Chapter Text
It starts with Solomon Burke.
He has always hated American music. For years, it was rare for a mission to involve him leaving the Soviet bloc, and when he did, he discovered that the sound of rock n’ roll grated on his ears. He can’t pinpoint what he doesn’t like about it—the wildness of it, maybe, the raw, primal grind of passions unleashed and sobriety cast aside. Maybe it’s just the rhythms, unstructured, lacking the clean precision that he’s used to. Maybe it’s the sheer freedom of it, the improvisation, the ability to create anything from anywhere, the refusal to adhere to strict (Soviet) rules of form and style—patriotism, simplicity, celebration of the proletariat. Whatever the reason, he hates it.
It should not have surprised him that the little chop-shop girl takes to it like a duck to water. He doesn’t know (and isn’t going to ask) if she already is familiar with the gritty soul ballad pouring out of the radio. But he strongly suspects that she is just the type of woman to have amassed a secret stash of Western records, hidden somewhere in her tiny apartment and meant to be played late at night, so softly that they could barely be heard—a small but dangerous rebellion in East Berlin.
He huffs in irritation as the singer’s voice rises to a crescendo, the music and the rustling of movement behind him making it impossible to concentrate on his game of chess. She’s getting tipsy, he can tell, and it’s making him nervous. He would rather die a thousand deaths than betray it, but she makes him nervous—has had him off-balance since the moment she stared at him, big-eyed and resentful, in that dress shop in Berlin. He’s used to resentment, anger even, but the spark of something else simmering underneath her contempt had made the hair rise on the back of his neck. He hasn’t settled down since.
Behind him, the music throbs and pulses, and he pinches the bridge of his nose between his fingers in frustration. He doesn’t know what she’s doing back there, and he doesn’t want to know. In the interests of the mission (never mind his own sanity), he wants to finish his game and quietly go to bed. He does not want to think about her swaying to the music, eyes half-closed, mouth curved in a lazy smile. Nor does he want the insistent pounding of the bass to remind him of the thud of his pulse when he touched her earlier, his hands almost spanning her narrow waist, his ears pricked for the sharp hiss of breath that told him she felt the spark of that something too. No matter how hard he tries to concentrate on the game, he can still smell the perfume of her hair, feel the softness of her skin as he folded her fingers around his ring. This ridiculous music—some idiotic American moaning about his baby leaving him all alone—just makes the memory stronger, more real. He can’t deal with it anymore.
Exasperated, he tosses down the piece he’s been considering and turns to confront her. What he sees stops him dead, just for a moment. She’s not just swaying—she’s dancing, those absurdly large white sunglasses dwarfing her delicate face, her hips rolling fluidly, arms outstretched, fingers beckoning. And the look on her face—the teasing curve of her mouth, the tilt of that sharp little chin, the pure unfettered joy of her—makes his stomach twist in something sharper than lust and softer than affection.
Out of desperation, he masks the moment of weakness with a show of annoyance.
“I am going to bed—please, turn this off,” he snaps, and makes to brush past her.
She stops him cold.
“No fun dancing by yourself,” she observes, voice husky and just this side of flirtatious. “I need a partner.”
She shoves those ludicrously oversized sunglasses on top of her head and looks up at him, brown eyes glinting with a combination of mischief and alcohol and something he can’t quite put his finger on. The spark that sizzled under his skin in the dress shop is snapping now, bright and hot like a downed wire, and he thinks he’d better get away from her before it burns them both.
“No,” he rasps, hoping she will leave it that and let him go.
Of course she does not. “No, as in you can’t dance—or you don’t want to?” she asks, and he can’t help but notice as she sways in from of him that, barefoot, she barely comes up to his shoulder. She is impossibly tiny, and on the list of things Illya Kuryakin does not do, three things are right at the top: Western music, dancing, and tiny, unpredictable women.
“We’ll call it both,” he sneers, his tone just patronizing enough to get under her skin. She will brush him off, he thinks, let the vodka and her clear dislike of him send her off in a fit of temper. She’ll be angry for a little while—
--and then she reaches out and takes his hand, delicate fingers circling the broad wrist, and he’s sunk. Hopelessly, foolishly, recklessly sunk. She tosses her head, flicks her bangs out of her eyes, and brings her other hand up to hold his, moving him to the music with a surety he can never hope to copy. She’s smiling, clearly pleased, and it’s this (and only this) that lets her move him like a puppet, her small hands bracketing his much larger ones as she makes him clap.
He’s beginning to sink into the steady rhythm of the music when the crack of his own hand against his face snaps him out of it, sharply. She’s delighted with herself, he can tell, even as she murmurs patently false apologies, and he can’t help but laugh at her. Mercury in human form, that’s what she is—fluid and constantly in motion, impossible to predict, shining and beautiful. And when she tilts her head to the side, dimples flashing, and looks up at him through her lashes, he thinks for a single desperate moment that he would do anything, anything at all, to make her smile like that at him again.
The shock of the next slap hits him like being plunged abruptly into ice-water. He drops her hands and glares furiously, feeling like a damned fool. What game does she think she’s playing, this little East German mechanic? He’s KGB, for God’s sake, not some tame bear she can lead around on a string.
“You are not in East German chop-shop anymore,” he grits out between his teeth, still feeling the impact of his own hand stinging his cheek. Her smile this time is thinly-veiled malice as she picks up her abandoned glass and swirls the clear liquid with a steady hand.
“Still no drink?” she enquires, and he can almost see her fangs bared. His own temper flares—the desire to dominate, to control the situation, to corral her into something, someone, he can understand.
"Don’t make me put you over my knee,” he rumbles, and surprises himself with the empty folly of the threat. Then the other connotation of the words hits him, and he feels his ears turn red. God only knows what she’ll make of him now.
Apparently she takes it as a challenge.
“So you don’t want to dance,” she breathes, eyes flinty. She pulls off the glasses, drops them on the table. “But you do want to wrestle.”
This is not at all what he expected. “I did not say that—” he begins, because honestly, he can’t imagine fighting with an untrained girl half his size. A running start and two seconds later, he can’t imagine anything at all because she’s barreled full tilt into his solar plexus, and he’s trying to fall without letting her take the brunt of the impact.
He doesn’t really know why he’s surprised.
She fights fiercely, even if her technique is predictable, and he finds himself in the unenviable position of admiring her glowing cheeks and tumbled hair even as he dodges a well-placed elbow to the nose. Her fingernails almost make contact with his cheek before he rolls them again, knocking over the coffee table in the process, and their bodies are pressed so closely together that he can feel the furious breath she draws in before he hears it.
“You—are—holding—back,” she pants, writhing against him until he lets her loose out of self-preservation; if she shimmies those hips of hers beneath him one more time, he’s not going to be held responsible for what he might do.
“You—should not be—fighting someone—twice your size,” he grates out while he dodges a knee to the kidney. She’s impressively flexible (he will not be distracted by envisioning how that quality might play out in other, less violent scenarios), and he is hard-pressed to avoid her kicks and punches without hurting her.
She actually growls at him, and then they’re back at it again, rolling across the floor, smashing lamps and vases in their wake, slamming against furniture to a chorus of soul and splintering wood. He is holding back, terrified of snapping those fragile birdlike bones, but she makes it hard to not let loose everything he’s got. She’s all fire, his little mechanic, burning fast and hot and never asking for quarter, and the sight of her flushed and panting has arousal twisting sharp and hungry inside him.
The vodka is catching up with her, though, slowing her limbs and weighing down her eyes, and finally he lets her pin him down with only the barest effort, her arms held securely in his powerful hands, the only sounds in the room their harsh breathing and the wailing tenor drifting from the other room. Still moving to the music, she bobs and weaves above him, sliding lower and lower with every measure, until she’s hovering above him and their eyes lock and hold.
He can’t look away, not even when her hand slips and she jolts down, dangerously close to his face. Swallowing hard, he feels her other hand hit the carpet beside him, and now they’re almost nose-to-nose. In his head, the music fades away, and there’s nothing but Gaby’s heavy-lidded eyes, the drumming of her pulse beneath his fingers, and her lips, too near to his. He waits with coiled anticipation, lets her make the first move, and when she stretches out above him, so close he can almost taste her, his hands slide to her waist of their own volition. He can’t think, can hardly breathe, for the sheer want. It overtakes him.
When her lips graze his cheek, torturously slow, and then her head slowly droops and falls beside him, he can hardly believe his terrible luck. So close, he thinks, so close to what they both wanted, the desire running like a fast current under all the things that separate them—and then this. He lets his head fall to the carpet with a heavy sigh, feeling her weight warm and heavy on his chest. There’s nothing for it now but to put her to bed and then spend the night thinking about what might have happened if she hadn’t passed out just at that deeply inopportune moment.
He sits up slowly, holding her to his chest, her limbs loose and sprawled across his lap. (He wouldn’t mind being in this position again with a sober and fully aware Gaby, he thinks, and then flushes hotly at the thought. He has no business thinking such things about a woman who is, to all intents and purposes, currently dead to the world.) With a grunt of effort, he pushes to his feet, still holding her, and moves slowly over to her bed. Something in him is loath to put her down, to lose the sensation of delicate bones and surprisingly tough muscles wrapped around him, to no longer feel the brush of silky hair against his cheek. Nevertheless, he lays her down, tucks her in, and looks down at her, half-affectionate and half-bemused.
“Good night, little chop-shop girl,” he murmurs, resisting the urge to smoothe his hand over her hair, run his thumb along the curve of her cheek. He’s about to turn away, get ready for bed himself, when he feels a tug on his hand. Bewildered, he looks down. Her small hand is caught in his, as if to keep him there just a moment longer, and something in him that he thought was long dead twists painfully at the sight. He’d forgotten what this could feel like, this sudden fierce surge of tenderness that tightens like a band around his chest, makes his breath catch sharply in his throat. It’s at this precise moment that he realizes just how deeply in over his head he is—and it’s not even been a full day.
He needs to get away from this girl, and he needs to do it now.
She lets go of him after a moment, and he strides away like he’s fleeing the scene of a nuclear disaster. Moving on autopilot, he walks through the trashed living room, trying to ignore the awful mess they’ve made, and looks at the radio balefully.
It all started here, he thinks, glowering as he listens to a tenor voice croon, soulful and light—I guess you’d say, what can make me feel this way? My girl, my girl, my girl… If it hadn’t been for that song, that thrice-damned song, he wouldn’t be in this mess—wouldn’t be entertaining dangerous feelings of tenderness for an East German defector that would be out of place in any good Russian citizen, let alone a hardened KGB agent. It was the music, he tries to convince himself—the music and the vodka and perhaps a little residual tension being released. It wasn’t real, and it isn’t going to be real, and that is final. It has to be.
He switches off the radio (perhaps with a little more force than strictly necessary) and stalks to the bathroom to change into his pajamas. He knows full well he won’t sleep well tonight, not with Gaby’s steady breathing beside him, not after he knows the weight and warmth of her in his arms, has felt her lips so close to his own, knows how she looks when she smiles—really smiles, has seen the instinctive joy that radiates from her when she dances. He always wants most what he can’t have, and she’ll be no different. He’s sure of it.
Oh, but he hates American music.