from her seat expectantly. She hadn’t even purchased the newspaper for the upcoming election coverage, Gaby thinks, her mouth slack and searching for an answer. In fact, she rarely paid attention to the cover stories at all. Every morning she’d purchase the paper on her walk to the tube. Every morning she ignored the headlines, combing instead through the sections on entertainment and music and sports, the things she was deprived of for so long behind the Iron Curtain.
Gaby flips to the front page of The Guardian . Large, black letters scream from the front page, declaring October 8th, 1964 to have been the “noisiest night of the election”. She wants to say something, but tube slows to a halt before Gaby can find the words. An automated voice announces the destination- Curzon Street Station- and Gaby turns back to the woman and smiles. “This is me,” she says with a nod. She pushes through the crowds before the chatterer can speak again and takes a large step onto concrete.
“Tories and Labourers,” she says in the old woman’s voice as the train roars to life behind her. She murmurs to herself as she weaves between bodies toward the exit, before colliding sideways into a broad chest and set of shoulders.
“Pardon,” Gaby grumbles as her feet slip beneath her and she bumps into another body behind her. A large hand grabs her elbow and steadies her.
“Sorry,” the man holding onto Gaby says. It is a voice that she recognizes — the flip of a Russian r against the back of the mouth and the deep, serious tone — and with a half-formed smile, she glances up, expecting Illya.
“How did you get here?” she wants to ask. For the briefest moment, she sees a pair of cool, blue eyes staring back at her. Before she can take a closer look, the man is gone. Gaby barely catches a glimpse of the back of his blond, buzzed head before he disappears into a sea of black suit jackets and trench coats. She huffs as she regains her footing and apologizes to the person behind her. As she climbs the stairs towards daylight, the sound of a Russian accent hitting her ears is all she can think of.
“Morning,” Gaby says minutes later, setting her stuff on top of her desk in the translation department. “Department” had been a generous term, Gaby had thought when Waverly had offered her a position there months ago. He’d mentioned the job after Istanbul, the same afternoon he’d called her into his office and given her his sincere condolences about her father. He’d referred to the role simply as an “extension” of her training as a field agent. He’d also passed her a set of silver keys to an agency-issued flat in London, and with the same resolve she’d felt flying over the Iron Curtain, Gaby had accepted.
“Good morning,” her coworker mouths to her from the closest desk. Gaby had been placed next to Susan Pentland on her first day as a translation analyst, a woman with a strong cockney accent and orange hair that cascaded down her back in waves. Today, the hair that Gaby has seen and envied for months is wound into a pile at the top of her head, covered in part by a set of bulky black headphones. In her mouth, a half -chewed pencil, the sign to Gaby that her friend and coworker is deep in her work.
Gaby doesn’t bother Susan again. Instead, she sits at her desk and faces the various piles of manila folders and audio files, some placed there overnight from different agents in the building, some piles constructed by Gaby herself. “Mess” is what Illya had dubbed her workstation the first time he’d wandered into the translation department looking for her, and Gaby had protested until he’d merely squeezed his mouth shut into a tight line and shook his head repeatedly. The thought makes her eyes roll now as Gaby reaches for the newest pile of folders. She begins to leaf through them before a yellow memo wedged between two files catches her attention. On it, she recognizes the handwriting of Waverly’s receptionist. High priority conference, 0730 hours. She snaps her head in the direction of the entrance, squints her eyes to read the minuscule numbers on the clock above the double doors. 7:17 a.m.
May as well go , Gaby thinks, adjusting a haphazard pile of papers before standing and walking toward the exit. She weaves between other desks and nods at other agents as they make eye contact with her. The translation department is small, nine people and their hard work shoved into the basement until Waverly can find “more suitable accommodations”. By now, Gaby has learned more about her quiet, subdued desk mates. She has heard their languages and their small talk, has gone to lunch a handful of times with most of them.
She swings the frosted doors open into the hallway before stopping in her tracks. “Illya,” she says, although it sounds more like a question.
He is frozen mid-step in the hallway. Gaby smiles when she takes in the sight of him, notices the light blue button up shirt she has come to favor of all of his clothes, and smiles wider.
“I was…” Illya mumbles, gesturing over his shoulder to the door leading to the stairs. Gaby nods and crosses the distance between them in the hallway.
“Good morning,” she whispers under her breath as she wraps her arms around his waist. He stoops down to her height and wraps his long arms around her shoulders. “How are you?”
She asks if as if she did not just see him, did not just spend the previous night wrapped in his arms. She knows Illya does not like the question. She has seen how he freezes, has heard him explain how the KGB trained him to forget his feelings and himself. On this October day, she asks anyway.
She feels him shrug and looks up at him. The smile he gives her doesn’t reach his eyes, and she nods knowingly. She knows why he hates Octobers; he’d explained it to her once, after Istanbul, on an overnight train ride to their next assignment.
“My mother died this time, three years ago.”
That night, Gaby told him she was sorry, had woven her fingers through his when he said he could not answer any more questions.
“Were you on the train today?” she asks now, her body relaxing into his. They are practiced, together, in dancing. They dance around the topic of his family, both of them wincing when someone they do not know asks questions about his home. They dance as a distraction, and each pirouette Gaby spins around him is always one more attempt to blur the memories he does not share.
“No,” he says, before the sound of a door shutting somewhere down the hall abruptly breaks them apart.
Illya had held Gaby in the grass in Rome, had finally kissed her on the street in Istanbul under a starry sky, had taken to spending most evenings either in Gaby’s bed or making space for her in his own. And yet, here they are now, Gaby thinks, leaving each other in the mornings before the sun comes up, pretending to everyone except themselves and possibly Solo that their relationship is purely a professional one.
“Strange,” Gaby says as the two head back toward the stairs. Illya opens the door for her, and before she begins the climb to Waverly’s office, Gaby stops to look at him. “I must have seen a ghost.” She turns away from Illya’s confused expression and starts the ascent. He shuffles behind Gaby awkwardly as her short legs carry her up the steps. They climb the remaining stairs in silence, although Gaby is keenly aware of Illya’s looming presence behind her. With a nervous hand, she adjusts the hem of her sweater over the back of her slacks, smoothing a hand over her side. Illya coughs lightly over her shoulder. Gaby smiles as the two reach the top floor of headquarters, and she swings the door open with a final, flirtatious glance toward Illya.
“Ah, there you two are.” Solo’s clear, crisp voice greets them as Gaby steps onto the fifth floor. He looks to Gaby like something out of a magazine, leaning casually on one leg, his hair glossed back, his pale, grey suit neatly pressed. “Excuse me,” Solo says to the young woman looking up at him from her spot behind the desk. He nods and smiles, and Gaby is certain she hears an audible sigh from Waverly’s receptionist as he walks toward them.
“Nice shoes,” Gaby mutters, unimpressed.
“They’re Givenchy monk straps, thank you,” he says, embracing her first before turning to Illya. The two men exchange a nod and a handshake before Solo goes back to Gaby. He takes her hand and kisses it, and Gaby laughs.
“It’s nice to see you,” she says, chuckling and giving him a proper hug. He agrees, tells her he missed her in Florence, and Gaby rolls her eyes and laughs again. “That sounds just taxing.”
Solo opens his mouth, about to defend his recent solitary mission in the Italian countryside, when a mousy voice from behind the desk cuts him off.
“Mr. Waverly is ready for you now.”
The trio cross the cream-colored lobby to the third door on the left. Solo leads them in, pausing first for a brief knock, and lets both Gaby and Illya enter Waverly’s office before flashing a final smile to the receptionist. “Deborah,” he says, as if to say goodbye before shutting the door.
Gaby had always thought of Waverly’s office as relatively unspecial , given his position as the head of a special unit. The room, also cream, had always felt too small to Gaby, especially with Solo or Illya in it. There was space only for a desk, two chairs behind it, and the navy Victorian parlor chair Gaby had seen Waverly sit in only once before. Now, the man sits behind his large, teak desk. Behind him, a floor-to-ceiling window reveals sun and the grey rooftops of London. Waverly had once revealed to Gaby during a meeting that the window had been his sole reason for choosing this office.
“Come in, come in,” Waverly says as he lays the phone to the receiver. Gaby, Solo, and Illya take their usual spaces in his office, with Solo leaning against the wall and Gaby seated between her two partners. Waverly smiles, asks Solo how his recent mission ended. They talk briefly and casually, and it feels to Gaby as if they’re normal coworkers catching up after a vacation.
The two men finish and Waverly turns back to Gaby and Illya and addresses his team as a whole. “Well, now that we’re all here, some nasty business has come up with the election that I need your assistance on.”
Yes, the election. Gaby has been aware of it the past few months, has only passively paid attention to the headlines and radio ads that were loud and bold and inescapable. “It doesn’t quite matter who, Conservative or Liberal, is in office in our line of work,” Waverly had once told her during a late evening at headquarters. Even behind the Wall, Gaby had rarely cared about politicians or their promises. In Berlin, she hadn’t cared who constructed the Wall, only that she, somehow, was going to find a way over it.
“There seems to have been a few disturbances recently,” Waverly says, his voice bringing Gaby back to the present.
“Disturbances, sir?”
It is Solo who asks, his face curious and almost excited. Like a child in a candy store, Gaby thinks, shaking her head and turning back to her boss.
“Indeed. Some threats have been made against Harold Wilson recently.” Gaby’s eyes dart to both Illya and Solo. They look to Gaby as if they know every word coming out of Waverly’s mouth, like they both spend time reading election coverage instead of flipping to the entertainment section. Gaby focuses back on Waverly, clears her throat and leans in toward her handler, and hopes that she looks like she knows what’s going on.
“There was an issue last week at a fundraising event hosted by Harold Wilson and his wife. Reportedly, a server was overheard by Mrs. Wilson referring to guests as ‘flies’—” Solo interrupts him then, confusion on his face, and Waverly merely nods. “That’s right, Solo: ‘flies’. Allegedly Mrs. Wilson confronted this server several times before asking him to leave. I believe her exact words were that he smiled a ‘cold, dead smile’ when she dismissed him. They later found the charming sentiment “Masters and Slaves” painted on the wall of the dining room. It seems fairly cut and dry given that we found security footage of him fleeing the grounds soon after.”
“Have you found him?” Gaby asks.
“That’s where you come in,” Waverly says with a subdued smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. He hands plain manila folders to Illya, Solo, and Gaby. “Of additional concern is earlier this May, Harold Wilson’s son, Robin Wilson, seems to have been the indirect target of an attack at the school where he teaches maths.”
Gaby opens the folder as Waverly says this. The first page is a shadowy, blown out photo pulled from a security camera. When she squints, she thinks she can make out the face of the man in question, walking between buildings on what Gaby assumes to be the Wilson estate.
“In May, typhoid broke out in the school where Robin Wilson is employed. Thankfully no fatalities, but over 400 teachers and children were at risk.”
Gaby remembers it faintly. She’d watched the headlines unfold, tried her best to ignore images of sick children that seemed to plaster every magazine cover in London. She’d only listened to one story on the radio, a personal account of a young mother who almost lost her two young sons. The woman had pleaded with God, crying endlessly over the radio, until the host had gently coaxed her off the air. Gaby had avoided turning the radio back on for weeks after.
“Wasn’t that Public Health issue, sir?” Illya’s voice is low and restrained. Gaby glances up from her file to look at him. His eyes are dark, his eyebrows pulled tight.
“Good question, Kuryakin. We thought, initially, that it was. However, an employee roster released at the time of the outbreak shows the same man — George Brodksy is his name — was on staff in the cafeteria at the school for a brief time, only about two months before the incident. School was suspended for several weeks after the outbreak, but Brodsky never reported to work after that. He kept a low profile until showing up at Harold Wilson’s party.”
The sun, visible through the window, moves behind a cloud, and the shadow it casts in Waverly’s office makes Gaby feel uneasy. She swallows down the tension she feels building in her throat and glances to her partners. Solo has lost the look of excitement, replaced instead by blank stoicism. When she turns to Illya, his face is the same.
“Needless to say, we are concerned that there may be foul play. It’s possible that Wilson’s opponent, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, is responsible. With the election approaching in exactly a week, we have been tasked with figuring out who’s to blame and making sure nothing else problematic comes to light.”
“You think Wilson is being targeted?” Solo asks.
Waverly nods. “We suspect that the typhoid may have been meant specifically to harm Robin Wilson, and by extension, his father.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” says Solo, moving from his position against the wall to stand at the edge of Waverly’s desk. “How is this an international issue?”
Waverly sighs, looks between the three spies sitting in front of him, and glances down at his own dossier laying closed on his desk. “It’s not so much of an international issue, Solo, as it is a personal one.”
Gaby sees Solo’s eyes grow wide, and she gulps again. They each turn to page five of their dossiers at Waverly’s instruction.
“Recognize him?” Waverly asks, and the look on his face makes Gaby pause before she glances down at the document in her lap. She inhales sharply, hears Illya whisper under his breath beside her. In her hands, a glossy black and white photo shows a group of men, standing in line at a shipping yard, the familiar word “Diadema” visible over their shoulders. In the center, Gaby recognizes the handsome face of a man she thought long dead, stabbed by Illya in the grass on a rainy afternoon in Rome. There is silence among the four of them for several moments before Solo’s voice, angry and impatient and surprised, is the first thing Gaby hears.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”