Archie
Sometimes, in the dead of night, when sleep would not come and silence turned hostile, I found myself thinking of the things Rasputin never got to say.
Not because he had lacked the words. But because no one gave him the time.
And grief, I had learned, was a strange and vicious thing.
It did not only mourn what was lost. It built rooms for the missing and forced you to sit inside them.
It made you hear voices where there should have been none.
Made you remember a man so clearly that eventually, you could all but feel the shape of his hand at the back of your neck, steadying you as the world came apart.
I knew my brother.
Knew the cadence of his voice. The way he wasted nothing, not words or movement. Not love. I knew the shape of his silences and what lived inside them. And I knew that if death had not taken him first, he would have found some way to leave me something.
Not poetry or sentiment, but a bruising kind of truth.
So sometimes, when the night was hard, and the grief was fierce, I imagined the letter he never got to write to me.
I imagined him somewhere cold and bleeding, with death at his shoulder and my name in his mouth, forcing whatever strength he had left into one final act of protection.
And in my head, it sounded like this:
Archie,
If you are hearing these words in whatever broken place the dead leave them, then it means I did not make it back to you.
It means he moved first, and I ran out of time. So listen to me carefully.
I did not leave you.
Whatever story you were given, whatever poison he poured in your ear, whatever version of my death he handed you and called truth—I need you to know this before anything else:
I did not leave you.
I know what you will think at first, because I know you better than I know myself. You will be angry before you are heartbroken. You will let rage carry what grief is too heavy to lift. You will think I chose some coward’s way out and abandoned you in that house with him.
I didn’t.
If I could have reached you, I would have.
If I’d had one more hour, I would have spent it finding a way to get word to you.
If I’d had one more day, I would have used it to drag you out of that place by the throat if I had to.
So hear me now.
Whatever happened to me, it was not surrender. And it was never you I wanted left behind to carry it.
You were the one good thing to come out of that house. The only thing in it that ever felt clean.
I knew that from the first moment Anna placed you in my arms and you stopped crying like somehow you already understood I was yours and you were mine. I did not know what to do with something so small then. I only knew I would kill for you if I had to.
That never changed. Not when you got older. Not as you grew loud and reckless and furious at the world.
Not when you stood in front of me and insisted the crown should be mine, as though fairness had ever had any place in our father’s world.
You loved too openly. That was always what made me afraid for you.
Men like him look at love and see weakness.
He would have looked at what I felt for you and called it weakness. He would have been wrong.
It was the only thing that ever made me strong enough to endure him.
So, if you remember anything of me, remember this: I stayed as long as I did because you were still there. Because Anna was still there. Because leaving would have meant trusting him not to consume what remained, and I never trusted him with anything worth keeping.
Do not hate me for going where you could not follow.
Do not turn me into another reason to destroy yourself.
I know you, Archie. Better than anyone. I know what lives under your skin.
I know how quickly grief curdles in men like us when there’s no one left to aim it at but ourselves.
I know your first instinct will be to burn.
To tear through whatever stands in front of you and call the wreckage justice because justice is easier to stomach when it’s bleeding.
If you must become something dangerous, then become dangerous in a way he never understood.
Not cruel for cruelty’s sake. Not hollow.
Not starved for worship. Be the sort of man who knows exactly where the line is and steps over it only when it matters.
Be the kind of monster who tears cages apart, not the kind who builds them and makes excuses to fill them.
I know what he is. I know what he did to my mother, and what he did to yours. I know it got under your skin early, and that is why you looked at suffering and could never quite walk past it.
Do not lose that. I mean it.
The world will try to beat it out of you. They will tell you that compassion has no place in power.
Let them say whatever makes them sleep better, because their evil knows no better.
You are not him. And for the love of God, Archie, do not let grief convince you that becoming him is the only way to survive what he’s done to us.
If there is any part of me left in this world after I’m gone, it is in the things I tried to keep alive in you.
Your loyalty. Your fury. Your refusal to look away. Your need to drag wounded things out of the dark even when they bite you for it.
Those things will hurt you. Keep them anyway.
One day, if the world allows it, you will love someone who sees all the worst parts of you and does not run.
When that happens, do not punish her for arriving late to a war she did not start.
Do not bleed all over the one place that feels like peace and push it away. Do not make her carry ghosts that belong to us.
You do not honor me by staying broken, or by dying angry. You honor me by living long enough to become something our father could never understand. Something he could never control.
Something he would have feared if he’d been wise enough to see it coming.
And if there is any justice in this world, you will outlive him.
If there is any mercy, you will love greatly enough that the house does not get the final word on either of us.
And if there is anything of me left in you after all this, let it be the part that knew monsters should never be allowed to walk this earth unchallenged.
—R
I would never admit aloud that I had composed those words a hundred different ways in my head over the years.
But I would know—deep in my bones—that if Rasputin had been given the chance, the letter would have sounded something like that.
Not soft. But loving in the only way either of us had ever known how.
Brutal.