THIRTY-EIGHT
ARSENY
They all want things from me. Statements, clarifications, and, worst of all, cooperation.
Their language keeps changing depending on who’s in the room, but it all means the same thing in the end.
They want me to help them turn this into something tidy, something that can be written down, filed away, and explained until it stops looking like what it is.
A failure.
A death.
They want a version of events that can be flattened, stamped, and handed round to all the right people so everyone left standing can keep pretending the system works.
Tragic, yes. Regrettable, of course. But not senseless. Never senseless. There always has to be a line somewhere at the end of it that says ‘this made sense.’
I hate them all for asking.
I hate the officers who look at me with that careful, measured sympathy they’ve probably practiced in mirrors, all soft eyes and lowered voices, as if grief has made me fragile enough to snap if they use the wrong tone.
I even hate the ones who don’t look at me at all.
I hate the system that taught them how to behave this way and calls it professionalism.
But most of all, I hate the words. Loss. Risk. Operational necessity. Acceptable.
I sit through one meeting, then another.
I answer only what I have to. Name, rank, relationship to the deceased, confirmation of identity, then I ignore the rest. The questions come dressed up as procedure, but I know what they want under that.
They want my compliance. They want to see whether I’m still inside the lines.
They want to know whether I’m going to stay useful.
I stay quiet long enough that they start mistaking it for control, which is their error.
One of them, a man with a face I have never liked and now never will, folds his hands on the table and says, “I understand this is difficult.” No, you don’t.
I think. What I say, though, is nothing.
He goes on anyway. “Given your relationship to Senior Sergeant Zakirov and the recent death of his partner, we need to establish whether there were any additional concerns regarding his readiness.”
There it is. What I was waiting for. He’s not just a dead man now. He’s a dead man, and now there’s blame to distribute. I stare at him until he has the decency to shift in his seat. “You already know the answer,” I say.
He clears his throat. “We need your statement.”
“You have my statement.”
“We have a preliminary account,” he corrects, and I almost laugh. There’s something darkly offensive about being asked to help them build the official version of my brother’s death when the truth is already sitting in the room with us, ignored because it doesn’t fit into their forms or narrative.
The CO advised against the mission. Caiden pushed for it. The operation went ahead, and Niko died.
End of story.
Everything after that means nothing to me. Another officer tries a different angle. “No one is questioning your judgment.” That one nearly gets me to react. They’re always questioning someone’s judgment. That’s half the reason rooms like this exist.
“What exactly are you asking me for?” I ask, and my own voice surprises me with how steady it is.
The first man speaks again, more cautiously now. “We need your cooperation in understanding the sequence of events.”
Cooperation.
I lean back in the chair and look at him properly for the first time. “Fuck you,” I say.
He blinks. “Sergeant Zakirov—”
“I said, Fuck. You.” Everyone in the room goes still, and I can feel their recalculation happening in real time.
I stand before any of them can decide how to reply to me.
The chair legs scrape against the floor, hard from the force.
One of the officers rises too — more out of reflex than courage— but I’m already at the door by then.
“Arseny,” someone says behind me, using my first name as if that is meant to stop me.
But I don’t turn around. If I look back, I will say something that will force all of us into a different kind of ending, and despite what they think of me, I’m not interested in giving them a scene they can use to call me unstable.
I walk out, and nobody stops me. That part tells me everything I need to know.
By the time I get back to my quarters, the anger is no longer just level. It’s gone deeper than that. It sits under everything now, the kind that doesn’t need feeding because it’s already become its own fuel.
I shut the door behind me and stand in the middle of the room, the bag open on the bed, and feel... nothing.
No nostalgia, no reluctance, no last-minute sentimentality about the years spent here, or the uniform hanging in the locker, or even the life I once thought I could have outside of this.
Fuck this room.
Fuck this base.
Fuck every corridor, every office, every neat little system that keeps taking people and then asks for statements afterwards so it can feel organised about the damage.
Fuck the officers who looked at me like I might break in a useful way if they pressed carefully enough.
Fuck the ones who couldn’t meet my eyes at all.
Fuck the ones who use words like unfortunate, regrettable, and expect those words to do anything helpful.
Cassie died quietly in a flat full of warning signs and Niko did everything he was supposed to do after that. He got up, he went back to work, he kept going. He made himself useful because that’s what this place teaches men to do when they’re falling apart.
And then it killed him for trying.
I move to the bed and start packing again because if I stop moving, my head goes straight back to the hospital, to the snow, to Niko under that sheet, and I’ve already seen enough of that.
The bag is full when I finish. It has the clothes, papers, and cash. I leave the uniforms; they can keep their fucking costumes.
My hands pause on the zip, and that’s when I think about Vladimir. Not because I’m changing my mind. I’m not. I already did the worst thing I could think of, and it was deliberate on my part.
I gave him to Caiden. Not to save him from me.
Well, not only that. But also to punish Caiden.
I want him to wake up, see my brother’s son every day, and know exactly why that child is in his arms, not Niko’s.
I wanted him to feed him, carry him half-asleep through the dark, and feel the absence in every single practical thing he does.
And yes, I know I can’t take Vladimir myself.
I’m not stupid enough to mistake rage for a parenting plan.
I’m leaving. I’m disappearing. Whatever comes next for me is not a life a child should be dragged through, and I know that with enough certainty to hate myself for every second I even wish the truth were different.
But the punishment is real too, that part I’m not dressing up.
Caiden gets Vladimir because he can keep him alive, and I can’t. But Caiden also gets Vladimir because I want him haunted. I want his pain, his grief, and his guilt.
I hate him for putting Niko onto that mission after hearing that there were concerns and deciding his judgment mattered more.
He decided that he knew better. This is what he always does; he didn’t think.
He trusted his instinct harder than caution, trusted his own certainty harder than systems, and somehow still thinks that means he’s the safer man to follow.
It wasn’t safe, and Niko is dead.
That should be enough to kill every kind thought I’ve ever had about him, and it almost is.
Almost.
That’s what makes it unbearable, and that doesn’t help me right now.
It doesn’t soften a damn thing. It just makes the hatred filthier because it keeps running into the fact that I still know him.
I still know the sound his voice makes when it breaks and how my body would react towards him if he walked through the door before my brain had time to remember that I want him to suffer.
That makes me angrier than anything else in this room.
And I hate myself for that.
I hate myself for ever loving him.
I hate myself for still loving him now, in this exact moment, with my brother dead and his son handed over like a sentence.
I hate myself because some part of me would still choose him first if instinct got there before my pride.
And that is fucking disgusting.
I grab the bag and walk over to the door, pulling it open without looking back.
They will call this grief. I'm certain of it. They will call it instability, desertion, a breakdown, even. They will say my judgment is clouded, my emotions compromised, and whatever other neat little phrases that let them reduce this to a personal failing instead of what it is.
But they will be wrong.
I’m not confused. I’ve never been clearer.
Staying would mean accepting that this is the price of belonging here. It would mean saying “yes, this is fine, take Cassie, take Niko, take whatever comes next,” and I’ll still stand in line, wear the uniform and say thank you for the structure.
I would rather burn every last bridge myself than hand them another body and call it duty.
The building is quiet at this hour. Good. Let it stay that way. Let them wake up tomorrow and realise I’m gone after the fact, when the only thing left to do is write it down and hand it off to somebody else.
I walk through the base like I have every right to be there, because for the next few minutes, technically, I still do. I stop off at the empty barracks, grab the stashed phone, shoving it into my bag next to my wallet and the phone number Niko gave me as I walk.
When I push through the outer door, the cold hits me hard enough to make my eyes sting, and I keep walking.
I’m not broken. I’m done.
This isn’t escape. It’s refusal.
And if they want to come after me for that, well, they can fucking try.