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He walks back in with no little hesitance, a bottle of water and a sandwich at hand. Though he can see her eyes running in his direction, testifying that she did notice his entrance, she doesn’t turn to him, nor does she acknowledge him in any other way.
That is probably the best reaction he is going to get from her, so he swallows and steps forward, holding out his offerings with no explanation.
It’s been a while, she needs to drink and eat something, or she’s going to crash at some point. He’s worried about her, though how he can spare enough space in his mind to worry about anything other than Solo at the moment is a mystery to himself before anyone else.
Gaby gives him a look that isn’t the least bit benevolent, but she accepts the water and the food, taking them from him and turning away like he isn’t there at all. He can’t spare the energy to be offended, and he certainly doesn’t blame her for not wanting anything to do with him.
Her screams are still echoing in his ears as he sits down, at more distance from her than would probably necessary. The look on her face when he told her is burned in his eyes, the way she went from worry, fussing over his graze as soon as Solo was out of their sight and she noticed the blood gushing out of his arm, to horror followed closely by disdain—he remembers her taking a step back, her hands still hovering between them for a few moments, and then there was only screaming.
He got out of her face when ordered to do so, numbly finding someone to take care of his stupid little wound just because he wasn’t sure he could bear to be alone with his head.
It was such a stupid mistake, and it’s going to cost them their partner’s life.
Even as they sit in silence, waiting on news that will probably take hours to come, he can feel the weight of the truth hanging between them, and he almost wishes for Gaby to start screaming again, just so he won’t have to sit there and contemplate how badly he fucked up.
After two hours, he gets her another sandwich and a coffee. She takes the coffee and leaves the food, still hardly looking at him in the eye for more than a few moments.
He leaves it on the seat next to her and goes back to his own chair.
He almost tells her he’s sorry, as he stares at her and she never turns to acknowledge him.
He swallows it down, figuring that she can probably guess as much herself and that saying it wouldn’t do anything to help Solo anyway.
When Waverly arrives, he asks for news that they don’t have, only to then sit down next to him and ask what happened, in the nice and unassuming tone that’s probably meant to mask how much trouble they are in, for messing the mission up this badly.
“I shot him,” is Illya’s explanation, the words coming out a little wobbly.
Gaby makes a sound that he doesn’t know how to decipher, staring at the closed door like she wants to burn it down.
Waverly merely raises his eyebrows. “I assume it wasn’t on purpose.”
“No.” Of course it wasn’t. He was being careful, counting the bullets, both his and his partners’, so he knew that Solo was about to run out. It seemed reasonable, to shoot his last opponent for him. “I wasn’t aiming at him. I flinched.”
“Alright,” Waverly says, slowly. “How? I seem to recall you having a fairly steady hand.”
He does. It was a stupid mistake. He should have been paying more attention to his surroundings rather than to what Solo was doing.
“Does it matter?” he asks, trying to swallow through the knot in his throat and not daring to look in Gaby’s direction. He is fairly sure that she isn’t going to appreciate him making excuses.
“I like my mission reports to be as detailed as possible,” Waverly says, placidly.
He hums. “Bullet grazed me,” he explains then. “Took me by surprise.”
Waverly lets the words hang between them for a few moments, then he claps his hands on his thighs, moving as if beginning to get up. “Alright then. I assume you got that taken care of?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good.”
He explains that he sent other agents to clean up everything – a nice way to highlight that there was a need to go clean up their mess – and that they are officially off-duty. It kind of sounds like a threat, even if he phrases it as them not having to worry about anything else.
Illya is plenty worried at the moment. So worried that he’s about to be sick.
“Do you two need anything?” Waverly asks, as calmly as on any other day.
Illya figures that maybe it’s best to just get it over with. “Should I—should I call my handler?” he asks, keeping his eyes pointedly off Gaby.
Waverly raises his eyebrows. “I believe I am your handler at the moment.”
“Yes, but—I should go back, right?”
The look on Waverly’s face is hard to read, which Illya has mostly gotten used to at this point, but right now—it’s just extremely unnerving, to have no idea what he’s thinking. He wishes that he would just speak plainly, for once.
“It was an accident, Kuryakin,” he says, calmly. “You don’t need to go anywhere. If Solo has any objections, I’m sure he’ll make them known, but as far as I’m concerned you don’t need to do anything—beyond perhaps getting some fresh air sometime in the near future.”
“Oh,” he breathes out, dazed like he just got hit in the head. He doesn’t even perceive the time that passes between Waverly walking out and Gaby suddenly standing in front of him. Saying that she looks mad would be an understatement.
Before he can say anything, she’s barking at him: “What the fuck is your problem?!”
“I—what?”
“First you shoot him, and now you want to ditch us?! Seriously?!”
For a few seconds, he gets distracted by the tears shining in her eyes, and whatever words he was about to say die in his throat. He stops himself before he can stupidly reach out, swallowing instead.
“You—want me here?” he ends up asking, without bothering to mask his surprise. It certainly never crossed his mind that she would be unhappy with him being kicked off the team after this.
“No! Yes! I—oh, fuck you.”
With that, she turns around and goes back to sitting as far away from him as she can get. Illya doesn’t try to speak to her again.
Solo pulls through.
It’s half a miracle, and a slow working one, but it happens, and Illya barely sleeps even after they are officially told that his condition is stable, afraid that he will wake up to find that the world has stopped being as kind.
Gaby slides into his arms somewhere between ‘we are cautiously optimistic’ and ‘he’s going to be fine’, pressing her cheek against his chest and pulling him against her. She’s sorry, she says, she knows he didn’t mean to and she isn’t mad at him. She was just scared, she adds in a whisper, and Illya finds that he still is.
Of something going wrong, of Solo never forgiving him for this, of Gaby coming back to her senses the moment the relief passes and she realizes the enormity of what he did…
“It’s okay,” he still says, hugging her back, because he never had it in him to reject her anyway. “I would have done exactly the same thing.”
He doesn’t leave. Perhaps he should, perhaps he should make himself scarce before he can be thrown out, but someone has to make sure that Gaby eats and sleeps during the endless wait, and Solo deserves the chance to yell in his face anyway.
(He doesn’t, not the first few times he wakes up, at least. His eyes are glassy and can’t seem to stay open as he moves his mouth like he’s trying to speak, but the way his lips curve upwards and his shoulders relax whenever his gaze manages to focus on Illya is impossible to miss.)
(He keeps trying to imagine what it will feel like, when that soft look will turn to anger and betrayal, and his chest aches.)
The first time that Solo properly wakes up, Illya is the only one there.
For a few moments, forgetting everything else, he just rushes to his bedside, offering water and keeping him from trying to push himself up. Solo looks pained and thoroughly exhausted, but he’s alive, and Illya wants to laugh.
“So,” Solo eventually gets out, his breathing a little too ragged and his fingers clinging to Illya’s sleeve. “What happened?”
It sounds casual, a bit of a smile to his lips, and Illya’s stomach falls to his knees.
He doesn’t remember.
He doesn’t know.
Part of him would like to flee and have Gaby break the news instead, but she doesn’t deserve it, and Solo doesn’t deserve it either. He did this, the least he can do his face the consequences.
Eyes stuck on the ground, because he can’t stomach to look at those soft eyes planted on him, Illya starts talking, letting the words flow before he can lose his nerve.
It was an accident, he manages to only say once. I’m sorry, he repeats at least four times, voice breaking a little. He manages to explain what happened too, he tells him about the bullets and how he flinched and how he knows that he was the one who shot him, because the only other shot that was fired grazed him.
By the end of it, he is out of breath, eyes still down, yet he’s able to tell that Solo is staring.
“Oh,” Solo eventually says, quietly, and nothing else.
He supposes there isn’t much else to say.
He nods, still not looking at him, and mutters that he’s going to go get a nurse, turning on his heels before the conversation can progress any further. Like a coward.
(He’ll go back later, he tells himself. He’ll let Solo yell at him later, right now—right now he just needs a minute to breathe. It was probably a bad time to tell him anyway: he just woke up, he shouldn’t have agitated him.)
(He’s a coward and an idiot. Great.)
When he alerts Gaby, she goes straight to Solo. She doesn’t stop to wonder why Illya isn’t following, and he should take the opportunity to go.
He’s awake now, he should be alright, so Illya could just—leave. Avoid the aftermath of this whole thing, at least for now.
Yet, he stays, the worry clogging his throat pulling him back like a magnet, and something in him almost craving the moment when Solo will finally throw his stupidity back in his face. He isn’t sure if it will help with the guilt, but he surely hopes so.
(Still, when Gaby comes to drag him back to Solo’s room, he isn’t anywhere near ready.)
“I’m getting a coffee,” Gaby announces, without waiting for an answer before turning her heels and leaving.
Illya keeps his eyes anywhere but on Solo, his fingers somehow hurting from the amount of nervousness he’s feeling.
“Are you going to sit or…?” Solo prompts.
He shakes his head. “I’m fine here.”
He huffs. “Well, I can’t exactly punch you in retaliation if you are all the way over there, can I?”
Barely even registering his light tone of voice, Illya feels his stomach churn and he nods without thinking, beginning to step closer with only an uttered ‘right’.
He should probably say something, offer another apology, offer to leave, to ask Waverly for a transfer, he did say that they would revisit the issue once Solo woke up, but—he just can’t seem to find his voice, and the silence stretches.
“Uh, Peril?” Solo eventually calls for him, an odd note in his voice. “Look at me?”
That is just about the last thing that Illya wants to do right now, but he doesn’t feel like he’s in a position to refuse him anything after what he did, so he complies. The deep frown on Solo’s face is not an unexpected sight.
“I was joking,” he says, slowly. “I’m not mad at you.”
He blinks. “You… aren’t?”
Solo is still frowning, but he doesn’t seem angry. Illya is beginning to wonder if he doesn’t look concerned. “It was an accident.”
This feels far too horrible a mistake to be called an accident. He was just so stupid that his actions cannot be evaluated with any grace. “I shot you,” he reminds him. It still makes him a little nauseous to say out loud.
“Well, yeah, because you were too busy counting my bullets to notice someone shooting at you. It’s rather sweet in its own dumb way, if you think about it.”
Illya sees nothing sweet about it. All he sees is the blood.
“Illya,” he calls, a little more forcefully, prompting his eyes to run back to his face. “It’s fine. Stop beating yourself up.”
“You almost died,” is all he manages to say, his voice shaky like he’s about to cry. His eyes are thankfully dry, but he doesn’t feel any better for it, a confused mix of oppressing feelings building up in his chest.
“But I didn’t! You once again didn’t manage to kill me, kind of makes you think that I’m the better spy, uh?”
He knows he’s trying to joke, to lighten the mood and bring them back to more familiar ground, but the levity washes over him in barely an instant, and his chest stays just as heavy.
“Probably,” he only mutters.
Solo groans, and while Illya’s heart jumps to his throat immediately, assuming he’s in pain, when he looks at his face it becomes clear that he’s only frustrated. His relief is short-lived, quickly smothered by his guilt.
“Peril, come on,” he whines, like a child. It’s exasperatingly familiar, and it makes him sick to think that he almost made it so that he could never hear that stupid tone of voice again. “It really is fine, what do I have to do to convince you? I’m not mad.”
He kind of wants to cry.
“I believe you,” he manages to get out, after a few moments, because he does, it’s just—he should be mad. How is it possible that he almost killed him, with his own hands, that they’ve come so close to losing him, and now things are just fine? He can’t wrap his head around it. “I really thought you would die.”
“I didn’t,” he says, gentle this time.
With the way his eyes have started burning, Illya barely registers Solo’s hand closing around his balled fist.