#101-500

The ropes cut into her wrists, arms yanked tightly behind the back of the chair. She didn’t know where she shoes went, her ankles tied to the chair legs. Her skin was covered in a sheen of sweat, her face streaked in black, bleeding mascara. The room is dark and dingy and dirty, with flickering lights and rats snuffling along the floors.

Gaby gulps for air and blinks, her vision blurred from a blow to the head hours before and the constant glare of tears. “P-please st-stop,” she stutters out. Her head is ringing not from the concussion but from the choking silence following echoing cries of pain. Illya slumps in the corner of her vision, a large dark smudge, subject to electric shock, brutal baton beatings, smashing his shoulder blades with a hammer, buckets of water and things that Gaby had blacked out for.

“Stop,” she whispers, her head drooping.

“Gaby, no.” The garbled sound of Illya’s voice barely reaches her ears.

She doesn’t know how much more of this she could take. She was barely touched, but Illya was taking a beating that was going to cost him his life. She would never be able to forgive herself if she didn’t at least try to save him.

Their captors spoke in thickly accented and broken English, the only language common between them all. “Talk now,” one said, lifting Gaby’s chin with the end of a baton. “More beat.” He points violently at Illya.

Illya’s back hits the mat and he grunts with the impact. Gaby pins his wrists down near his head and grins down at him like she just won the world’s most expensive and pristine vehicle.

“Russian down,” she says proudly, not moving from his spot, her knees digging into the mat on either side of his ribs. She’s small enough where she really has to lean to keep his wrists pinned, leaving them remarkably close.

Illya can smell her shampoo, loose pieces of her hair falling all around her face. She hadn’t bothered to hold it all back under a bandana today like she normally did when they were training in self-defense. Her cheeks are flushed from the exertion and her breathing is visible, chest expanding with each intake.

She is beautiful.

Then again, she is always beautiful, even when she is drunk and outrageous, which happens more than Gaby would care to admit.

“You could do better,” Illya says, not willing to give her an inch until she perfected the moves he was introducing her to. This is all to help her survive, he isn’t about to skimp on her lessons just because his mind is thinking of other things not typically suited for the makeshift gym they set up in the villas that Waverly set up U.N.C.L.E. in.

Gaby’s smirk changed to an unsatisfied frown. “I have you pinned.”

“Yes.”

“What more is needed?”

“I can easily break from this,” Illya explains. “When you get someone down like this, be careful, they may roll. You should try to place your knee in softer place.”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Gaby says, her shoulders relaxing slightly. It had taken time and plenty of drunken fights for Gaby to begin getting over her anger at the world, at the Russians, at Illya for being Russian even though he couldn’t help it. Many times she was drunk and did little damage to him, but occasionally she had bruised him. She doesn’t want to do that here.

“What if I was your enemy?”

“You are not.” Gaby releases her hold on his wrists, sliding down until she’s resting on her elbows, their noses a millimeter apart.

It takes all of Illya’s power not to move his hands to her waist, recreating that scene from the bedroom back in Rome. “I could be. In future,” he says, his voice grown significantly softer.

Gaby smiles softly, tilting her head ever so slightly to the left. “That is the future.”