Written for today’s short affair prompt at Section VII

Summary: In which Napoleon and Illya find their sleep disturbed by the spirits of their past lives.

Notes:
There are two versions of this piece.  This is the light slash
version.  There is a gen version on my
dreamwidth if you’d prefer reading that.
The two blurbs are around 95% similar.

Not cross-posting this as I’ll be expanding this in the future.

Napoleon frowned, annoyed at his sleep being
disturbed as he heard a knocking on the headboard of his bed.

“Illya, cut it out,” he mumbled.

“Zzz… Wha…?” Illya murmured, still mostly asleep.

Napoleon paused as it sunk in that Illya couldn’t
have been the one knocking on the headboard if he was still asleep.  Cautiously, he opened his eyes, and froze as
he beheld the absolutely bizarre sight of a transparent spirit looking exactly
like him frantically striking the headboard of the bed with an umbrella that he
had found on the floor.  Beside his
doppelganger spirit was another spirit—one that that perfectly resembled Illya.

Ordinarily, this sight would have frightened
the living daylights out of a man, but for Napoleon Solo, it was merely a great
annoyance.  It hadn’t been the first time
they had seen these two spirits—spirits who claimed to have been them in a
former life—and though Napoleon had expected to see them again at some point,
he hadn’t expected the circumstances to be quite like this.

“Rise and shine, you city slickers,” his
doppelganger spoke in a Southern drawl.  “We’ve
got us some work to do.”

“Since when did the two of you become
poltergeists?” Napoleon grumbled, grabbing the umbrella from his spirit double.

“Since we’ve got ourselves some new
developments in regards to us being stuck in this plane,” Illya’s spirit double
returned.

The sound of the conversation drew the
flesh-and-blood Illya to awareness.  He looked
up, saw the two spirits hovering by their bed, and groaned, cursing in Russian.

“Okay, look,” Napoleon said.  “I don’t know for how long you two guys have
been spirits for, but maybe you’ve forgotten that there’s this thing called ‘sleep’
that we mortals need, and Illya and I aren’t guaranteed this necessity in our
line of work…”

“This is our first leave in three weeks,”
Illya grumbled.  “We are tired and need our sleep.”

“Sure didn’t stop you from wasting half the
night partaking in certain indulgences,” Napoleon’s doppelganger said, sounding
almost envious.

The two mortals stared at their spirit
counterparts.

“Exactly how long have you been here!?” Illya
demanded, now fully awake and indignant as Napoleon pulled the covers up around
them, blushing bright pink.

“Contrary to what your Napoleon thinks, we do
remember what it was like to be mortal,” the blond spirit smirked.  “You’re us, after all.  We don’t have to be here to know what you do.”

“That’s quite enough,” Napoleon said.  “What do you want!?”

“You heard us mention about the ancient
medallion we smashed—it prevented the release of a mythical beast, at the price
of our being cursed, unable to cross over, unless our reincarnations met and
broke the curse,” his double said.

“Yeah, you mentioned that,” Napoleon
said.  “You also said that since Illya
and I met, the curse should have broken.
But you still can’t cross over.”

“Yeah, and now we know why,” the blond spirit
said.

“Why?” Illya asked, hoping it was something
that they could resolve in the next five minutes.

“THRUSH is reassembling the broken pieces of
the medallion we smashed,” the brunet spirit said, flatly.  “They’ve been attempting to collect the
pieces ever since we smashed the thing back in 1895.”

Both Napoleon and Illya stared.

“Enough of the pieces were reassembled to
prevent us from crossing over,” the blond spirit said.  “We need to put a stop to this before it is
fully reassembled—or else the curse will pass to you, as well.”

“Well, then let’s prevent that,” Napoleon
said, grabbing his Special from the nightstand.
He looked to his partner.  “Illya?”

Illya cringed at the thought of getting
involved in the supernatural again, but he sighed.

“Very well,” he said.

If nothing else, at least they could close
this chapter of their past lives and allow them the freedom they desired.

That would be the least they could do.