PicFic for 10/2/12

[avirra.livejournal.com]

Sign of the Past

The bright warning sign cautioning that the area was under quarantine made Illya pause.  He knew that Napoleon was somewhere in that building and there were not many things that would keep him from his partner, but at the moment, that one sign was doing the trick.

It might not have given another man as much pause, but Illya was a child of war.  Quarantine signs meant death on the other side.  New orphans arriving were always quarantined when they first arrived and Illya had witnessed firsthand the after-effects of whooping cough, smallpox and typhus.  Most who became ill in quarantine died there – there were simply not enough supplies or medical staff to do more than keep the diseases down to the unfortunate ones and prevent them from sweeping through the whole orphanage.

Shaking his head slightly as if to banish those memories, Illya crept closer and took a better look at the building.  It seemed to have none of what he would have considered even the most basic of precautions that a quarantine area should have.  His head and his gut were in total disagreement, but he set his jaw and readied himself to enter.  If the place was under a genuine quarantine, he wanted to get his partner out of there and to decent medical care as quickly as possible.

On the other hand, if that sign was a fake?  In that case, this particular mutation of THRUSH (Illya had always thought the name for a grouping of thrush to be highly appropriate) would find out how very ill-advised it was to stir up bad memories in a demolitions expert.