#it's torture (lying) | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

set-phasers-to-whump · 1 month ago

Text

decisions

prompt: forced choice

whumpee: illya kuryakin

fandom: the man from uncle

hi this one got a bit longer than intended but such is. it's pre-ship and features a bit of whump for napoleon as well. hope you like!

Napoleon wakes up and before he so much as opens his eyes he ascertains that he’s tied up, quite severely, to a chair which is bolted to the floor. His bindings are rope, scratchy and thick. At least his shoes are still on and there is no water surrounding his feet. Small victories.

He opens his eyes and discovers that he’s not alone.

Illya’s sitting across from him, similarly tied up. He’s sweaty from effort, but his bonds appear unaffected, and it is at this point that Napoleon realizes that they’re not going to be getting out of this easily.

“Are you alright?” he asks, and Illya nods.

“You?”

He nods as well. Wonders what fate holds for them, knows it can hardly be pleasant.

The man who enters the room just then is not someone Napoleon knows. Nor Illya, from the looks of it. He smiles, quite friendly, and Napoleon is put deeply on edge.

The man stands directly in front of him. “Nice to finally meet you, Mr. Solo,” he says smoothly, which is another bad sign.

“Now. Let’s get straight into it. Left or right?”

“What?” This is decidedly not the sort of question he’d been expecting, and he can’t make heads or tails of it. The man’s hands are loose, so he’s hardly hiding any kind of nasty surprise, and there’s nothing in the room that makes this question make sense.

“You heard me. Left or right?”

“In regards to what, exactly?”

The man grins again. “Just choose.”

Napoleon shrugs as much as the bindings will allow. “Left, I suppose.”

The man whistles sharply, and a door at the back of the room opens. Another man enters, looking considerably more physically imposing. So he’s got minions, Napoleon thinks. Great.

“He wants the left,” reports the man in charge. His goon nods, slipping a length of metal pipe from out of his sleeve. Shit, Napoleon thinks, and braces himself for a hit.

Except it never comes. The minion, as Napoleon has already begun calling him, approaches Illya, and so suddenly that Napoleon cannot so much as cry out, he swings the pipe directly into Illya’s left ankle.

There’s an audible crunching sound, and Illya lets out a sharp breath. Napoleon just stares at him, shocked.

“What the hell?”

“Don’t speak unless I tell you to,” says the man in charge. His voice is flippant and yet belies an enormous amount of power.

Napoleon shuts up.

“Now then. Let’s let the real fun begin, shall we, Mr. Solo?”

“What do you want?”

Another unnervingly placid smile. “Only to hurt you.”

“Funny way of doing that, hitting him instead of me.”

The smile widens. “Oh, trust me. You’ll hurt plenty.”

Napoleon elects to ignore him, for the time being. He focuses instead on Illya, who is breathing heavily in the way he does when he’s trying to control a rather immense amount of pain. I’m sorry, Napoleon thinks, as if Illya will hear. I didn’t know that would happen.

“My next question, Mr. Solo, is this: waterboarding, or whipping?”

Napoleon blinks. Doesn’t answer. What the hell?

“I won’t repeat myself next time, and he’ll just end up getting both. Choose, for his sake.”

“You’re not—why not me?”

“I’m sure you’ll work it out. Now choose.”

Napoleon locks eyes with Illya, who looks back, unflinching. He blinks once, very deliberately, and Napoleon speaks before he can question it.

“Waterboarding.”

He knows Illya’s trained for this. They both have, in their time. This does absolutely nothing now. Napoleon’s heart beats wildly in his chest and there’s a sense of rage threatening to consume him as the minion approaches Illya with a towel and a bucket.

Watching his partner be waterboarded is one of the most painful things that Napoleon has ever experienced. The way he fights, absolutely futilely, as the towel is placed over his face, as the water is poured over. The way his body thrashes against the restraints. The way he coughs and gasps when the towel is pulled away, only to be replaced mere seconds later.

Waterboarding is supposed to make the victim want to speak, to share every secret they’ve got, but at the moment Illya isn’t so much as making a peep, while Napoleon feels like he’d spill everything he knows if they’d only stop.

“Stop!” he shouts, though he knows that they won’t listen.

“Shut up. Every time you speak without me telling you to, I’ll hurt him just that little bit more.”

To prove his point, the towel is replaced once more. Illya gasps for breath and it turns into a horrible coughing and spluttering as the water—the last of it, it looks like—is once again poured over his face.

When the towel is removed this time, it’s placed neatly onto a table, and the bucket is set onto the floor. Napoleon observes these things out of the corner of his eye, the bulk of his attention focused on Illya's coughing, shivering body across from him.

When the coughing at last subsides, the man approaches Napoleon again. He is so angry he can barely hear the words spoken to him over the pounding of blood in his head.

“Hammer or pliers?”

“Leave him. The fuck. Alone.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that. I’d like to see you suffer a bit more, first.”

“I’m going to kill you.”

“Bigger men than you have tried. Choose, or shall I remind you of the rules again?”

Brief eye contact with Illya, another single blink. Napoleon hopes to god he’s reading this right, that Illya isn’t simply doing this coincidentally, that he’s at least allowing his partner the freedom to choose.

Choose. Right. He feels sick. Wishes, above all else, that it was him in Illya’s position, making decisions about his own fate.

“Hammer,” he says, and his voice sounds alien to his ears.

“I do hate to repeat a question, but needs must. Left or right?”

Another single blink.

“Left.”

He doesn’t want to watch. But he has to.

The hammer comes crashing down onto Illya’s left hand and there’s a sickening cracking noise and Illya makes this completely involuntary sound of pain and shock and Napoleon feels like his entire being is getting ripped in two.

“Stomach or chest?”

The single blink again. Napoleon cannot wrench his attention away from the tear that travels its way down Illya’s cheek.

That metal pipe makes a reappearance, slams into Illya’s stomach. There’s a loud exhale as the air is forced out of Illya’s lungs, and he gags harshly.

God, Napoleon is going to be sick. He’s sitting here watching and making decisions and Illya is getting tortured and he can’t do fucking anything about it.

He can feel blood trickling down his wrists from where he’s been straining against the ropes with every action taken against his partner. He focuses his attention on this infinitesimally small pain, hates himself for losing focus on Illya for even a second, but—

He wants nothing more than to break free of these restraints and kill this guy. Brutally, if necessary.

“Fingers or toes?”

He forces his attention back to Illya. Two blinks.

“Toes.”

The minion places his entire weight onto Illya’s left foot, the same one he’d previously smashed with the pipe, and Illya groans. Napoleon struggles harder against the ropes, without making it obvious what he’s doing.

When the minion at last steps off of Illya’s foot, his partner is crying. It’s involuntary, a pain response, and Napoleon knows this, and god, he understands. What the man had meant earlier, when he’d asked, why not me?

This is more painful than anything else they could do to him, by far.

“What you want?” Illya asks. It’s the first time he’s spoken and his voice is wrecked, all small and shaky and wrong.

The minion steps back and to the left, faces Illya, and the man in charge gets up into his space. They’re not looking, and Napoleon fights frantically against the ropes in this window of opportunity.

“Don’t speak.” There’s the sound of a slap, but Napoleon isn’t paying attention. He’s got the ropes off his wrists, and he’s untying the ones around his ankles as quickly as he can.

“Or else what?” Illya asks, and Napoleon knows he’s seen him, knows he’s doing what he needs to do so that they can get out of this.

There’s a dull thud and a wince.

“I suggest you don’t try to find out.”

He’s done it. The ropes are gone. He just has to get up, while their backs are still turned—

They’re turning back around. Fuck!

There’s no time to do anything, but then Illya says, “fuck you,” which takes Napoleon completely by surprise—he can count on one hand the number of times he’s heard Illya curse in English—and it takes the other men by surprise, too, because they both turn back around just before their eyes would’ve landed on Napoleon.

The hammer is picked back up and just as it’s being brought down onto Illya’s already destroyed hand, Napoleon flings himself out of the chair.

He tackles the minion first, not quite stopping the hammer but at least preventing it from doing maximum damage. He wrests the implement from its wielder’s grasp, smashes it into the man’s head. He goes limp immediately.

One down.

The other man, the mastermind of this horrific torture scheme, is standing above him with the metal pipe in his hands. He swings it down, and Napoleon just barely rolls out of the way. The pipe hits the body of the minion instead, adding insult to injury.

Napoleon leaps to his feet. The fight is harder than he would’ve expected, given the relatively small size of his opponent and his apparent unwillingness to do any of the truly nasty work.

Still, he gets there in the end. He sacrifices himself to a couple strong hits from the pipe, but then the hammer connects with the man’s skull and this wave of pure anger and adrenaline overtakes him.

He loses himself for a second. And then Illya’s saying, “it’s enough, Cowboy, stop,” and he opens his eyes and finds himself straddling a body which is only vaguely recognizable as Illya’s torturer.

He drops the hammer to the ground with a deafening clatter and then gets to his feet. His hands are covered in blood and he can taste it in his mouth.

He’s gone, is the first thing Napoleon thinks, untying Illya with trembling hands. He can’t hurt him anymore. Illya’s safe.

“I’m so sorry,” he says quietly, as he unties the ropes around Illya’s ankles. “God, Illya, I’m so sorry.”

“You did not hurt me,” Illya responds, wincing as Napoleon inadvertently brushes a hand against his injured ankle. “No reason to apologize.”

“He hurt you because of me.”

“No, he did this because of him. Come, we should leave.”

Napoleon wants to argue. Wants to apologize for the rest of his life, wants Illya to yell at him and tell him to go to hell, wants—

He wants to hold onto Illya forever and protect him, even though he knows Illya’s more than capable of protecting himself. He wants to be around Illya always, to threaten those that would come near him, try and harm him like they had today.

He doesn’t know what he wants, in short, and his heart is still pounding and he feels dizzy with relief and guilt and about a million other things he can only guess at.

Their getaway is slow-going. Illya can barely walk on his destroyed ankle, although he does his best. They limp out of the building, Napoleon with the hammer in hand lest anyone else should come crawling out of the woodwork.

But they meet no one. The path to their car is mercifully short, and Napoleon drives them back to their safehouse with his hands clenched firmly around the wheel so that they’ll stop shaking.

“It’s okay,” Illya says, quiet and sudden, when they’re about a mile away from their destination. “I know…I know you will blame yourself about this. But you did not do anything. It is not your fault.”

Napoleon suddenly finds himself blinking back tears. Get it together, he tells himself. It’s not you who was just tortured. At least not physically.

“I just sat there,” he all but whispers, after a beat. “They were torturing you, and I just sat there and gave them directions.”

“They made this decision. And you told them to do what I chose.”

“He said—he said he was hurting you to hurt me.”

“And?”

“That makes it my fault, Illya,” Napoleon says, and he can’t quite stop his voice from breaking.

“It is his fault,” Illya says, and there’s the familiar sureness in his voice that has heretofore been missing. “He wanted to hurt us. You did not make this decision.”

“But—”

“No. Not your fault. I do not blame you, you cannot blame you.”

Napoleon does not know how to argue against this. Even though the guilt feels like it is going to eat him alive.

They arrive back at the safehouse, and he helps Illya through the door. There’s about a million things that they need to do. Tend to Illya’s injuries. Contact Waverly. Pack and prepare for an evac.

Illya collapses immediately onto the couch. He’s damp with water and sweat and blood, his hand is swelling something awful, and his ankle must be faring similarly. He looks absolutely exhausted and pained, and Napoleon is about to start bustling around, gathering ice and bandages and alcohol and cotton balls, but then Illya lightly taps the space beside him.

“Sit with me?” he asks, and Napoleon thinks he’d do absolutely anything Illya asked of him right now.

He sits, looks at his partner. Illya is looking back at him, terribly vulnerable beneath the tiredness and hurt, and Napoleon feels himself begin to properly cry.

He shouldn’t be crying. He’s not even hurt, besides the scrapes around his wrists and the bruises from the pipe. But there’s nothing for it and no way of stopping now that he’s started.

“Napoleon,” Illya begins, but Napoleon cuts him off.

“Just—I don’t want to hurt you any more, but can I—can I touch you?”

It sounds pathetic and stupid but he just wants a physical reassurance that Illya’s here, still alive despite the torture and not even upset with him, after everything. That protective feeling is back, hot in his chest.

“Okay.”

He carefully pulls Illya towards him, gentle as he can be, attentive to any indication of discomfort.

He doesn’t get any. Quite the opposite, actually. Illya leans into him, warm and still trembling a bit, and Napoleon wraps an arm around him and just holds on.

thanks for reading! hope you liked <3

#whumptober2024 #no.23 #forced choice #fic #the man from uncle #torture #tied up #emotional whump #comfort #my writing #i say things #illya kuryakin #ough. still a bit sick and so mad about it.#also lazy about it and i need to not be. i got shit to do man! but instead i'm lying around rewatching slow horses lol #such is life. tomorrow i'll do real work. i must.

24 notes · View notes