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They’re in New York when it happens, fortunately; in New York and in Napoleon’s apartment, or at least one which belongs to someone who Napoleon tries on, from time to time, when he’s feeling worn-through, drawn tight by the stresses of the job and the demands it makes upon him and the endless long hours of travel and in need of somewhere quiet, where he won’t be bothered or prevailed upon to be anything other than what — and who — he wants.
Unfortunately, Napoleon hasn’t had time to clear up from the last time he was here, and so when he crashes into the coffee table, which topples, he takes a cut-crystal decanter with him, and something which is either whiskey or perfume, as far as he can tell when he’s picking himself up and wiping blood from his nose. A half-second later, he can smell it, smoky and sharp — whiskey, then — but then there’s a shoulder in his stomach, and it’s all Napoleon can do to curl around it and soften the impact of his back against the wall.
His head snaps back anyway, simple physics, and that’ll hurt in the morning, with the persistent ache of a pulled muscle. Pity about the whiskey, Napoleon thinks, I could have used that, but — then there’s an arm across his throat, and another over his nose and mouth, and — he starts thinking of rather more useful things, like the points of light at the edge of his vision, and the way that he was out of breath to begin with, and then, incongruously, thinks instead of the way that Illya, face half-turned away as it is, listening for a knock at the door, has him transfixed, no blade but his body and the way that he moves as if doing what he was made to do.
There’s blood starting to soak through the shoulder of Illya’s shirt, Napoleon realizes, almost imperceptible against the black, but enough of it to show through the thick material, slick, and, with the last of his air, he says “—Illya, your stitches—” and though his voice is more a creak than anything else, beyond rough and most of the way to gone, Illya meets his eyes for an interminable moment, all astonished realization, and Napoleon mistakes him for simply one more trick of the light.
Illya doesn’t disappear, though, when he pulls his hand away from Napoleon’s mouth, and lets up the pressure on his throat, the way that the sparks swimming through and eating away at Napoleon’s vision do, when he blinks; he doesn’t drop him, either, but helps Napoleon over to the sofa, and lets Napoleon wave him away. “Watch out for the pieces,” Napoleon says — voice rough, now, but at least present — and indicates the liquid soaking its way into the carpet.
“Waste of whiskey,” Illya says, and won’t meet his eyes.
“There’s more in the sideboard,” Napoleon says, “though if you get the vodka from the freezer, you can get ice at the same time.”
It hadn’t started with the coffee table, of course. It had started in a screening room — a possible money-laundering operation, diverting funds to weapons stockpiles — and ended in Times Square, of all places, their quarry lashing out and putting six stitches in Illya’s shoulder, and disappearing into the unfriendly night, no place for good intentions. Napoleon had to confess that it had been more the ground that they had covered, from Algiers to New York, which had been the surprise, and not the endpoint in and of itself. They had been charged with finding a paper trail, an aim in which they had succeeded, and not with protecting the witnesses, an aim in which they were rather less certain of their success, and Napoleon had watched Illya turn further and further inwards, summarizing their findings, and said: “It’s late, and there’s a passable Italian place down the street from mine that does takeout.”
Illya had looked like nothing more than a beast at bay as he followed Napoleon into the cab, and had made it all the way to the front door before his motions became deliberate, those of someone conserving movement out of fear, or a desire to make every one count. Napoleon had watched him in the doorway, and set his bag — the chef’s daily experiment in tortellini, an entirely unknown dish redolent of basil — down on the counter, and noted the tap of Illya’s finger out of the corner of his eye.
“We did our jobs, you know,” he had said, and shrugged off his jacket, draping it over the back of a chair. “A week’s work well done.”
“But not adequate,” Illya had said. “We failed.”
“We didn’t,” Napoleon countered. “We did exactly what we were assigned to do, and now someone else — better equipped, I hope — will figure out where to go from here.”
“How can you,” Illya had started, and then tried again: “People will get hurt, because of this.”
“People get hurt anyway,” Napoleon said. “People who don’t deserve it get hurt, all the time. What would you have me do — buy all of them dinner and put them in a cab to the airport? It’s—” he had sighed “—we can’t save all of them, and sometimes, someone else has a better chance. Hard truths or kind lies; your pick.”
It hadn’t helped. Napoleon hadn’t expected it to, but he hadn’t quite expected Illya to slump over on himself, and for a moment he hadn’t been sure if it was exhaustion or effort, but then Illya had raised a hand, and he had been able to see it shaking from across the room.
“Your bathroom,” Illya had said, still not looking up, and Napoleon, tired of walking on eggshells, had sighed.
“I won’t break, you know,” he said, and Illya had, if anything, drawn further into himself, all tension held in check. “If that’s what you’re scared of, I’m not.”
“Smart is not the same as scared,” Illya said, “and I thought you were smart.”
Napoleon’s sigh had been all exasperation, that time. “Smart,” he said, “is not the same as self-aware,” and he would have said more, but perhaps it was the tone of his voice, or the way he had half-turned away, uncalculated but not unconscious — either way, it meant that he hadn’t seen Illya move, the doubtless elegance of his pivot — but he hadn’t missed Illya’s elbow in his ribs, or the the leg hooked behind his knee that had him suddenly stumbling.
On his way to the floor, Napoleon thought that he could probably kick the breath out of Illya if he tried, and snapped his heel out just so, but halfway through the realization wondered if it would help or hurt, and instead rolled away from the impact, getting to his knees just in time for Illya to catch him in the face with an elbow. It hurt, unspeakably so, and Napoleon felt the heat of it almost immediately, a swelling that would need ice; he fell back, and Illya had kicked him in the ribs, and Napoleon curled in on himself and had told himself that he’d suffered worse, that he’d live through this, too, and that, most difficult of all, he could take it without fighting back. He had a chance, if he was smart about it, and Napoleon had seen Illya in action enough to be smart about it, now; that wasn’t the point, though.
So he had kept his elbows up and his shoulders forward, and hadn’t quite managed to block Illya’s left hook to his jaw, or the awkward blow to his face that split his lip, and left him disoriented and dizzy, but had gotten to his feet nonetheless, and when Illya had lunged, Napoleon had gone backwards straight into the coffee table.
Shifting on the sofa, Napoleon thinks that he’ll have some interesting bruises in the morning, if he doesn’t already, and from the most unremarkable item of furniture possible. “Don’t forget the ice,” he calls, “and a cloth,” and Illya doesn’t reply, but reappears with a bottle under one arm, and the supplemented sewing box usually taped under Napoleon’s sink under the other, and two glasses in one hand, and a bowl in the other, which he sets down on the table, which creaks in protest. Napoleon sympathizes.
“Self-aware,” Illya says, finally, when Napoleon has the ice wrapped in a dishcloth, and pressed to his cheek, “is the same as stupid, it seems,” and pours for both of them. Napoleon watches the contrast of transparencies, liquid over ice, in his glass, and when he picks it up, presses it to the split of his lip rather than tasting it.
“A rose by another other name,” Napoleon starts, and sips, and winces; his lip is rather more split than he thought, and the blood hasn’t clotted nearly enough for it to not sting viciously when he gingerly licks at it, salt and slick with it.
“Could have been dead?” Illya inquires pointedly.
“Is a rose,” Napoleon says. “Don’t ask me to explain.” His voice is still rough, and he’ll probably be feeling it for a day or two, but that’s nothing new, by itself. Napoleon takes a detached inventory: split lip, and the bruise coming up around his eye, and over his cheekbone; another on his jaw, or just under it, surprisingly tender already, and the tight pull across his shoulders and neck. His ribs ache too, not with the urgency of a fracture, but in a muted way that suggests bruises like watercolor wash, indistinct edges and colored to match, which will take days to fade to a respectable shade. The ice in the cloth is soaking through already, and Napoleon holds it against his jaw for a moment before resigning himself to a little swelling, and dropping it back into the bowl. “Let me see your shoulder,” he says, instead. “If you clean it up, I’ll fix your stitches, and medical won’t put another black mark next to your name.”
“I can do it,” Illya says, and Napoleon snorts.
“I don’t doubt it,” he says, “but one-handed and in the mirror is more trouble than it’s worth, if you don’t have to. I promise I won’t turn you into a patchwork project.”
Illya doesn’t look convinced, but he takes the peroxide from the box, and heads into the kitchen, pulling his shirt over his head as he goes; Napoleon considers, as he always does, the ribbon-widths of the old scars on his back that Illya hasn’t told him about, and the ones that he doesn’t remember, and the glassy knot of one which they both know, and try to avoid talking about. Christ, his head hurts; between the vodka on an empty stomach, and less sleep than he’d care to think about, and the deadening effect of new aches, Napoleon watches Illya around the doorframe, dabbing the stickiness of semi-congealed blood away from his shoulder, and wonders if he’s helped at all.
Illya comes back with a saucer, and splashes peroxide into it; Napoleon cuts the thread to length, pulling it between his fingers, and chills it atop the needle in the saucer. He takes the scissors from the kit, and wipes them down, and then looks up at Illya; without needing to be told, Illya settles on the floor, legs folded, and leans into the sofa, and waits, face wiped clean of expression.
Medical had done a good job of stitching him up, and Napoleon almost hates to pick the thread out, cutting the loops and then pulling them through with tweezers, but it has to be done, and he takes his time, careful to pick out every last segment. He tips peroxide onto the corner of a piece of gauze, and cleans where Illya couldn’t, and doesn’t think about the fresh bright pain of it, the sting of the disinfectant and the reopened wound. Illya doesn’t show any indication that he’s noticed, beyond going closed-off and quiet, and Napoleon wonders for a moment if he’s breathing at all.
“If you’re getting tired,” Illya says, and Napoleon can feel the very slight shift in the way that Illya barely turns to look at him, “I’m sure I can manage.”
“Tired nothing,” Napoleon says. “Quality takes time.”
“Will that be before or after it heals by itself,” Illya says, and Napoleon dabs at the wound one last time, the ragged end of it where the blade had snagged and torn, rather than slicing, no longer driven by momentum, and not sharp enough to cut through on its own. Illya doesn’t wince, but he goes quiet again, and Napoleon wonders what it’s like, when he disappears like that.
“If you keep talking, after,” Napoleon says, and fishes the needle and thread out of the saucer, holding them up to the light. He threads the needle first try, and bends to work, and loses himself in it, the rhythm of press and puncture and pull, and at the end of ten minutes, or maybe ten years, he looks at his work— six neat stitches, even and not too tight — and remembers to breathe again, and ties the thread off. “It won’t win any prizes,” he says, “but it should hold, and if you’re lucky, medical might even mistake it for one of their own.”
“Lucky,” Illya scoffs, and Napoleon realizes that he still hasn’t leaned away, though his shoulders are knotting even more. “Who needs lucky when you have good.”
“Just passable,” Napoleon replies, and doesn’t turn, even when Illya turns to look first at the stitches, and then at him, too close, and yet Napoleon still doesn’t pull away, just holds himself still as if he’s being inspected.
“Good,” Illya repeats, and Napoleon almost believes it for a second, but then: he isn’t, not really, not at all. He sits up and drops the needle in the saucer.
“Your standards are too low,” he says, instead, and starts packing things away — one last wipe for the tweezers and scissors, the needle wrapped in gauze and packed in the center of a roll of bandages — before he catches himself, and sets aside gauze and bandages to cover the stitches. Illya is still leaning against the sofa, and Napoleon considers the width of his shoulders and the way that, now that he’s no longer expecting pain, Illya has gone relaxed and lazy into the cushions. He cuts the gauze to size, and Illya holds it in place, and Napoleon tapes it down as best he can and doesn’t think about the steadiness of Illya’s hands, or how Illya’s fingers had felt pressed over his mouth.
“I could do with a shower,” Napoleon says, instead. “Start on the takeout, if you like.” He needs to be somewhere else, in a dark room with nobody watching, so that he can stop thinking, and fade into the nothing of the shadows; he needs Illya to stop trusting him with such casual lack of intent, and he needs to stop thinking about Illya going closed-off, and Illya going comfortably still, and Illya letting Napoleon put six stitches in his shoulder, such a small thing and yet of such sudden magnitude. Good. Napoleon needs, suddenly, to have never heard Illya saying that.
“In a while,” Illya says, and Napoleon, unbidden, looks at the curve of his back, and thinks of the way that Illya had slumped like that earlier, by the door, taut and held in check, and how he can’t tell what suits Illya more: threat, which he wears so well, or the way the lamplight spills over him now, almost tender.
“Suit yourself,” Napoleon says, and forces himself to turn away.
He’s halfway out of the room before Illya calls him. “Napoleon,” he says, and even without looking, Napoleon can imagine him, eyes half-closed, even as he settles back into trusting himself with sensation. “Thank you.”
Napoleon does turn back, then, even though he can’t see Illya over the back of the sofa. “Least I could do,” he says, a hard truth and a kind lie all at once, and doesn’t let himself think about what that might mean.