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Back in the very beginning, when he was ‘reading up on’ Illya Kuryakin, he was actually sitting at the cramped kitchen table with Gaby as she finished her third glass of wine, scanning a dossier Sanders had stupidly left in an unattended briefcase. It was a very thin dossier. Thin, haphazard, and obviously missing quite a bit of what was almost certainly crucial intelligence – in other words, CIA protocol, at least where he was concerned. But it gave him enough of a picture to be getting on with, and that was all he really needed.
Then was Rome, with all of...that, and then came Istanbul, and then Tangiers, and then Montevideo, and so on and so forth, until one day Napoleon Solo wakes up and realizes he’s been with this team for a good six months, and he’s...happy. Not only that, he’s content. Complacent, even. He’s stopped needling Peril to try to provoke his rage and started doing it to try to provoke a smile. He’s dropped his mask of insouciant charm around Gaby and begun to let her see him cranky and rumpled, getting more of her honesty in return. He’s been letting bits of himself out, too, unthinking remarks about his past and his priors – it never seemed like much, but taken as a whole in the clarity of hindsight it’s far more of a breadcrumb trail than he’d ever intended to leave for anyone.
He’s horrified. He’s disgusted. He needs to balance the scales, and he can’t take back everything he’s leaked out so he’ll just have to find out as many secrets as he’d revealed.
The knee-jerk panic of it all takes him to Waverly’s archive room one Wednesday night, but he only makes it halfway down the first page of Illya’s full, unredacted personnel file before a new and different sort of disgust hits. He slaps the folder shut and shoves it back into the drawer, then does the same with Gaby’s. Jesus Christ, he tells himself, get a grip. Isn’t this what you fucking wanted?
It is, but—
But not, he’s forced to admit, like this. He stands there in front of the looming filing cabinet for a good minute, trying to decide if he’s gone soft, lost his edge, or just lost his interest. He could explain it away as wanting more of a challenge, of distrusting anything that came so easily, if not for the shame still roiling in his gut even after his crime had been cut short.
He doesn’t want to know them like that, not anymore. Not from sterile pages and clinical descriptions, pieced-together evidence and judgements and the bare laying-out of griefs and betrayals.
Well, shit, he thinks. Looks like he’s gone soft after all. Sentimental, even. It’s probably going to get him killed, but at this point, who really cares? It was always going to be something; may as well be this.
He leaves the files, the room, the building, locking every door between him and his transgression, and makes it back to his flat with no one the wiser.
For his trouble he takes with him, as prize or punishment, a single word from Illya’s file. A word he doesn’t recognize. A word that was stamped, not written, on a part of the page that Sanders’ copy had blacked out. A word that waits silently in the back of his mind until he tries to go to sleep, and then stands boldly behind his eyelids.
Изменчивый
For the next few days the word sticks like a splinter, because even once he looks it up, it doesn’t make sense. Volatile, inconstant, changeable. Which, sure, Peril’s pretty famous for his rages, but that’s noted elsewhere, under his psychological profile: volatile personality disorder, неуравновешенная расстройство личности. So why note it twice, with a different word, and in a different style, and only redact one of the instances?
In the end he concludes that it has something to do with Illya’s father; that relatives of dissenters or traitors were labeled as liabilities, deserving of closer scrutiny and fewer freedoms, no matter how ardent and obedient their service to the party.
And that’s...sad, honestly. In a sour sort of way. Illya wants so badly to redeem himself, to prove himself, to make his horrible childhood worth it in some twisted, abnegating way, and all he is to them is that stamp on his file. Unreliable. Unworthy.
Frankly, it pisses him off, but there’s not really anything he can do or say about it. Unlike him, Illya is a patriot – he might not be blind to his country’s flaws, but he believes in its mythos enough to excuse them, at least for a time, and willingly consign himself to a life as a mistreated tool. If he’s determined to see himself as nothing more than a grenade to be thrown at obstacles to the Party, Solo has no business trying to change his mind.
The closest he gets to mentioning it is during an argument some weeks later, when he asks if Illya even knows how much contempt his beloved agency has for him. He really should have expected it to land badly, either because of his wording or because of Illya’s stolid inability to hear criticism of the people wielding him, but wow. So that topic is pretty well closed for the next, oh, two to twenty-four months, depending. Message received: he lets it go.
Mostly.
The problem he keeps running into is that Illya actually seems happy with them. They’ve all mostly figured out how to get along, the three of them, and while Waverly remains annoyingly enigmatic he’s not at all a bad handler. Sure, their work is dangerous, and their deadlines are often both literal and looming, but between the jobs there’s a life worth living – if you can figure out how. Solo knows how. Illya and Gaby, well, they’re figuring it out together.
And then Illya’s KGB handlers will check in with him, or force a meeting, or pull him behind the Curtain for a bit, and it’s back to the old Illya: tense, terse, and absolutely goddamn hair-triggered.
So like he said, it pisses him off. He gets a pretty good lid on it, though, and keeps it close. It bubbles up every now and then, like any annoyance does, but never on the same scale as that first fight. And that’s not to say there’s nothing about him that pisses Illya off in return, or that Gaby never drives him up the wall. They all get on each other’s nerves sometimes, that’s just life. They’re all figuring it out together.
But whenever Illya does something that teeters on the line between bravery and stupidity, whenever he puts himself in harm’s way to spare his team, whenever he risks his life for the sake of a world that will never know his sacrifices, whenever he speaks with open love and yearning for his home, his country, and all it has lost and all he hopes it can become, that word roils in Solo’s head. Изменчивый, изменчивый, изменчивый. This is who they would label unreliable. This is who they would call untrustworthy. This is who they would sneer at and decry. What more could they ask? What more could they want?
They always want more, though, don’t they. No matter which ‘they’ it is. That’s sort of what got them all into this mess, isn’t it.
Speaking of messes, Batak is a big one.
Bulgaria as a whole isn’t as grim as he’d expected, especially after Estonia – Christ, Estonia had been grim – and neither is it as precarious. It’s found a strange sort of balance under Zhivkov. The Soviets are appeased, the West thinks it’s found a willing ear, and the Bulgarian people are, for the most part, enjoying the fruits of industrialization.
Turning villages and their farmers into cities and their factory workers is no easy undertaking, though, and leaves no shortage of anger and worry behind. People don’t generally want to be forced from their homes and their lives to become so many cogs in a strange and unasked-for machine. People don’t want to have their families separated by the need to seek work far away down dusty roads, or to watch their forests felled and their mountains quarried.
People don’t want their rivers to be dammed into hydroelectric reservoirs that flood their villages and pasture lands.
They follow rumors of sabotage into the heart of Pazardzhik province, where the southern mountains stumble down into the central plains and take the waters of several rivers with them. Batak is the final reservoir in the planned chain, but the first to be completed, and stands poised to unleash absolute hell down the diminutive Matnitsa river and the several towns it runs through before joining the Chepinska and doing further damage.
Not quite on the scale of nuclear warfare, but still more than enough destruction to make headlines, catch the Soviets’ attention, and send Bulgaria the way of Hungary eight years before.
Surely, he thinks, surely no one is angry and stupid and desperate enough to try it, knowing what will follow. But they are, and he finds them, and they find him finding them, and then it all gets rather unpleasant.
Bulgarian is similar enough to Russian that he can kind of follow what’s happening around him, but his Russian isn’t perfect and Bulgarian shares more of its vocabulary than its grammar and he has a feeling that the gaps in his understanding are obscuring the most crucial pieces. Pretending to be unconscious can only help so much, especially when it’s only pretending to a point. But he hears “reservoir” and he hears “destroy” and he hears “freedom,” in and amongst all the rest, and he thinks God damn it, you idiots, it’s not worth it. He stopped trying to say anything pretty damn quickly, after Russian got guns pointed at him and English sparked an even more furious barrage of questions followed by a vicious hit with a rifle stock, and besides, he’s mostly pretending to be unconscious. But he hears, and he thinks, and he dreads. Hours, materials, truck (maybe?), Dorkovo, Kostandovo, Velingrad.
God damn it, you idiot, you’re tied up in a room and they’re going to blow up the fucking dam, Gaby and Illya are still in Batak, they don’t know, there’s no way to warn them.
He’s been here before, but this time Illya’s not going to come and save him.
Tomorrow. Morning(?)
Fuck.
He’s trying to listen, trying to think, but he can’t do both at once and he keeps losing the thread, keeps being pulled from one to the other.
How much, know, threaten
Should he go back to Batak to regroup with Gaby and Illya—
Plot, detonator, interrogate
—or make straight for the first town along the flood path and warn them?
Signal, reserve, make sure
It takes too long to get his hands free, and longer for them to leave him alone long enough to do anything with them.
As exits go, it isn’t graceful. He’d hoped for at least a few minutes’ head start, but gets less than one. Shouts that need no translation follow him out, pouring into the dusk. Shots follow shouts, none particularly close but all discernibly in his direction. Adrenaline takes over: he runs.
He has the map in his mind (This road isn’t going anywhere) and as much of a plan as he’d made. All thoughts of going to Batak are trampled into the ground with such heavy pursuit – he should at least try to head that way, try to pick up a car, something that will help (If you’re going to run, Cowboy, at least run towards something), but if there are this many here by the dam, how many more are scattered around? How much of Batak is in on this? If there are more of them, then maybe this will cause enough of a stir that Gaby and Illya know the game is up, and they can fall back on their contingency. They all know the risks on this one; they all know the priorities.
His, right now, is drawing attention away, preferably without getting shot, and making his way to Dorkovo and warning them. Reservoir, flood, danger, evacuate, hills – all words he’s heard here, cognates with the Russian. Hell, he can draw them a picture if he has to. He just has to get there. Follow the curve of the valley, but not too low, just in case. If he hears an explosion, he’ll only have seconds to get high enough, and with that much water that’ll be pretty damn high.
And that’s pretty much all he manages to think about that. Running for your life is hard work; in the closing dark, over terrain that’s difficult in daylight, it takes just about everything you have.
He can’t say how much later the adrenaline wears off, or how long before that the shooting had stopped and the shouts had faded into the forested distance. Everything has been condensed to pure, stripped purpose.
Keep moving.
You stop, you die.
Keep moving.
He keeps moving.
He’s not running, anymore. Too dangerous in the dark, in the dense woods, with dips and valleys and drop-offs criss-crossing the smoothly drawn hills on his maps. He jogs when he thinks he can without risking life and limb, downhill and over brief patches of flat, and walks when he can't. Rocks and roots that would be troublesome during the daylight are treacherous at night, and night comes early in the trees. He's rolled his ankles and bruised his heels more times than he can count, and his thighs and calves ache with the shrieking tension of fibers drawn near to breaking, but he keeps moving. Runs when he can, walks when he can't.
He's been walking more and more, as the dark deepens and he feels more and more what the adrenaline burned. It’s not free, someone had told him once. The more you use, the more you’ll pay for it later. He’d used a lot. He’s paying for it now.
But he keeps moving.
Keep moving.
Keep moving.
You stop, you die.
Keep moving.
Keep moving.
He keeps moving.
Keep
Moving.
(What the hell is he even doing out here?)
Keep
Moving.
(Follow the curve of the valley. Dorkovo. Reservoir, flood, danger, evacuate, hills.)
Stop
Die.
(Curve?)
Keep
Moving.
(Haven’t hit it yet. Underestimated the terrain. And the dark.)
Keep
Moving.
(Jesus, it’s cold.)
Stop
Die.
(Keep moving, then.)
Keep
Moving.
How many hours has it been? Doesn’t matter, not morning yet. Still time.
His foot doesn't lift high enough, toe catches on a rock, sends him reeling. Catches himself on a tree, rights himself, keeps moving.
Dorkovo. Kostandovo. Velingrad.
Stop.
Die.
Keep.
Moving.
He finally hits the curve.
He barely notices.
Pезервуар, наводнение, oпасность, эвакуировать, холмы
Keep moving.
--
Резервуар.
Наводнение.
Oпасность.
Эвакуировать.
Холмы.
Keep.
Moving.
When a figure steps out of the trees just ahead of him, the adrenaline comes back fast, and with more force than he would have thought possible. His stumbling walk turns to a lunge without his say-so and sends him head-first into the guy, taking them both to the ground.
He’d have trouble in a fair fight right now, so don’t let it get fair.
He’s on the guy’s chest, hands around his neck, before he parses the sounds in the air and the sight in front of him.
Сoлo. кaубой.
Solo. Cowboy.
It’s Illya.
Lying in the frost-crusted dirt, looking up at him, hands held open and away even as Solo tried to throttle him.
He scrambles off, trips on nothing, and winds up on his knees again, breathing hard, heart pounding. Staring.
“Solo,” Illya says again, unmoving.
“Illya,” Solo says, and almost chokes as the word comes up out of his dry throat.
Illya finally sits up, then and approaches warily. “Are you okay?” he asks, crouching down in front of him.
“Great,” Solo croaks. Illya frowns, slings the pack off his back and pulls out a canteen. He’s moving slowly, without looking away.
Solo takes the bottle – and can’t get the damn thing open. One hand won’t close tightly enough to unscrew the cap, and the other won’t hold the rest of it still. Huh. It’s cold, isn’t it? He shivers, hard, and then can’t seem to stop.
Illya says something under his breath, and suddenly he’s much closer, warm hands on Solo’s face.
(Warm?)
“You’re cold,” Illya says, pointlessly, like he’s worried. “And your face...they hit you?”
Solo blinks. Did they? Oh right, the rifle. Odd that he hasn’t really noticed the pounding in his head, the ache in his temple and around his eye. “Yeah.”
“Hm. Explains some things.” And with that Illya takes the unopened canteen, opens it, and passes it back. “Slow,” he says. “Small sips.”
As if he doesn’t know. He wets his lips and tongue, rolls the water around in his mouth until it feels dry again. Does it a couple more times. “Good,” says Illya. “Now, come.”
Right. Dorkovo. Kostandovo. Velingrad. They should be close by now. “Where?” he asks, meaning where the hell are we? but Illya just takes his arm and pulls him gently to his feet, then away from the path.
“Shelter,” he says, like that makes any sense at all. They’re plenty high enough to be safe, so shouldn’t they keep trying to get to the town to warn people?
“The dam—”
“It’s okay,” Illya says. “It’s okay. It’s safe. It’s fine.”
“How?”
“Later,” Illya promises. “Long story.”
They’re mirroring each other, all simple words and short syllables, like Illya’s just as exhausted as he is. Must be, if he followed… If he… Wait a minute.
“How,” he asks again, and digs in his heels, literally. “How did you—”
“Doesn’t matter. Come on, Solo. We’ll find a place to rest.”
The word does something to him, tears him in two. He can’t— He has to— But god, he’s so tired, he wants—
Keep moving.
You stop, you die.
But that isn’t true anymore, is it?
(Is it?)
He’s moving again, this time where Illya leads. One foot after the other, same as he’s been doing this whole time. His eyes had adjusted to the dark after a little while, but only enough to keep him from running into a tree or stepping off of a cliff. Roots, rocks, dips, bushes, all still hazards, all still attested to in his bruises and scratches and sore ankles. Illya doesn’t seem to have a problem with any of them. The path he’d been on was never really a path, just the most passable track between the tall, spindly pine trees crowding the slopes, but the track Illya takes him down is just as passable, if not more so. Shelter, he’d said, but where? What kind? Had he been here before? How had he— But he doesn’t ask. Doesn’t want to talk. Hurts this throat, cracks his lips. Jars his teeth against each other.
He loses himself again for a bit, in the rhythm of step and breath and in and out and right and left, eyes on the ground, half-focused, move and breathe, don’t stop, don’t stop— Until they stop.
It’s not shelter. It’s an eroded space under a tangle of tree roots on a slightly higher rise, scarcely large enough for one of them.
Clearly Illya disagrees, because he sets his pack on the ground, then takes off his long coat and lays it in the hollow before starting to take off his sweater.
Oh. That’s what’s happening.
“I’m not hypothermic,” Solo says carefully. His lips don’t want to move around the sounds, but it’s just cold, that’s all. He’s been moving. It’s cold now that he’s stopped, but that doesn’t mean— They don’t have to—
“Not yet,” Illya agrees, now in just a turtleneck. “But you are exhausted, and you have concussion. We are too far from villages to find one tonight, so we rest here, and warm you up.”
Warm you up. That sounds...specific. And he doesn’t have a concussion. He lost a bit of time at the beginning, and his head hurts, but he’s not dizzy, not confused, not having trouble thinking. “No, I don’t.”
Illya rolls his eyes and shoves the sweater against Solo’s chest. He grabs it reflexively, holding it close. “Of course not. You were just hit very hard, could not understand what was being said around you, and then ran off into the woods. Very normal behavior, yes.”
“They were shooting at me,” Solo snaps. “And they were talking about blowing up the dam. I had to—”
Illya takes him by the shoulders. “Solo,” he says very deliberately, “they thought you were going to blow up the dam. They thought you had the detonator. The ones who took you, they had already stopped the plan. They thought you were back-up, another trigger-man. They questioned you, you would not answer. You would not speak. They thought it meant they were right, so when you ran, they chased you. They are not chasing you anymore. Everyone is safe. But you are not acting like yourself, not thinking like yourself, because you have a concussion. It’s okay,” he adds with a faint smile. “It’s not your fault.”
“I—“
“It’s okay,” Illya says again, with finality. “We can talk about it later, but for now, just...trust me, please.”
How does he know all of this? How did he find him? How did he catch up to him, in the dark – and not just catch up, but circle around him, unheard, to step out in front of him?
Maybe he does have a concussion, because nothing’s making any sense. But he wants to. He wants to so badly. To believe that everything is all right and trust that Illya knows what to do. He’s clammy with old sweat and shivering hard enough to hurt, and more tired than he’s ever been in his life.
“Fine,” he concedes, after a too-long pause.
“Thank you,” Illya says quietly, and squeezes his shoulders once before letting go. “Put on sweater, and go sit on coat.”
He does. He needs help with the first part, can’t seem to make himself uncross his arms from his chest long enough to do anything, but once it’s on something in him eases a little, something he hadn’t known was drawn so tight. He sits down in the hollow with his knees pulled up against his chest and drifts there, eyes closed and half aware, until a light touch on his shoulder pulls him back. In the low light, Illya’s eyes almost seem to be glowing. “I’m going to do something,” he says quietly. “You might not understand, and that’s okay, I will explain later. But you don’t have to be afraid. I won’t hurt you.”
There’s a frisson of unease at that, even though he knows how this works. Skin to skin contact, shared warmth, it’s not like he’s never—
But then Illya...changes. Changes in a way that shouldn’t be possible, shouldn’t be real, doesn’t have words to describe it. Because a few long, confusing seconds later, where Illya had been crouching on the ground sits a massive, pale wolf. A wolf with oddly blue, oddly familiar eyes.
Solo’s back is pressed against the dirt behind him before he knows he’s moved, every instinct wide awake and shrieking at him to do something, but what the hell can he do? He’s so perfectly cornered, so utterly outmatched, that even as his body scrambles to save itself his mind accepts his death and goes terrifyingly blank. It takes several frantic heartbeats to remember what Illya had just said. I’m going to do something. You don’t have to be afraid.
He takes one shaky breath, and then another. The wolf holds perfectly still, only blinking once. A deeper breath, then: “You have got to be fucking kidding me.”
The wolf huffs and flicks its ears back. It sends his heart stuttering again, that sign of displeasure from so dangerous a predator, but at the same time there’s something so Illya about the movement that he almost wants to laugh. It’s a strange and viscerally unpleasant combination.
“That is you, isn’t it?” he has to ask, and gets a disconcertingly human eye-roll in response. He shudders. He can’t make it make sense, can’t reconcile what he sees with what all the evidence tells him to believe. This can’t be happening. He’s hallucinating, he’s bleeding into his brain, he’s having a seizure, a stroke, something, because people don’t just cha—
Wait.
Изменчивый.
A word stamped on a personnel file, redundant and confusing and offensive. And misunderstood. Not an indictment of character. Not a denigration of loyalty. Not changeable as in volatile, changeable as in able to change.
“Holy shit,” he says weakly. And then, to his very great embarrassment, he passes out.
Later, of course, he blames the fact that he was exhausted, freezing, and, yes, concussed.
When he wakes up – sore, confused,and seemingly tucked into a very plush sofa – it takes a while to reorient himself. The air on his face is crisply cool, his breath steaming gently, but the rest of him is warm. There’s muted birdsong coming from somewhere high above, and the stiff rustling of evergreen and dried leaves in the wind. His back is stiff, his legs and feet ache like he’s been beaten, and for long, slow moments the only response he has to any of that is, huh. Okay.
Then the details start to piece themselves together. He’s lying on the ground, in the woods, with no memory of how he came to be here. One side of his face feels tight and tender over a throbbing cheekbone, and the ache reaches around to the back of his head. He’s curled up tightly, presumably to conserve body heat, but surrounded by something soft and so warm he wonders why he’d bothered.
Soft, warm, and breathing. The rise and fall against his back is what gives it away first, followed shortly after by the realization that it’s not just his exhales fogging the air.
That’s when the memories come slinking back. When he gets to Illya’s revelation, his nervous system makes a halfhearted attempt at summoning up some of the panic from before, but quickly gives it up as a waste of time and energy. Easier to just accept it. Besides, if it had been the product of a head injury, he probably would have died in his sleep. If he’s awake, it can’t have been that bad; if it hadn’t been that bad, he’s not hallucinating, and some people are just...изменчивый.
Frankly, he’s more concerned with the fact that he had, as Illya had said, “run off into the woods” with some half-cocked notion of playing Pheidippides instead of just contacting his handler to have the message relayed. Less than half-cocked. Quarter-cocked. He sighs. “Any chance we don’t tell Gaby about this?” he asks out loud. The wolf lifts its head, moving Solo’s own, and makes a sort of whining sound he can only describe as condescending.
“Yeah, I figured.”
The wolf huffs. Then he shifts, unwinding himself from around Solo and eeling out of the hollow they’d been sleeping in. He stands to his full height and shakes himself out once there’s room, and Solo feels a little less embarrassed about passing out the first time he saw it because Jesus Christ. He’s got to be at least four feet tall at the shoulder, and a good seven feet long.
“Good to know conservation of mass still holds up,” he says, a little faintly. The wolf – Illya – grins. His teeth are terrifying. Two hundred pounds sure makes for a lot of wolf. “Should I, uh, look away while you change back?” He had undressed first, after all, and his clothes are still...oh. Draped over Solo like a patchwork quilt, minus the sweater he’s wearing and the coat on the ground under him. “You’ll probably want these, huh.” Illya shrugs. He’s never seen a quadruped shrug before. “Unless you’re planning to stay like that?”
He realizes it’s pretty stupid to keep asking questions of someone who can’t talk back, but Illya’s figured out how to roll his eyes as an animal Solo’s pretty sure shouldn’t be able to do that, so a nod or a head-shake should be easy enough. But of course Illya doesn’t do that. He just reaches down with his huge head, plucks the pile of clothing up in his teeth, and trots off out of sight with it.
The air abruptly gets much colder, and he still hasn’t worked up to taking off the sweater when Illya reappears in his human form, dressed in rumpled dark pants and his ubiquitous turtleneck and seemingly unbothered by the cold, and shoos Solo off the coat. This exit isn’t a graceful one either – his legs are half asleep, his back is killing him, and moving too quickly makes his head swim. He manages, though, and gets to his aching feet. He still hasn’t taken off the sweater, but Illya doesn’t seem to expect him to. He picks up the coat, shakes it out with a hard flap, and puts it on, not even glancing at the dirt pressed into it. “Ready?” he asks.
“I guess.”
Illya nods, curt, and removes the canteen from the pack before putting that on as well. “Keep drinking,” he says, “and tell me if you need to stop. Downhill can be harder, sometimes.”
It is. They go slowly, but only for Solo’s sake – Illya is almost preternaturally sure-footed on the uneven ground, and seems to be following trails that Solo can’t discern. If he’d been alone, he probably could have run down from the mountains with his eyes closed.
“So,” Solo says, after they’ve been walking for perhaps half an hour. “How did you find me?”
Ahead of him, Illya answers without turning. “Scent,” he says.
Solo stops. “You’re shitting me.”
“Come on, Cowboy.”
“You tracked me over miles by my smell?”
“I will leave you in the woods.”
He would, the bastard. Even after coming to find him. Solo starts walking again. “Are you following a scent now?” he asks on impulse.
“Yes,” Illya says evenly. “Deer. They know the easiest way down to the water.”
“You’re making that up.”
“A herd came through two days ago.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Illya shrugs, unconcerned.
“Where are we, anyway?”
“Not sure. We’ll find out when we get to village.”
As it turns out, the village they reach after a few more hours and a distance Illya insists is less than five miles but which Solo swears can’t have been less than ten, is Draginovo. When they learn this, Illya politely thanks the woman who told them, pulls out his map, finds the relevant section, and points with two fingers at Draginovo and Dorkovo, about six miles apart. His eyebrows are scathing.
“Oh, shut up,” Solo tells him, but without any force. He’s dirty, he’s tired, he’s sore, and the head injury is making itself known in ways it hadn’t last night.
Illya holds his pose a second longer, then relents and puts the map – and his eyebrows – away.
“So what now?” Solo asks, mostly rhetorically. He knows what now, he just doesn’t relish the thought of it. A village this size probably won’t have a telephone, which means they’ll have to keep going south, to Velingrad, and then try to find one there to call Gaby or Waverly and arrange to be picked up. It’s that or hope that someone here will take them back to Batak in a farm cart, but that’s a pretty slim chance.
“Now,” Illya says with a faint smile, “we wait for Gaby.”
Because of course he’d pocketed one of his bugs before haring off after Solo, leaving his tracking equipment with Gaby, and of course she’d been monitoring them, waiting for the signal to come down from the mountains and into an area accessible by road.
She drives up an hour later in a truck probably older than she is, waits for them to climb in next to her, and takes off without a word, heading back towards Pazardzhik, where Waverly is waiting for them.
(She has plenty to say about the whole episode, just not right then. They’ve all had a long night, and chewing out can wait until after they’ve slept.)
Two days later, as they’re preparing to leave Bulgaria, Solo stops by Illya’s room at the pension they’ve been staying in. “So,” he says, after the door is closed behind him. “Does Gaby know?”
Illya doesn’t pretend not to know what he’s talking about. “She knows,” he admits. “But she hasn’t seen it.”
“Does Waverly?”
Illya’s eyes go flat. “It’s in my file.”
“Yes, but is it actually explained anywhere? The word choice seems...deliberately vague.”
Illya sighs and puts down his book. “It is...complicated,” he says eventually. “There have always been such people in Russia, in certain families, but before the Revolution they were shunned. Distrusted. Seen as savages. The Soviets saw a use for us, and brought us in – quietly. We are soldiers, guards, agents, placed where we are needed, but we are not talked about. I was the only one in my unit, but I never shifted unless I was alone. Too dangerous.”
“And are you all…” Solo trails off. It seems rude to ask, really, but he’s curious.
“Wolves?” Illya finishes dryly. “Yes. There used to be others, other lines, with other forms – bears, I think, and maybe others, I don’t know – but they have disappeared. Maybe they are just better at keeping the secret, but I think they are gone. I think there is no room for secrets anymore.”
“So your family, it’s in one of these ‘lines?’”
“My father,” Illya confirms quietly. “And his mother. I don’t know who else. We are...shrinking. It seems with every generation there are fewer. To my knowledge, I have never met another, other than my father. Sometimes I think that I might be the last.”
“I’m sorry,” Solo says. There doesn’t seem to be anything else to say. Except: “But for what it’s worth, I’m glad you are who you are. And I’ll keep the secret, if it needs to be kept. It can’t have been easy, choosing to trust me with it, but I’m grateful that you did, and I won’t betray that trust.”
“I know,” says Illya. “It’s why I trust you in the first place. You are very strange, you know, but I’m beginning to understand you.”
“I’m strange?” Solo can’t help but ask, and Illya rolls his eyes like the wolf does.
They’re all strange, he guesses, each in their own ways. But they’re all figuring it out together, and that’s what counts.