Rasputin
Nothing could balance what Viktor had taken. But it was something.
Archie looked toward the desk. Our father’s desk.
The throne of a cruel little demon who had mistaken fear for loyalty until fear finally turned around and bit him.
“He deserved worse,” Archie said.
His gaze came back to me, but there was no satisfaction in his face.
Only exhaustion.
“You should have told me. I would have come.”
“I know.”
“I would have crawled across Europe if I had to.”
My chest tightened.
“I know that, too.”
“Then why? Why did you decide for me?”
I had answered this in my head a thousand ways. All of them sounded like lies now.
“Because I was afraid.”
Archie’s face shifted. Rasputin Popovich did not confess fear. Ever. But there it was. Bleeding on the floor between us.
“I was afraid Viktor would use you to finish what he started. I was afraid if word reached you, it would reach him. I was afraid you would come for me before I could stand, and I would watch our father put you in the ground beside me.”
My voice lowered.
“And I was afraid that if you saw what I had become in those first months, you would stop living and start trying to carry me.”
Archie’s anger faltered again.
I hated myself for every flicker of hurt in him.
He looked away. His throat worked.
“Do you know what it did to me?”
I nodded.
“No, you don’t,” he said. “You don’t. You were alive. You had pain. You had Marushka. You had Bass. You had something to fight toward. I had a fucking ghost.”
His words struck me.
“I had a brother who existed only in memory. I had questions no one answered. I had nightmares of this room. Of you falling. Of them carrying you away. I had a mother hidden from me. A life I didn’t choose.
A country I couldn’t return to. And every time something good happened, every time I laughed, every time I breathed without choking on it, I remembered you were dead and felt guilty for surviving. ”
I stood very still.
He stepped closer.
“You didn’t just stay dead, Rasputin. You made me live with it.”
There it was. The wound beneath the rage. I would have taken a knife easier.
“I am sorry,” I said.
The words felt too small. Insulting, almost. But they were all I had.
Archie stared at me. For a moment, I thought he might hit me. I wanted him to. There would have been relief in it. Something simple. Pain for pain. Instead, he looked past me, toward the window. His face had gone tight in the way men’s faces did when they refused to fall apart.
“I hated him,” he said. “For killing you.”
“Understandable.”
“I hated myself for not saving you.”
My chest tightened.
“You were never meant to save me.”
“You were my brother.”
“I still am.”
His eyes sharpened.
“Are you?”
The question was cruel. But I had earned it. I took one step closer. He let me.
“I was your brother when Viktor pulled the trigger,” I said.
“I was your brother when I lay in Marushka’s house unable to move and bit through cloth so no one would hear me scream.
I was your brother when I learned to walk again.
I was your brother when I stood beside your hospital bed and told you to get up.
I was your brother when I put Viktor in the ground and spat on his grave. ”
I stopped in front of him.
Close enough now that I could see the faint scar near his hairline. The tiredness around his eyes. The life in him. The impossible, stubborn life.
“And I am your brother now,” I said. “Even if you hate me.”
His face twisted.
“I do not hate you.”
The words came fast. Angry. Almost unwilling. Then softer.
“I wanted to.”
I nodded.
“You have every right to,” I told him.
His eyes burned.
“Don’t be noble. It doesn’t suit you.”
Despite everything, a rough breath left me. Almost a laugh.
For a moment, neither of us moved. Then Archie looked down. His hands were shaking. A tremor he would have hidden from anyone else. I saw it because I had spent a lifetime watching for the things he didn’t say.
He saw me see it. His expression hardened, humiliated by his own grief.
I reached for him slowly. Slow enough that he could stop me. He didn’t. My hand closed around the back of his neck. The same way I had done when we were boys and he came home bloodied from fights he swore he had won.
He went rigid. For one second, I thought he would pull away. Then something in him gave. His forehead dropped against my shoulder.
I closed my eyes.
There he was. Warm. Breathing. Alive.
My brother. The boy I had failed. The man who had survived me.
His hand gripped my coat, fist twisting in the fabric like he hated that he needed something to hold on to.
I did not speak. Neither did he.
There were no words left that would not ruin it.
His breath shook once. That was all he allowed himself.
I tightened my hand at the back of his neck and bowed my head over him, shielding him from a room that had taken too much from us.
“I came back,” I said quietly.
His voice was muffled against my coat.
“You came back.” His grip tightened. “You bastard.”
There was another silence. Then, so quietly I almost missed it, he said, “I missed you.”
The words moved through me like something breaking open after years of being frozen shut.
I held him harder.
“Me more.”
He pulled back then, eyes red but dry, anger still alive in him. I wanted it to live. He would need it. So would I.
“This doesn’t fix things,” he said.
“No.”
“I’m still furious.”
“You should be.”
“I may hit you later.”
“You can try.”
His mouth twitched despite himself, and grief made the almost-smile unbearable.
Then it vanished.
“What happens now?”
I looked around the office. At the desk. The polished floor. The window. The room where Viktor had tried to end one son and destroyed the other by doing so.
Now both of us stood in it. Breathing. Changed. Damaged. But still here.
“Now,” I said, “we clean up what he left behind.”
Archie’s gaze held mine.
“And after that?”
I looked at my brother, and for the first time in years, the future did not look like a battlefield I had to crawl across alone.
“After that,” I said, voice rough, “we decide what kind of men we become without him.”
Archie looked away, swallowing hard.
Outside, the Russian sky pressed grey and heavy against the windows. Inside, the office remained exactly as it had been. But something had shifted.
The room no longer belonged to Viktor. Nor to the blood he had spilled and expected us to drown in.
Archie stood beside me now, wounded and furious and alive.
And I understood then that survival was not the same as victory.
Sometimes survival was uglier. Sometimes it came limping, resentful, scarred beyond recognition.
And sometimes it stood in a dead man’s office with your brother’s grief in its hands and no idea how to give back the years it had stolen. But it was still something.
It was breath. It was blood still moving. It was a hand at the back of a neck. A fist in a coat. A brother returned from the grave, and another who had every right not to forgive him yet.
For now, that had to be enough.
Because four years ago, Viktor Popovich had stood in this office and believed he had ended us. But he had made ghosts of the wrong men. And ghosts, when they finally came home, did not knock gently.