profession | first minute.

[ it's a phone call and it's for you. what is texting??? there's no such thing as texting xoxo.

pick it up.

and if you don't he'll keep calling.

really. ]

[ It's an unlisted line. It's a delisted line, three times over, and he can count on two, maybe three fingers the people who know to call this number.

His former handler's sitting in a car two floors down, pretending that he doesn't know that he knows it's him sitting in the car. (He'd recognize that beak-like nose in a crowd.)

He picks up on the seventh call. First ring. ]

Five seconds, and then I put the phone down.

[ Seventh time's a charm, right?

Lucky number and all that. And right on the first ring, too. There you go, Peril. ]

Better late than never. Am I interrupting something?

[ Cowboy.

You could hear the sneer of the word even through the silence, like a joyrider hitching along the copper lines. ]

Surveillance. [ Going both ways. ] Three seconds, Cowboy.

[ It sounds almost sweet coming from you. ]

I was in the neighborhood.

[ Laying low means peeling off all over the city, keeping eyes up above and ears to the ground. He's been making lazy, but calculated rounds over a variety of routes. The map is crinkled and folded four-time over in his inner pocket. ]

You have company across the way.

[ Maybe you noticed them--he can never be sure, but he saw them filing in earlier on his sixth go-around of some smaller byways. ]

[ So those weren't real milk trucks. Cue garbled noises that may have been curses once upon a time. ]

I know.

[ One arm is prepped to raise and fire at the door at any moment. Any moment now, but Illya doesn't put the phone down yet. It feels a little rude to, for some reason. He can hear the crinkling, faint but there, through the line; it's too fine a sound to be static, and too uneven to be the buzz of the power lines abovehead at street level. ]

You're in the building, I'm assuming.

[ They certainly weren't with the way they were moving. He didn't like them to begin with. What kind of milk truck lingers for that long in this weather?

There's a soft clicking noise, the gentle clatter over and over of something being loaded that's just soft enough to hear under the whisper of the connection. He keeps the phone tucked in his shoulder as he smooths fingers down to close the casing. ]

Fourth floor. Just under you.

[ If I shot upwards through this ceiling with the right gun I could probably catch you straight through the jaw. ]

They're not particularly clever... [ We can't all be blessed. ] There are more filing in from below.

[ One floor up, he's thinking the same thing.

If I aim just right. Perfect hole through your skull, right through your neck. Snap, like a twig under a boot. Clean exit wound.

Not that this is that kind of call. ]

Hm, [ he hums, and then— a door swings wide open with a crash-bang, three evenly spaced out shots firing (like a beat, a smooth bang-bang-bang), and a ringing silence that always follows. ] Staircase on your left, leading to the fire exit.

[ I'm drawing them to you. Illya lets the pause stretch just shy of awkward, before putting the phone down with a sharp click and moving to the stairs.

You can hear the footsteps following his way along the hall. ]

[ They're unmistakeable. There's a drive to his step that he can pick up in an instant, can match to his own quickly-packed snapping of his shoes on the expensive marble. He's not wasting any time, hanging up like he does and lining up against the door.

He's hung up the line so Solo drops the phone. The directions are simple, straight and to the point. The staircase he's talking about is one of two--the first running up and down, the second peeling off to an eastern wing that stretches down the street. Luxury suites. He waits, holds his breath, counts the steps and anyone else might jump or prematurely leave the room, guns blazing. But he waits, he holds, because they're getting close, they're almost there, they're just about--

Solo swings the door open feeling the way skull careens against it.

Save a bullet there.

The next one he fires from behind the safety of the door, flashing out for a moment to line the shot up within seconds. It's practically a party. How many men did they fit into that clown car of a milk truck? ]

[ Right on cue.

A thug swings round a corner and gets his head slammed straight up against a door. Two flashes of gunpowder - one from behind the door, another from the hall running parallel to the staircase landing. Illya drops, rolls onto his back and fires at a man's knee once, at the falling man's face twice. (Overkill, definitely, but that's the idea.)

Four more men ahead — two coming down from the staircase, the other two on Illya's side of the door. The nearest one is disposed off with a clean snap of the neck, the other gets messy, what with a hidden boot knife and a shiv besides.

It nicks the sleeve of his jacket.

Bad move.

He has his watch under that sleeve.

Illya cracks the man's head against the wall in quiet, furious brutality, before pulling the door the whole way open. ]

[ There's the sound of gristle and bone--the way it splits the wrong way and Napoleon knows that someone's gone and done something awfully naughty to deserve that one. They're coming down the staircase like a stampede now, probably after hearing the shots and subsequent thudding.

Illya swings the door open and he knows instantly that he has less than six seconds to make a shot before someone gets fast and smart.

The man behind him doesn't stand a chance when he points the muzzle of his gun and fires off only once into his chest.

There's that wet, sucking sound after the smell of heated gunmetal that tells you that you didn't miss. The kind that's fit for desperate breathing. The last one that comes down seems to buckle back, maybe try to backtrack up the stairs, but Napoleon rounds quickly, ducking under the arm shoving the door wide and firing one last shot between the shoulder blades. He considers it a mercy. You could be trying to breathe like your friend on the floor with swiftly collapsing lungs. You're the lucky one. ]

Thoughtful of you to bring the party downstairs.

[ I like sharing this part of the mission.

I never used to like sharing.

He wrinkles his nose a bit and kicks an empty shell out of the way with the tapering end of his shoe. ]

Any more? [ He's peering down the hall now slowly. ]

It is likely.

[ Everything is likely from a certain perspective. From the consummate cynic's vantage, everything is a mistake waiting to be made; so it is, too, for an operative of their kind, to assume the same paranoia, though this is given by the knowledge that death comes for them all for the smallest of errors, and that death is not merciful towards such faults.

Illya counts his breathing. One. Two. A pause to let the blood rush settle in his veins, ill-advised as that might be. A faint cold seeps in, and it calms him a little. Calm is always good, after all. Illya was born under the watchful eye of an angry fire; the cold will ease the burn of it on his soul.

(Don't let it pass from a man's lips, that the Russian man has no poesy carved in his bones.) ]

Walk now, Cowboy.

[ There's a siren wailing in the distance, headed towards them. Too quickly for the rounds fired. ]

We are expected.

[The location is England, London, a quaint bar/quasi-cafe with mirrored walls to make the room seem not quite so small. Perhaps Mr Kuryakin is there when a waiter walks over to him, places down a serviette and a glass of vodka.

"On the house", he says, but the presence of a small brunette woman at the back of the room, engrossed in her well-worn copy of Madame Bovary suggests otherwise. She does not look up. Instead she adjusts her non-prescription glasses, still not used to them and keen to be rid of them as soon as possible, once her stint as an uptight accountant is over, and wets her thumb with her tongue before turning another page. If Ilya is willing to talk to her, she thinks, he will let her know.]

[ How does a young woman as arresting as Gaby end up becoming an agent, if not for circumstance dictating its own terms with no consideration? Waverly picked her out on his own, sly as a man as one could be, and pitted her against the best of two global powers. Not that they'd given him an option on that front either, Illya considers — but that's not the point.

Like he told the American: it's not the same.

He scans the crowd for his benefactor and Illya knows right away, from the shape of her neck and the slope of her shoulders alone, that she is here. Under cover, yet still her. There's a small impatience to the way she holds her book, as if she's read it before and is hurrying along the page in front of her for the better parts that follow.

He picks up his glass, walks over to her, and sets the glass on her table with a clink. ]

Would you mind terribly?

[Book still in hand, Gaby peers over her glasses and at the man in front of her. She keeps her mouth relaxed, unsmiling and unamiable. Her expression is harsh but her eyes are sympathetic. Sorry, Illya: a cover is a cover and you're stuck with a hardass today.]

Do I look like the type to welcome strangers to her table?

[Though nevertheless she closes her book and slides it over to one side. Her hand moves to her glass so that she can lazily trace the rim of it with her fingertips, but immediately she hesitates and instead grips it with a deliberately cautious awkwardness. She feels oddly comfortable with him considering everything that has happened between the two of them and what she has done. His presence makes the muscles in her shoulders soften and her lungs feel slightly larger than before.

A stranger would not feel quite so at ease and so, for now, she is relegated to stilted, sheepish smalltalk. She stiffens her shoulders and looks at her drink.]

What do you do?

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