Bright Gift

Fandom: The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

Pairing: Napoleon Solo/Illya Kuryakin

Category:
het with slash longing

Rating:
PG for implied violence

Word Count: 385

Summary: What are the details that anchor us to ourselves?

Table/Prompt: Inspired By Poems Table Prompt: excerpt from A Winter Ride by Amy Lowell

 

The gun in my hand brings me fully back to myself. My thumb flicking the safety and wrapping around the grip to press the textured surface against my palm, my finger caressing the nub of trigger, cold metal warming to my skin, this alien tool becoming a part of me, a deadly extension, and I know myself for the killer I have been, must be again.

I find myself alone for a moment, but I haven’t always been, in this place, alone. No. Something is still missing, so much still hidden in shadows, but there is no more time as I am followed. These laughable cowboys like images from a children’s Saturday morning show, they play at being dangerous; they do not know what it is to be an assassin, a deliverer of oblivion. I do. And I give them what they deserve.

These are not my clothes I am wearing for if they were there would be a hidden arsenal, enough to blow up the banks of computers and machinery blinking and humming. I will content myself with doing what damage I can until they come again, and they are here already.

But that is not the only group to arrive, there is a pair of men coming from the tunnel that the THRUSH boss has been screaming about on the intercom. Images and sensations flood my memory; blond hair under my fingers, a shy smile. The face before me superimposes over the other and I try to figure out which sensations go with which images. This is my bright haired sharp tongued partner, come to find me, again.

My words come back to me, “Why you two-faced, two-timing little THRUSH witch.” And witch she seems, for I still feel a compulsion, bewitched by THRUSH and their machinations, and I am clear finally. My mission was to bring the errant doctor back from this secret outpost, and now I must bring her as well, if only to prove that I can let go of that Shangri-La lie she created for me, that they created in me. But not just yet, allow me my moment, I ask whatever power might watch over spies and assassins. For while she is a pale replacement for my true want, she is the closest I might have for now.

 

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A WINTER RIDE (excerpt) By Amy Lowell
Everything mortal has moments immortal,
Swift and God-gifted, immeasurably bright.