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Illya can tell that Solo is about to say something stupid from the odd twist of his mouth and the bemused quirk of his eyebrows, the one that says oh, I’m about to be so smart. The only reason why he doesn’t pre-emptively roll his eyes is that he’s feeling awfully relaxed, lying back on the couch with a half-empty glass at hand and his jacket and shoes abandoned a while ago already.
“So,” Solo begins, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his thighs, which makes his newly refilled glass threaten to spill all over the floor. “If you were being held at gunpoint—and you had to choose between us—”
“Gaby,” Illya immediately says, biting back a teasing smile and delighting in Solo’s outraged spluttering.
“That’s cold, Peril!” he eventually manages to protest. “Why didn’t you at least pretend to think about it for a minute—”
“No need to,” Illya shrugs, his face just as blank as when he gave his first answer.
“I can’t believe this!” Solo all but yells, throwing up one hand and turning to Gaby, maybe hoping for support.
She doesn’t offer any: she shrugs, clicking her tongue and merely stating: “I could have told you the answer to that one, Solo. The man has taste.”
“Unbelievable! Outrageous! No one loves me!” he keeps saying. “I’m so wounded, so thoroughly gutted—”
“I could gut you,” Illya muses, and he finds that he can’t really remember what it was like to mean it.
“—I cannot believe that I am gracing the both of you with my delightful presence and this is the treatment I’m getting! Why do I even put up with this?”
“The sex, mostly,” Gaby comments, utterly shameless in a way that still gives Illya some pause. Trust him to pick two people with approximately zero concern about any kind of decency.
Solo squints at her, pursing his lips as he considers. “Hmm. Yes. A fair point, yes,” he concedes, leaning back against the couch, seemingly satisfied. “You are still the worst, though. I’m offended.”
His pouting makes Gaby laugh.
Less than a week later, the memory flashes back into Illya’s head, the smell of alcohol and the sound of laughter and if you were being held at gunpoint—
He has Solo thrown over his shoulders and Gaby held by the arm, so that she can more easily limp after them as they move to safety. His whole body is on fire from the effort, but he pushes the thought away, stores the pain somewhere it won’t bother him now and only rain down on him later, when he can afford to be tired.
Right now, he has a partner half-bled out and another soldiering through a most likely fractured leg, and he has to get them away from there.
They were supposed to still have the damn car, the extraction point is too far and they are being too slow—
“Stop,” Gaby says through gritted teeth, her limping falling out of rhythm as she pulls at him for emphasis.
“We can’t,” he can only answer. He will drag her if he must.
“Illya, stop, we are being too slow, just—”
“Slow is better than nothing.”
Slow is still not enough, though.
She yanks her arm free, making him stagger a little and buckling under her own weight as soon as she’s lost the support.
He curses under his breath, already turning back, hoping that he won’t fall over while reaching down to her. He’s tired, but he can do it, now’s definitely not the time to give in to exhaustion—
“You’re helping me off the road, and you are leaving me here,” Gaby says, no room for argument. She looks at him with fierce eyes and just daring him to disagree, and he knows she’s right, he’s known for way too long, that is the smartest tactical decision—he’s just been refusing to contemplate it.
If you were being held at gunpoint, if you had to choose—
“No, we can make it,” he insists, as he leans forward and miraculously doesn’t fall over, as he pulls her up and Solo doesn’t even make a noise of protest – he hasn’t for a while now.
She glares at him. “Help me off the road, then go. You know he won’t make it at this pace, and I’ll be fine. If someone tries to follow, I will just shoot them.”
She’d be alone and injured and one against who knows how many, there were at least seven of them left, she wouldn’t stand much of a chance, much as he trusts her to handle herself. It wouldn’t be a fair fight.
“You go and send help, okay?” she adds, gentler.
He wants to protest. He really, really does.
“I’ll be fine,” she says, again.
If you had to choose—
He nods, not trusting himself to speak, trying to stop even thinking, because if he started getting lost into thoughts of her alone being shot down and bleeding out in the cold—a corner of his brain points out that Solo is half-dead already. That he might not make it to the extraction point at all, that if he has to bet on someone’s life then Gaby is the better choice. Her he’d be sure to save.
Except he can’t, he can’t make that choice, and as he helps Gaby stagger off the road he just wants to throw her over his shoulders too and go. For a second, he considers it: scooping her in his arms, magically finding enough strength to run—
“Here is fine,” she says, trying to yank herself free again. They are still too close to the road, too visible. She rolls her eyes at him. “I’ll crawl to a better hiding spot, you have no time to waste. Go.”
He swallows, pushes back the urge to take her with him, and nods. He leaves her with an extra gun and his knife. “Don’t shoot unless they see you first,” he says, but he knows her, he knows she’ll try to delay them so they have a lesser chance of coming after them. With every passing thought, he feels more and more like she’ll be dead by the time help comes.
“If you don’t leave right now, I’m going to shoot you,” she says, an affectionate smile flashing on her face as she gives him a gentle shove. “Go.”
He nods, turns around, takes off without looking back.
It’s easier, without having to help her along too, and if he looks straight ahead and thinks only of the extraction point, counts the steps, tries to estimate how long he will be—he pushes and pushes and pushes, grits out “You do not die on me now” between his teeth when he thinks he’s felt Solo moving for a second, and eventually, finally he sees the truck waiting for them, makes out the agents running towards them—he feels himself wobbling in relief for a moment, his body getting ready to let go, but he grits his teeth and he pushes forward a little more, just for another minute—
“—alright, it’s fine, we’ve got him, let go, mate—”
He blinks, takes note of the hands on his arms and the soothing voice trying to reassure him – he knows this agent, they go get coffee around the same time in the morning and exchange a few words when the mood strikes, he isn’t very talkative but he’s never side-eyed Illya, and he realizes now that he’s never asked for his name.
They take Solo off him, which jolts a shot of panic through him and makes him feel like his bones have disappeared at the same time, and before he knows it he’s being seated down, his head a jumbled mess, the only thing certain that throughout the whole thing he managed to quickly explain the situation and send them after Gaby.
He wants to go get her, but he doesn’t want to leave Solo, he’s tired, but he needs to see her—he isn’t given a choice, perhaps thankfully so, when the same agent from before pushes him back down, tells him stay still and let him look him over.
Maybe he could fight him off, try to get to Gaby anyway, but he can’t seem to will himself to move, not now that he’s sitting down, his muscles fighting between the instinct to let go and keep ready to move at a moment’s notice.
“Good—okay, you’re covered in blood here, just—help me out, uh? Are you injured?”
Illya blinks at him, realizes that he’s literally hurting all over and as he tries to think back to the fight he can’t seem to grasp onto anything for more than a few seconds. He shrugs. “I don’t know.” The blood probably isn’t his anyway. “Is he alive?” he gets out then, suddenly realizing that he doesn’t know, not for sure, that they took him away and he didn’t check and now he can’t see him—
“You made it in time,” the agent says, offering a reassuring smile and a nod. He seems trustworthy, but a part of him doesn’t believe him anyway.
It turns out that he has no major injuries, mostly bruises and a couple of grazes, because he’s been undeservedly lucky this time around, and it’s ridiculous, that he should come out so unscathed the day he gets his partners killed – or maybe just one of them, the other being an almost, or maybe Gaby will appear in a moment and Solo will be alright—still, too close, too big a mess.
When Gaby arrives, it takes him a few moments to process, for her to come into focus and for his instincts to push him on his feet, making him stagger towards her as he mentally catalogues the grimace of pain on her face and how she still needs support to stand but she doesn’t seem to have been shot at, she’s fine—when he pulls her to his chest, she clings to him to hold herself up, and he hardly dares breathing out of fear of shattering the moment. She’s fine.
“Is he okay?” Gaby asks then, looking up to him with that schooled expression of hers that means she’s drowning in worry.
Fear clogs his throat as he tries to answer, because he isn’t sure and he rarely neglects to consider the worst-case scenario, but she’s scared and she needs his comfort, not his worries. “I think so, yes,” he says, rubbing her back.
Before he has time to evaluate whether she is convinced or not, they are ushered to the truck, made to sit away from prying eyes and finally headed to safety.
As they go, Illya feels exhaustion crashing down on him, no reasonable expectation for danger to keep him moving anymore, everything in him wanting to just let go and sleep.
Gaby is tucked under his arm, the string of curses she mutters as the badly kept street keeps jolting her leg a welcome reminder that she’s okay, and Solo is right in front of him, not yet the least bit okay, but alive, which is more than it seemed reasonable to hope for, before.
Illya forces himself to breathe, knowing that he won’t sleep, won’t dare taking his eyes off him, but hoping that relaxing a little will do him some good anyway.
They are fine, they have all made it out alive. This time, adds a voice in the back of his mind, a warning. It was too close.
Waverly thinks he did a good job. An excellent job, he said, and the praise is still ringing in Illya’s ears as he heads to the hospital, making him slightly nauseous with guilt. Just because he barely managed not to lose either of them, it doesn’t mean he did anything even remotely close to a decent job.
Gaby is alive out of pure luck, because no one came chasing after them. Solo is alive because he was stubborn enough not to die of blood loss on the way. Barely managing to salvage a mission gone to shit is not doing an ‘excellent job’.
Yet, in spite of the chains he drags with him with every step, he still finds it in him to smile when he finds Gaby sitting on Solo’s bed, her casted leg sticking out oddly as they argue over something.
Illya doesn’t even attempt to follow, the words merely a buzzing background as he makes his way to his seat next to the bed – careful to avoid Gaby’s hands as she gestures animatedly and almost smacks him in the face – and he just stares, relief going through him in waves with every breath he takes and every reminder that they are there, that it was close but no more than that.
You got lucky, comes the chastising thought, a reprimand, and he doesn’t dare thinking of what would have happened if he hadn’t been lucky, if Gaby had been shot down after he left her alone, if he hadn’t been fast enough and Solo had died before he could get him help—both thoughts fill him with such visceral horror that it’s hard to breathe, anything would be better than that, than losing either of them and knowing that it’s because of a choice he made—
“Hey,” Solo calls out, snapping his fingers in front of him. Illya starts a little, blinking to make himself focus on his face. Solo is frowning at him, looking carefully curious, which means he’s worried, and when he glances back at Gaby he finds her staring too.
“What?” Illya mutters, his heart hammering in his chest.
“You spaced out on us,” Solo only says. “Penny for your thoughts?” It’s said with a small smile and the light tone of someone who is ready to let him shrug everything off as a joke, and Illya’s stomach shrinks.
“I would take bullet,” he gets out, because it feels important.
“Uh? What do you mean?”
“If someone held me at gunpoint,” he explains, slowly. “And asked to choose between you. Bullet’s the better choice.” He doesn’t dare looking at them in the eye until Gaby reaches for his knee, giving him a tight squeeze.
“We know,” she says, quietly, her smile more of a reassurance than he’d be entitled to.
“Oh, I’m sure that you’d rip in half the poor fool who thought to try something like that,” Solo comments instead, waving him off. “Nothing to worry about.”
Illya snorts, shaking his head slightly and breathing a little more easily, letting himself be distracted by their chatter when Solo informs him that they were discussing vacations – because they’ve decided they are entitled to one, and though they are all fully aware of how their jobs work the two of them enjoy daydreaming – and debating where they should go.
Illya is just about grateful enough to be able to have a conversation with them at all that he doesn’t even feel like complaining about how literally every destination that they’ve thought about is a humid hell that is going to make him feel anything but relaxed. He’d follow them anywhere.