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Just two more hours. Waverly said back-up would arrive in just two more hours.
Two hours is nothing, in the grand scheme of things. Illya has been running on fumes for the whole night now, having had to drag around his injured partners and keep all of them alive at the end of an awfully draining mission. After a week of little to no sleep, he can handle two more hours.
Seated on a chair between two barely usable beds, he thinks that isn’t so bad anyway: at least they have shelter. At least he isn’t standing. He has his eyes on the closed window and the only entrance to the room, his gun in his lap, and enough stubbornness to fuel him should anyone have managed to follow them.
He thinks he killed them all anyway. He did lose count somewhere after Solo passed out, and the whole fight is getting a little blurred in his mind, but they probably wouldn’t be alive to begin with, if he had missed anyone. They were proceeding too clumsily and too slowly.
His head feels heavy, and he catches himself beginning to drift off a couple of times, his eyes sliding closed only for something in the back of his mind to jolt him back awake, looking anxiously between his partners like they might have slipped away in his few moments of distraction.
He resolves not to get too comfortable, standing up to check on the wound on Gaby’s head – it has stopped bleeding, thankfully, and a quick check of his watch confirms that he can let sleep her for another thirty minutes – and the one on Solo’s thigh.
While she didn’t rouse during his examination, lying so still that the only thing keeping him from jumping into a panic was her visible breathing pattern, Solo isn’t nearly as complacent, jolting awake as soon as Illya starts changing the bandage.
“What—?” he utters, looking around with wide eyes and paling as soon as he begins pushing himself up.
“Stay down,” Illya immediately says, pushing back against his shoulder, as gently as he can. It’s more than sufficient, the fight quickly draining out of Solo as soon as he recognizes him. “It’s okay, we made it back.”
“Oh,” Solo says, quietly. He takes a few deep breaths, eyes to the ceiling, and since he doesn’t appear to be about to cause himself any further injury, Illya resumes his work, quickly fixing up the bandage in spite of Solo hissing and instinctively trying to pull away.
He doesn’t comment on it, offering him some water instead, because he did lose a concerning amount of blood.
Having to hold himself up to drink, even if with help, seems to be enough to exhaust him, and Solo quickly slumps back against the pillow, his head turning to the side and his eyelids falling every few seconds.
“Go back to sleep,” Illya says, gently. “Extraction is on the way.”
Solo hums, still blinking dazedly. “You carried me,” he mumbles, blindly reaching for his shirt and giving it a few tugs, as if to catch his attention. “You’re not tired?”
“I’m not tired,” he blatantly lies, but he’s fairly sure that Solo is too out of it to really notice. “I’ll sleep later.”
“Hmm’kay,” he utters, finally letting his eyes slide shut and sinking a little farther in the pillow. “’night.”
“Goodnight,” Illya sighs, leaning back against the chair only to change his mind a moment later and sit at the edge: not as tiring and uncomfortable as standing, but enough of a precarious position to leave him tense and awake.
All he needs to do is stay awake two more hours.
It’s all a bit of a blur.
He remembers watching the minutes tick by on his watch, his head swimming but his whole body jumping to attention the moment he realizes it’s time to wake Gaby up.
“Go away,” she utters, clumsily swatting his hand away, and it’s the most beautiful sound in the world.
Illya isn’t sure he asked her all the questions he was supposed to.
He knows that he felt relieved, once she went back to sleep, so he figures he ought to have asked the questions, right? He wouldn’t have quieted himself down if he hadn’t.
He fights the urge to wake her up again, just to be sure. It’s been only twelve minutes, after all.
Solo wakes up once. It’s brief and he settles back down with a few gentle words and a promise to wake him up if anything happens. Illya isn’t sure if he will even remember in the morning.
To be fair, Illya isn’t sure if he will remember any of this either.
He tries pacing around and only ends up stumbling, his foot getting caught in Gaby’s bed. Sitting down is probably a better idea. He can sit on the edge of the chair and keep watch.
He almost shoots a bullet straight through the window. He isn’t sure if what he saw was a bird or the shadow of a tree or a product of his imagination to begin with, but nothing tries to kill them and his partners are still sleeping, so he’s glad he stopped himself in time.
When help comes, he shoots on his feet at the sound of the radio announcing their arrival – a necessary precaution, since he did almost shoot the radio too for daring to startle him -, still a little wary as he approaches the door, because you never know.
Everything that follows is hectic, people running around, medics checking his partners’ injuries, waking them up, which Illya manages to be a little peeved about, Waverly pestering him with questions—Illya feels more awake than he has in hours, if a little numb.
It’s a good thing, that the soreness in his muscles feels so distant and the fog in his brain has cleared enough that he’s able to answer Waverly’s questions about what happened: this mission was enough of a shitshow without him failing to report information properly.
Gaby seems okay. Awfully annoyed at having been woken up again, squinting at lights and looking a little green in the face still, but okay.
Solo is complaining about the roughness of the treatment he’s receiving and the blood on his suit, so he’s definitely okay. It’s when he gets quiet that Illya has learned to worry—he was really quiet, before.
He takes a relieved breath, breaking into a slight smile as Waverly talks and he forgets to listen, let alone look at him. That turns out to be a mistake when he calls his name and Illya instinctively turns: it must be too sharp a movement, because suddenly he’s a little too unstable on his feet and there are black spots dancing in front of him, rapidly growing in number.
Waverly frowns. “Perhaps you should sit down,” he suggests, grabbing his arm and pulling him towards the nearest seat.
Next thing he knows, the world is tilting around him and he’s falling, dropping on the nearest chair like deadweight. The black spots are slowly clearing from his vision, his heart thundering in his ears, and he thinks he might have passed out for a second.
“Kuryakin?” Waverly calls, not for the first time by the sound of it, entering his field of vision. “Are you injured?”
“I’m fine,” he says, automatically. Then, because he realizes how stupid he sounds: “Just tired.”
Waverly doesn’t look very convinced, but he hums affirmatively. “Alright,” he says, slowly. Illya sees him waving someone over, but he doesn’t care to look at whomever it is, his head growing heavier by the second and exhaustion a more and more pressing concern, now that his partners are in good hands. “Not to worry, you will have plenty of time to sleep now,” Waverly adds.
Illya manages a hum of acknowledgement: he really hopes so.