“It’s not as bad as it looks.” for Napoleon Solo pretty please :3 (Napoleon/Illya if you feel like it, but gen fic is fine too~)
(I always feel like napoleon/illya uu hopefully I’m not too rusty!)
1. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”
Napoleon hopes he heard wrong.
He really hopes he did, except he’s pretty sure he didn’t, and the fact that Illya is looking at him as if it’s Really Not A Big Deal isn’t exactly helping right now.
“Told you,” Illya shrugs, “it is... not as bad as it looks.”
Napoleon looks at the papers Illya dropped on Waverly’s desk a moment ago, after their handler left the room because they obviously needed space, then he takes them in his hands. Illya doesn’t stop him, and he knows he can read Russian.
“Your former employers basically implying that the moment you set foot beyond the Iron Curtain you would be dead or deported in the span of the minimum amount of time it would take them to find you is not as bad as it looks now?”
Illya shrugs minutely again. “Your former employers said that you were... dishonorably discharged, I believe?”
“Yeah, well, honorably discharged doesn’t mean that the moment I step foot in the States they’ll kill me, so don’t try to spin it to make it seem like it’s the same. Because it’s not.”
Illya says nothing for a while and Napoleon puts the papers back on the desk, shaking his head and moving to the other side of it, where Illya is standing without moving a muscle.
“You know,” he says, “you can be pissed off about it.”
“Maybe I am,” Illya admits, slowly, “but it still is... not as bad as it looks.”
“Care to explain me how? No need to give me a speech, but I do not believe for a second that it’s not as bad as it looks.”
Illya looks down at his hands, then at him for a moment, then -
“I could be angry,” he says. “But I am here now.” He seems to think about it for a moment. “I was not... going to go back, unless... this does not work out. And it is working out, isn’t it?”
His hand twitches and Napoleon doesn’t even blink before threading their fingers together.
“Then I cannot go back, but I did not have much to go back. This work is... better. And -” He squeezes Napoleon’s hand, slowly but surely. “It looks bad. But it really is not.”
He’s still not quite looking at him, and when Napoleon reaches out and turns Illya’s head towards him, hand touching his face, he does look back... with a slight flush to his cheeks.
“Peril,” he smiles, “are you saying that I am the reason it’s not so bad that your own country wants you dead?”
“Do not get ahead of yourself,” Illya says, but he’s maybe halfway smiling as he says it. “But you might be part of it. Might.”
“Look at that,” Napoleon says, moving right in front of him, “if that’s how things are, maybe I should give you an incentive to not make you rethink this statement.”
“How so?” Illya says, and now his voice went a bit lower and softer and he’s still a terrible flirt but he’s trying and Napoleon is delighted of it.
“Oh, I have my ways,” he says, inching closer. “And Waverly said he wasn’t going to come back for an hour or so.”
“You do not want to fuck in his office,” Illya blurts.
“I am not that stupid and I like this job,” Napoleon says, “we can do that later. But,” he inches even closer, a breath separating their mouths, “I can absolutely kiss you in his office. Properly. How about that?”
“I could allow that,” Illya says, and then he doesn’t speak anymore because Napoleon has pressed him against the wall and kissed him soundly, and a moment later Illya is kissing him back and their tongues are touching and Illya’s hands are on his waist and yes, they need to get home -
But he thinks that for now he can absolutely provide his incentives right here.