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It’s probably the knife through his head that wakes him up. Or rather makes him not-unconscious. He doesn’t think he was sleeping. Hell, he doesn’t think he’s awake.
As a matter of fact, he’s pretty sure he’s dead.
That would be a logical explanation for the way he’s currently floating in a blissful cloud of not-pain, in spite of the fact that he’s sure he should be in agony right now. He can feel something pressing down on his stomach, hard, but it doesn’t hurt, the only thing that’s currently aching is his head – though, to be fair, it does feel like someone is splitting it in two.
There’s a rumbling coming from a distance, closer and closer until he realizes it’s Illya’s voice. He still can’t hold onto the words long enough to understand what they mean, but he knows he’s speaking and he’s close and—he’s pretty sure he’s currently curled on Illya’s lap. Which is just another point under the ‘yup, I’m dead’ column.
He tries to move, only to find that his body is very slow on the uptake, and the most that he gets is taking notice of the arm around his shoulders – he’s definitely dead – and the fabric between his fingers. He thinks he should call out for Illya, let him know he’s awake and ask what exactly is going on and if this is his afterlife, why is it relatively pleasant? Because sure, he is extremely confused and he is experiencing the worst headache known to man, but this isn’t that bad.
His tongue isn’t working. He thinks he should get Illya’s attention with his hands, but he doesn’t want to let go of his shirt, and even if he did he isn’t sure he has the patience to figure out how to take control of his fingers again, particularly when he’s clutching something that hard, so he only gives him a shake, which takes more concentration than it’s dignified to admit but is soon over with.
He thinks it worked, because the rumbling sound stops for a few moments, and then there’s more talking, a single sound repeated until it morphs into an actual word.
“Cowboy?”
Illya sounds ridiculously worried, and it’s when he feels a sense of twisted satisfaction at that that he realizes he can’t see him, because his eyes are still closed. He should probably open them.
When he blinks, he’s welcomed by a world that’s a little blurred, too much light coming from in front of him, and eventually Illya’s face. He does look worried. That’s sweet.
…
He’s so dead.
Although—the truck that they are currently in – because this is very much a truck and Napoleon isn’t sure he wants to know what it means that his afterlife is a truck – hits a bump in the road, shaking him from head to toe and leaving him with a more explosive headache than before. He looks down to find that there’s an actual knife buried in his lower abdomen, a shitload of blood and only Illya’s hand trying to keep it inside with the aid of a towel that has seen better days.
Uh.
That should hurt.
It’s pretty concerning that it doesn’t.
When he looks back up to Illya, he isn’t sure if he said anything in the meantime: things are still a little fuzzy, and he doesn’t think he can concentrate on more than one thing at the time.
He swallows, takes a breath and experimentally licks his lips, as if to make sure that his tongue still works somewhat. It does, but putting the words together is still no easy feat.
“Am I very dead?” he eventually manages to get out, and it sounds weird, like there’s something off and foreign about his own voice.
Illya frowns. “How would you be just a little dead?”
Good question, good question.
Uhm.
“Coma?”
Illya doesn’t look impressed. “You are talking.”
“Are you seriously arguing with him right now?” comes Gaby’s voice from somewhere near the annoying light, and she sounds a little annoyed, but he’s so glad that wherever he is she is there too. Maybe she’ll turn off the light too, if he asks nicely.
“You are not dead nor in a coma, Cowboy,” Illya kindly informs him, and Napoleon does believe him, because of course he wouldn’t lie, but that still doesn’t sound right.
“Doesn’t hurt,” he points out, looking back down on the knife. It should probably twist his stomach somewhat, and maybe it does, but the feeling seems distant, like he can only touch it with his fingertips.
Illya hums. “Just wait, it will hurt.”
That is cryptic and entirely unhelpful.
Napoleon would very much like to complain about that, because he’s tired and his head is pounding and even breathing costs so much effort and he has no idea what’s going on, he hates not knowing what’s going on, but—Illya’s shoulder is so comfortable when he drops his head against it, and the feeling of his arm around his shoulders and of his shirt between his fingers seem easier to hold onto than literally anything else, and look, if he’s alive he should probably start concerning himself with how to keep himself that way, but—Illya will probably take care of that for him. He wants to sleep a little now, and hopefully the hangover will be gone in the morning.
When he wakes up, he’s considerably less confused. On the other hand, his knife wound does hurt like hell. He thinks he preferred the hazy post-mind control hangover from hell.
He’s lying on a hospital bed, which is not exactly surprising at this point in his life. Neither are the handcuffs tying his right wrist to the bed, frankly.
Still, it isn’t nice, and he gives it an experimental tug as he tries not to panic, because he’s sure that Waverly can be reasoned with: this isn’t his fault, he did the best he could under the circumstances, Waverly is going to understand, there is no need to overreact and send him back to prison.
Unless—unless he killed—
He can physically feel his blood freezing in his veins as doubt creeps in, because the pieces are falling back together impressively quickly, he remembers what happened and he is pretty sure that he managed to stop himself in time, but what if he’s wrong, what if he actually—
The answer to that question turns out to be a resounding no, seeing how Illya walks in three seconds later, looking thunderstruck at seeing him awake.
“Cowboy!” he breathes out, much more enthusiastic than Napoleon would have dared to hope. He seems to be all in one piece.
“Peril,” he manages, smiling a few seconds too late and marvelling for a moment at how right his voice sounds. He isn’t sure how accidental it is that he shifts and pulls against the handcuffs right then, but it catches Illya’s attention.
“I told Waverly those weren’t necessary,” he says, grimacing. “He said he wouldn’t let me stay without protective measures. And he didn’t give me the key.”
Napoleon waves him off. “That’s smart, better safe than sorry.”
Illya hums, walking closer and inspecting him like he’s trying to see something—Napoleon’s guess is that he’s trying to look for further confirmation that it’s him in there, and the realization that he isn’t sure how to give it to him makes him a little nauseous.
Illya drags a chair closer to the bed, sits down and the whole time doesn’t stop staring at him. It’s a little unnerving.
“Do I have something on my face?” he tries, lightly.
“What you did was very stupid,” Illya says, unamused by his teasing. He even sounds a little pissed off, which is probably not entirely surprising, though still unfair.
His wound throbs, like it rose to attention upon being called into question. “I mean, it was risky, but stupid—” he muses, because it’s not like he had much of a choice, and it did work, didn’t it?
“No,” Illya says, drily. “It was stupid. I was handling it.”
Napoleon snorts. “Right.” His memories are – fortunately or unfortunately he isn’t sure – crystal clear, and he knows that that’s bullshit. “I’ve seen you fight a thousand times, Peril. If you had been handling it, I would have been on the floor in two minutes.”
To be completely fair, Napoleon was holding a knife at the time, but that has never stopped Illya before.
Illya crosses his arms tightly, blowing air out of his nose. “I was buying time,” he says, between clenched teeth. “I wasn’t sure that I could safely knock you out—”
“So you kept playing defence and didn’t even lay a finger on me,” Napoleon completes, raising his eyebrows. “You were backing yourself into a corner.”
“I was handling it.”
Yeah, right. Repeating it doesn’t make it any more true.
“There was no need to—” Illya pauses, shaking his head and glaring at him. “What were you thinking?”
“Well…”
Mostly he was panicking because he was in the backseat of his own body, for starters. It was a whole new kind of horrifying, feeling an irresistible urge to kill someone and knowing it was planted in his head. He knew it wasn’t his own will, yet he couldn’t stop himself. He just wanted his partner dead, and he wanted to be the one to do it. What did it really matter, after all, where the impulse came from?
He remembers admitting to himself, somewhat bitterly, that that is a good way to go about it: why bother killing your enemies when you can make them go after each other? And apparently sending death wearing the face of his partner is a good way to throw Illya off his rhythm. Who knew.
He did try to fight it, he did, but the knife was in his hand and the movements came smoothly: trying to stop himself turned out to be impossible. He was on a ride that he couldn’t stop, and the more he panicked the easier it was for him to lose his frail grasp on his own thoughts.
He noticed that Illya was hardly even fighting, just trying to get out of the way of the knife and never once attempting to strike back. He remembers wondering, somewhere in the mess of things, what exactly he thought he could accomplish like that, thinking that he should just shoot him and get it over with.
His moment of utmost clarity was when he saw a gun within easy reach: immediately, he felt himself longing for it, beginning to turn around to grab it, and just as quickly realized that that was bad, that they were too close and it’s one thing to avoid a knife, but dodging bullets—once he read somewhere, or maybe heard somewhere, that a big shock can jolt someone out of mind control.
He remembers thinking that killing Illya might do the trick. Not that he was particularly eager to find out—at least, not all of him. Sane him. Actual him.
Who is also the him that figured he’d just solve the problem by stabbing himself in the gut. That counts as a shock, right?
He isn’t sure how he managed, he just knows that it was a lot easier to redirect his swings than to stop them altogether.
Everything that followed was a mess, both in his head, where he tried to emerge and kept drowning, and around him, where he could hear Illya talking and yelling and he knew he was trying to help him at least—next there was the truck, and that is even hazier than what came before.
And now, well, he has some explaining to do, apparently.
He shrugs. “I read somewhere that it might work,” he says, because it’s true.
Illya blinks at him. “Might,” he echoes, slowly.
Napoleon hums noncommittally.
“Might,” he says again, this time downright scandalized. “You stabbed yourself—because you thought it might work.”
It sounds a bit crazy when he puts it out of context like that.
“I didn’t have much of a choice, Peril,” he points out, shifting a little and immediately regretting it when the pain reverberates all the way up his spine. He tries to breathe as shallowly as possible and resolves to stay very still. “You clearly weren’t going to attack me—”
“Oh, so you decided to do it yourself.”
“Yeah.” He huffs. “I was about to grab a gun, okay?” he says, tired and exasperated and honestly not interested in justifying his perfectly reasonable solution that, by the way, worked. “I wasn’t going to bet on your ability to dodge bullets from a close range, what exactly did you expect me to do?”
Illya stares at him for a few moments, looking very much like he wants to argue. “You could have died,” is what he eventually says, which, very weak argument.
“Yeah, and that would have undoubtedly been tragic,” he nods solemnly. “But I didn’t, and I’m really sore right now, so, are you done lecturing me?”
Illya’s glare says absolutely not and probably also fuck you, but he does get up and leaves without another word. Napoleon already begins regretting his tone before he’s even out of the door, but he doesn’t stop him.
Left alone and with a horrible weight in his chest, he turns to the handcuffs, thinking that he should probably get rid of those at least. The problem is that, looking around, he notices that there isn’t anything within his immediate reach that could help. If he moved around a bit, maybe, he’d manage to find something but—he is not entirely sure that it’s worth the pain that it would cause him, honestly.
After what seems like an eternity of silent contemplation, he curses himself for antagonizing Illya like that, shifting carefully to find a semi-stable position that he can hold until someone comes for him, and even that simple movement is anything but comfortable.
Shit, that asshole that he has for a partner could have at least sent a nurse after him. If this is his attempt at convincing him that he did something very stupid and that he should never take self-sacrifice under advisement again, congratulations, mission accomplished: Illya is officially an ungrateful bastard, and next time he will just sit back and let things unfold. No self-stabbing. Because he’s annoyed and petty.
He’s contemplating trying to chew the handcuffs off, even though that would require a painful amount of manoeuvring so it would probably be smarter to just suck it up and push himself up to grab some helpful tool, when Illya walks back in.
He still looks pissed, but before Napoleon has even had a chance to decide whether he wants to ask him for help or be offended, Illya drops his little bag of lock picking tools on his lap.
“Let yourself out,” he says, drily. “Nurse is coming in a minute.”
Right.
Awkward.
He mutters a thank you, hissing as he twists his torso to get to work, but he’s grateful that Illya didn’t offer to do it himself, because at least he has something to do while he ignores the pressing urge to say something to break the tension between them.
He is not going to apologize for his decision. He doesn’t want to talk about it to begin with it, he doesn’t understand why Illya is so hung up on it—alright, perhaps he understands, rationally, that he must have been worried and that he’s being emotional about it, but—it’s uncomfortable. He’s so invested, and Napoleon just really needs him to stop.
“Thank you,” Illya says, out of nowhere, just as the handcuffs come off. Napoleon, because he is stupid and he couldn’t help himself, raises his eyes on him. Illya looks very contrite about the whole thing, staring at him like a kicked puppy. “For what you did. It was brave, just—if it happens again, don’t. I’d rather you didn’t. I will hit you back if you want, just—don’t.”
Napoleon shudders at if it happens again, briefly considers that he is not so sure about the honesty behind that I will hit you back, comes up with a toothy smile. “Don’t you worry your pretty head about it, Peril,” he says, lightly. “I’m sure it was just a momentary lapse in judgement. Won’t happen again.”
He gets the feeling that they both know he’s lying through his teeth, but he hopes Illya won’t call him out on it, because he doesn’t really want to unpack what the truth means, right now.
(Or ever, for that matter.)
The nurse walks in, Illya steps aside, and just like that the conversation is over, hopefully disregarded to never be picked back up again.
(He knows he would do it again. It’s just that the why or the ramifications are best left alone.)