An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Gen, 7000 words
Heather McNabb, Napoleon Solo, Illya Kuryakin
Heather McNabb's career as an airline hostess comes to an end in much the usual manner: she meets a man.
(Two men, really, though not at once, and she wouldn't know it until later—but that's getting ahead of the story.)
Or, the Innocents don't always go home at the end of the story.
To tallihensia, who requested this thing, and has been beyond patient with me: I can only guess if the finished product is anything like what you thought you were actually requesting, but thank you once more for the excuse to write it. (Will be matching your charity donation, btw -- it seems the least I can do after making you wait this long.)
To everyone else who might be here for my UNCLE fic: Yes, I have indeed finally gone and written actual gen for this fandom. Though I’m also sure that if you’d like to, you will have no trouble finding a little bit of subtext buried somewhere in this thing. ;) But let’s be honest -- this is still very much Heather’s story.
And to the minority who actually want to hear me ramble still further about my new pet aviation subject: Oh boy, have I got you covered.
After their final move to New York City--at Napoleon’s request and finally given the go-ahead from Waverly as their new home base--each agent had their own apartments, though Illya’s and Gaby’s were in the same building, and Napoleon had his own, private apartment a few blocks away. He’d had it since his time early in his career with the CIA and he was loathe to give it up at Waverly’s request. ‘Have to keep everyone together, Solo,’ he’d said. But the agreement was made after apartments were found nearby for the other two, and Napoleon was able to keep his lavish, decadent apartment.
Months of visits, dinner parties, and social gatherings to get accustomed to each other’s personal digs, and Illya was finally settling into a life in the United States. It meant more decadence and spending than he’d ever done in his life, but his salary from UNCLE afforded him the things he’d neglected for himself in his past life.
Illya was a simple man when it came to the finer things in life.
He didn’t need much to keep him happy, so long as he had comfortable furniture and a bed large enough for his huge frame. No more single cots at the KGB barracks, or the single bed in his apartment back in Moscow. No small beds in foreign hotels or curling up wherever he could catch some sleep while on-mission. Illya bought himself a king sized bed and had it delivered to his apartment, so the delivery men could struggle with it.
Illya didn’t need to struggle any longer.
Meals were often shared in someone’s apartment--normally Napoleon’s, since he adored his kitchen and was very good in it--but sometimes Napoleon would bring what he needed to Gaby’s or Illya’s and prepare food there.
When he was by himself or wandering the city, Illya liked to keep things fairly simple still, so his food was basic. His favourite thing to get while wandering the city, were French fries.
There were a number of fish & chip shops near the Pier and Illya would either walk or take a cab--depending on the weather--just for an order of fries. Served in newspaper and doused in salt and malt vinegar, he’d munch as he wandered the docks, taking in the people coming from the boats, and those shopping at the fresh fish market.
He loved the way the shops left the skins on the potatoes, the way his mother used to when she made any sort of potato dish, and the malt vinegar was a nice touch. He likes white vinegar, but the malt added a touch of something he remembered from back home; some kind of pungent, cured sauce his father ate on his sandwiches. It was fish-based, but so salty and dark brown that it almost seemed like motor oil, rather than food.
Illya knew he looked slightly out of place wandering the pier in his clean slacks and down jacket, his hat on tight so the cool wind coming off the water didn’t steal it off of his head. New York had so much diversity and it was a surprise to the shielded Russian; people of Asian descent, Europeans like himself, the coloured folk Napoleon liked to dance with at the all-night clubs. They each had their ways of life, and Illya was fascinated by it all.
He felt almost like he belonged in New York; technically an immigrant himself, sucking down fry after salty fry, taller than the fishermen on the Pier but feeling no more above them other than his height.
I’ve already posted the link to The Curious Nature of Felines, but I couldn’t resist adding a few illustrative gifs to go with it. (Heather and her dachshund don’t really get more than namechecked in the story, but I couldn’t not include such a perfect girl-chilling-with-her-daemon scene.)
Bonus gif: totally how the fic was always going to have to end.
Merry Christmas all! Have a bit of meet-the-family Christmas fluff for a lightly-pining Illya -- albeit one written mostly in the name of a crack theory I came up with to explain Napoleon’s comment about his “another grandfather” in The Green Opal Affair.
There should be enough context worked into the story that you don’t really need to have that episode fresh in mind to read the fic, of course -- but if you do want all the detail, the original dialogue where the subject comes up is under the cut.
Napoleon first brings up his "country town lawyer grandfather" in conversation with the episode's innocent, Mrs. Chris Brinel. (For context, Brach is the episode’s villain.)
Chris: What is it in this world that makes a man like Brach?
Napoleon: I don't know. Sometimes it starts with a very sincere driving ambition. Some people find other values. My grandfather, for instance. He was a brilliant lawyer in a small country town. He got many lucrative offers from Wall Street government agencies, big corporations. But he had only one goal in life. That was to go quail hunting every September. And I thought that he was a very successful man.
Chris: Because he went quail hunting?
Napoleon: Yeah. And because he used to stop by the side of the road and smell the flowers along the way. Come on, we better get going.
She brings the subject up again in their last exchange at the end of the episode:
Napoleon: Oh. I think we're clear with you now, Mrs. Brinel. You can go home. Except for one proviso. You can't reveal anything of what's happened to you. Not even to your husband. Since he's received a note explaining your absence... as going to think through your marriage, it would be best if you stuck to that cover.
Chris: But that's exactly what I have done... gone away for two days to think through my marriage.
Napoleon: And come to a decision?
Chris: Yes. I'm ready to go wherever he goes. I'm even going to tell him about your grandfather. And if David wants to live in a small college town, quail hunting... or even umpiring Little League games, that's just fine by me too. Thank you, Napoleon.
Napoleon: Thank you, Mrs. Brinel. And don't forget to smell the flowers along the way.
It is all a lot of rather charmingly blatant moralising, especially for a show like UNCLE -- but the punch line is the final exchange Napoleon and Illya have only after she’s left the room:
Illya: About that grandfather of yours she mentioned. According to your records, one was an admiral... the other was an ambassador.
Napoleon: Hm. Strange. Perhaps there was another grandfather. Or uncle.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Napoleon/Illya, PG, 28,544 words
Illya has never in his life known any man so enthusiastically heterosexual as Napoleon. He’s not entirely sure he believes that a man so heterosexual as Napoleon could exist at all.
Aaaaand finished, as Napoleon and Illya’s Big Gay Love finally overcomes and saves the day! Or something roughly to that effect.
A Unified Theory of UNCLE -- Napoleon/Illya WIP snippet 3
Anyone remember this thing? Posted a couple of WIP snippets last year, then spent all the months between now and then having terrible luck with betas. But it’s finally back from the beta and down to needing a few final edits before I can post, so this seems like a good time to finally throw up the last of the preview snippets I had sitting in my drafts. (Previous two, with more introduction, here and here)
Anyhow, have a thousand odd words worth of fluff and UST with a convalescing Illya. <3
The other half of the trouble with Napoleon is that no matter how many women Illya may have had to watch him woo, there are still those moments that make him… wonder. For a man so incurably fond of flirting with each and every member of the opposite sex to cross his path, Napoleon sometimes seems to forget to stop flirting when there isn’t a woman in sight.
“I am afraid,” Napoleon announces, buttoning his cuffs in front of the mirror, “that I will have to deprive you of my fine company for a few hours. Do you have everything you need?”
Illya frowns, upsetting the balance of the ice-pack resting on his brow, and forcing him to shove it back up out of his eyes. The only woman he can clearly remember meeting today had been a THRUSH medical technician holding the syringe. He tries to recall whether there’d been any attractive nurses back at the hospital earlier in the afternoon, but his head swims with the effort. “When did you manage to line up a date in all the excitement?” he asks, suspicious.
Napoleon’s smile is rueful. “The only date I have lined up for this evening is with the town mayor. I’m told he wants to know on whose authority people have been detonating explosives within reverberation distance of his constituency. UNCLE has deputised me to smooth things over.”
“Ah.” Now that Illya looks again, Napoleon isn’t dressed for an evening out. He needs that second look – everything in his field of view is still fuzzy around the edges, thanks to whatever they’d given him in the hospital to help bring him down. “How lucky they had someone so uniquely qualified to explain how that came about.”
Napoleon catches his eye in the mirror. “He may have some questions about reports of a nearly-naked man attempting to make a getaway over a rooftop too, of course,” he adds, which Illya supposes is much the retort he’s been subconsciously waiting for for some time. But if Napoleon wants to laugh at him, he’s probably earned it.
“Then you can tell him his nearly-naked man has been reunited with his pants and is recovering comfortably in your hotel room,” Illya suggests. Not the same pair he’d been wearing this morning, admittedly, wherever those might be now. Lost in the blur that is nearly everything after his THRUSH captors had wheeled him into the boardroom on a gurney is the key detail that would explain why he’d been down to his underwear when Napoleon finally got to him out on the roof. Perhaps the lab techs had wanted him to look vulnerable? It’s certainly possible. Illya thinks he’d rather prefer that to be the case, when the alternative is that he’d rid himself of his pants later, on his own initiative – for reasons he has little hope of reconstructing now, and even less desire to try.
A captured UNCLE agent must have seemed the ideal subject for a live demonstration of their new fear toxin: after all, if the drug could reduce a professional enemy spy to a paranoid wreck, it could surely do the same for anyone. Having experienced first hand the devastating effects of Gervaise Ravel’s own fear agent, Illya would hardly have been inclined to argue the point, and had resigned himself to the inevitability of another such experience – at least up to the point where his adrenaline-fuelled thrashing had overcome the restraints holding him to the gurney, leading to an altercation in which he had apparently wrestled a gun away from a guard and wounded at least three people before climbing out a window. It was probably for the best he was out of bullets by the time Napoleon got to him with a syringe full of the antidote – by then camped out under the overhang of an access stairwell on the roof, glaring blearily out into a world that was bright and sharp and over-full, and he himself distinctly under-dressed.
Here in the present, Napoleon raises his eyebrows in amusement, and it’s only when Illya sees his expression that it occurs to him that the part about ‘recovering in Napoleon’s hotel room’ probably came out sounding more suggestive aloud than it had in his head.
“You’ll understand if I might word that one a little differently in case there are any little birdies still hovering in our vicinity.” Napoleon’s eyes faintly glitter with amusement. “I should probably check in with the clean-up crew while I’m out.”
“Let me know if they’ve found my dignity in the rubble,” says Illya, who is too mature to attempt to hide under his pillow from the train-wreck that has become of his day, but only just. “I suspect it will be right at the bottom, probably in several pieces.”
Napoleon winces, and has the decency to look fuzzily sympathetic. “You know I would have offered you my coat for the way down…”
“If you wanted to complete my image of the neighbourhood flasher lurking in the bushes behind the playground, certainly.”
“I don’t know that it’s so bad as all that,” Napoleon tries, his wince settling into something more in the vicinity of a pout.
“I’d argue with you, but I honestly don’t remember much of it,” Illya admits. “I’m going to have to read your report just to find out what I’ve been up to all day, which I can’t say I’m looking forward to.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” says Napoleon, straightening his tie. “Agent Kuryakin performed an admirable diversionary service, shaking off the effects of the latest THRUSH paranoia toxin to disable at least three guards before making his escape, leading them all on a merry chase across the rooftops and providing Agent Solo with ample time set the charges and plan their exit strategy.”
Illya shoots another look at the mirror, though it’s far too high up to reflect his own face from where he sits on the bed. He must look truly dire if Napoleon is working so hard to lift his spirits. Perhaps for once, defensive pessimism has done its job. “So. No date then?”
“None lined up at this time.” Finished with his tie, Napoleon pats him on the ankle as he passes the bed. “But you never do know how the evening may turn out.”
Illya feels uncomfortably certain he can see the shape of his own already. “If the mayor has a beautiful daughter, I’d advise you to leave her alone.”
“And risk having to admit such poor behaviour to our superiors, after? Illya, you wound me.”
Napoleon, Illya decides, is far too chipper for a man whose own partner had very nearly taken him as an enemy plant earlier that day. “One would almost think you’d spent enough time wrestling nearly naked people to the ground for one day.”
“Or vice-versa,” Napoleon comments, or mumbles, in an off-hand sort of way that Illya is less than sure he was supposed to have heard at all. From the depths of the crowded fog of his recollections, a memory stirs. Illya experiences a sudden and vivid flashback to what may have been his first moment of clarity in what had felt like countless hours of being hunted across the rooftops of the compound by a seemingly infinite army of armed THRUSH enforcers, dogging his footsteps and imitating the voices of his friends. Then, in the midst of all that fury, the terrible realisation that what he’d taken as an enemy impostor posing as Napoleon was no enemy at all but the real thing, in incalculable danger from an untold number of THRUSH snipers peering from shadowy stealth helicopters over their heads, if Illya couldn’t get to him right now…
“Please tell me I didn’t.” Sense memory is a vicious thing, and Illya fervently hates it.
Why the thought of Napoleon having to tackle him in order to stab him with the syringe of the counter-agent should be the less mortifying option is beyond him to justify; all Illya knows is the very organic fear this could be one he’ll never manage to live down.
Stopped in the doorway, Napoleon looks back over his shoulder with a playful smile. “Illya,” he says, tapping the side of his nose, voice pitched low as if sharing some particular secret, “a gentleman never tells,” and leaves Illya alone in their hotel room with a bag of ice on his head and a warm, fluttery feeling in his gut he’ll later try to blame on the cocktail of drugs working their way through his system, or perhaps indigestion – anything, really, except the sinfully low pitch of Napoleon’s voice as he flirted shamelessly to reassure his convalescing partner.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Napoleon/Illya, PG, 20536 words
Illya has never in his life known any man so enthusiastically heterosexual as Napoleon. He’s not entirely sure he believes that a man so heterosexual as Napoleon could exist at all.
In which Illya continues to pine after his partner, while blaming it all on the management.
