Travel hopefully in life.

Guys guys guys! The eatdrinkmakemerry exchange collection is open and I received a truly beautiful piece of pre-OT3 Illya/Napoleon/Gaby fic from a yet-unrevealed author. If you're at all interested in this trio, you should go and check it out. The author sets up a beautiful avenue for character growth and lays out the perfect scenes to lead these disaster babies through their first year of partnership and toward...y'know. Partnership. It's a nice short-and-tight fic too, so even if you're not in Man from U.N.C.L.E. fandom but you're looking to kill twenty minutes or so, I highly recommend giving it a shot.

MEZE
Creator TBA

Summary: In Istanbul, Napoleon cooks, Illya eats, and Gaby drinks. Over time, over food, they come to some better understanding of one another.

“You don’t like it,” [Illya] said, frowning, setting down his fork.

“It’s not bad,” [Gaby] said, defensively. “Just...different than I’m used to, is all.” He could imagine it easily. In East Berlin she’d likely not faced serious privation--though as a child just after the war, it might have been a different matter--but from his own experiences he was sure her diet had been...unvaried, without connections to the West that her foster family had certainly not enjoyed.

“I don’t think about food much,” she continued, spearing a piece of fish and toying with it on her plate. “It’s just...not important. Not really.”

“Sometimes. Sometimes not,” Illya prevaricated, hesitating, but his training and the desire to share with his colleague won out over the opportunity to exercise discretion. “I do not think Cowboy’s taste for fancy things is always wise, gets him in trouble more often than not, but food can tell you about a place. The people. What they prefer, what they avoid.”

“Whose tastes are important, and whose are not,” she muttered, a challenging look in her expression as she eyed him across the table, clutching her wine glass. He nodded shortly.

“Yes.”

Read it on AO3.