Not Quite According To Plan - Short Affair, 21st September

[otherhawk.livejournal.com]

Prompt Word - Leaf
Prompt Colour - Purple
Word Count - 863

Not Quite According To Plan

There were some moments that as soon as they happened told you that you had just ruined your life, if not forever then at least for the foreseeable future. As far as Napoleon was concerned, gesturing grandly during a frank and spirited discussion about who was the better actor and accidentally letting slip the gold-leaf covered lead brick you'd been holding so it fell solidly onto your ridiculously-vindictive partner's foot certainly qualified.

He watched guiltily as the colour drained from Illya's face. “Ow,” he said woodenly after a second went by.

“Sorry,” Napoleon said as Illya stooped to pick up the brick. “Is it broken?”

Illya shot him a dark look. “The brick? Or my foot?”

“Unless your shoes are made of diamond,” he began patiently, but Illya rolled his eyes at him and dropped the brick back into the chest before hopping over to the sofa.

“Really, Napoleon, your clumsiness knows no bounds.”

In the circumstances he decided to ignore the unfairness of that. Starting another argument right now didn't seem helpful. Apart from anything else, technically speaking they hadn't finished with the first one. “Alright,” he said, crouching down and starting to ease off Illya's shoe and sock. “Let's take a look.”

He barely caught a glimpse of the rapidly-spreading purple, before Illya pushed him away. “No time. Baxter will be here any moment and he is unlikely to react well to anything out of the ordinary.” He pursed his lips irritably. “And as far as he is aware, your incompetence is out of the ordinary.”

“You're the one who put your foot there,” he said, hoping to distract Illya enough that he could at least sneak a judgement as to whether or not it was broken.

Illya eyed him sceptically. “On the floor?”

“Yes,” he declared, and he was thwarted as Illya shoved his foot back into his shoe and stood up.

Unfortunately Illya was right about Baxter at least. The man was rightfully paranoid about the Central Committee discovering his little embezzlement racket. And when he tried to repay the money with fake gold bars, well, that should shut operations in this part of the world down for a while.

That had been the plan anyway. But when the coded knock came a moment later, it was followed almost immediately by a smoke grenade and that was followed almost immediately by a series of armed THRUSH guards. Ah. Evidently Baxter's scheme had already come unstuck.

He grabbed Illya's arm and pulled him back towards the meagre cover of the table. “Well,” he said. “I guess this whole affair turned out to be a waste of time anyway.” There wasn't much point, after all, in deposing someone who'd apparently managed to topple himself. And it had been such a clever scheme too... “There's a trellis beneath the window. Feel up to some climbing?”

Illya nodded, firing carefully into the smoke. “You go first. I will cover you and follow.”

He was almost on his feet before he registered the lie. “Oh no you don't. Why don't you go first?”

There was a beat and Illya smiled humourlessly. “It is broken,” he admitted. “I will not be be able to climb.”

Ah. He fired a quick burst at the shadowy figures he could see, smiling with satisfaction when one fell, and took advantage of them momentarily falling back to pull Illya towards the window. They were on the second floor, but just as he remembered, the wooden trellis reached all the way down to the ground.

“I can barely put any weight on it,” Illya said through gritted teeth. “I can't climb and there is no time for you to help me.”

He glanced back into the room and the window was round the corner so they still had a bit of time, a bit of cover. Nowhere near enough though. “I know,” he agreed, sliding the window open.

“So you see?” Illya regarded him earnestly. “You must go. I will hold them off as long as I can. There is no sense in both of us being captured.”

“No,” he agreed truthfully. “I'm sorry, Illya.”

Something in Illya's face tightened and he opened his mouth, no doubt ready to say something else ridiculous and Napoleon was beginning to think he kept his brain in his foot. But in the end he didn't say anything at all, because that was the moment Napoleon shoved him out the window.

He followed a second later, scrambling down the trellis in what, he admitted, was now the slow way down, and hurried over to where his partner was huddled in a heap, dazed and muttering in bitter Russian, his arm now lying at an unnatural angle.

“Well,” Napoleon said practically, in response to the baleful look. “You're alive, aren't you?”

“Yes.” Illya gazed fixedly up at him. “Remind me to...thank you for that later.”

Mmm. He shivered. As the bullets started hitting the ground, he hauled Illya off the ground and started to run, but still he couldn't help but think he might just be safer staying here and taking his chances with THRUSH.