TWO
ARSENY
I’ve always been good with absence. It’s a skill you learn early when attachment proves itself unreliable, when the safest way to survive is to make yourself smaller internally while remaining impeccable on the surface. It’s also a skill you get praised for by people who benefit from your silence.
It’s convenient, really.
When people leave, are reassigned, or disappear behind official phrasing and sealed reports, you adapt. You don’t reach for what’s no longer there. You adjust and carry on.
There have been other men, other women, other presences in general that occupied some space for a time and then didn’t. I handled those losses efficiently.
I convinced myself that the lack of impact meant maturity rather than avoidance, that the absence of pain meant I had done something right. I was praised for it, told I was disciplined, reliable, and not prone to distraction.
But none of those people were Caiden Varrik.
I wake up when I am supposed to, dress with habitual precision, train until my muscles burn, and work until the hours compress into something featureless and obedient. I do everything correctly, and I’m a model soldier.
If they gave medals for being dead inside, I’d have a whole row of them.
From the outside, nothing about me invites any concern. I’m functional, controlled, and completely unremarkable in exactly the ways this place rewards. I’m the sort of man commanders like to point at when they’re trying to convince themselves the system works.
Caiden is gone.
That’s a fact, and facts I can live with. What unsettles me is not panic or even longing in the most obvious sense, but the subtle misalignment of everything else.
The days feel slightly off, as if the balance has shifted and I keep compensating without quite knowing what for.
I notice it in the evenings mostly, when I turn onto my side, when there’s no familiar body, no steady breathing, no quiet sense of someone else occupying the same space.
No stupid, infuriatingly comforting noises, and no British muttering.
The silence isn’t loud, but it’s persistent.
I find myself listening for things that are no longer here, and that is a failure of discipline I don’t appreciate.
I don’t reach for him in my sleep, and I don’t say his name out loud.
I don’t replay conversations or mistakes, because that way lies indulgence, and indulgence has never been my vice.
Spite, yes. Control, yes. Indulgence? Only if you count the occasional impulse to ruin a man’s life because he smiled at me.
Instead, I fill the gaps with extra hours, longer routes, and jobs that require focus and precision. It works, mostly.
Secretly, I’m hoping Caiden will write.
I hate that.
I hate wanting it like a teenager with a crush and no self-respect.
The tension lives in the waiting, the not knowing, and in the knowledge that if he did, whatever he sent has been sitting somewhere for probably days now.
The address I gave him isn’t accessible from the base, which was deliberate on my part. No one watching what goes out and comes in. Another buffer, one more layer of separation between impulse and consequence.
I told myself it was sensible, that distance would give me time to stabilise before introducing variables I couldn’t control.
That logic has held for six days.
By the seventh day, I’m irritable in ways that don’t match the provocation.
I’m correcting people who don’t need correcting and finishing conversations before they’ve properly begun.
I catch myself pausing mid-task, my attention drifting somewhere unhelpful, and I have to pull it back with more force than usual.
One of my men asks me a harmless question about fuel logs, and I nearly tear his head off. I don’t, obviously. I’m not that insane. I make my face do the correct thing, and he walks away alive.
I’m practically a damn saint.
Niko watches the exchange longer than he would usually. His expression is unreadable in a way that irritates me. He used to be easier to read. Or maybe I’ve just been distracted.
I’ve started dreaming, which I despise.
They’re not memories; those I can contain, but possibilities, which I refuse to look at too long.
Possibilities are reckless.
They make you stupid.
Futures with undefined ends, outcomes without contingencies, and Caiden present in ways that are not tactical or temporary. I wake up with my jaw clenched and my pulse unsteady most mornings, the combination of which is also deeply irritating.
It’s on the eighth morning I find a reason and leave base under perfectly acceptable pretences.
The papers are signed and stamped, my expression is arranged into the neutral calm of a man with nothing to hide, and nowhere else he would rather be.
Routine has always been my shield. Discipline, my preferred form of mercy.
If anyone asks, I’m doing something boring and necessary.
If anyone doubts me, that’s their problem.
The car carries me through the checkpoint and then into civilian movement, noise, and the unregulated sprawl of people living without consequence.
Must be nice.
I keep my eyes forward because looking too closely at other lives has never ended well for me. I should turn left at the second intersection. That takes me to the depot, completes the task, and closes the loop. I signal anyway. And then, very deliberately, I turn right.
Small betrayals are still betrayals.
The internet café appears exactly where I remember it, tucked into the street as if trying not to be seen, its sign faded enough that you would have to be looking for it to notice it at all.
Inside, the air smells faintly of dust and overheated electronics.
It’s the kind of place that exists solely to facilitate other people’s secrecy.
There are a handful of terminals along the wall.
All are identical and almost obsolete, which is precisely why they work for what I need.
Modern systems leave fingerprints. Old ones leave you with tetanus — at worst — if you touch the wrong surface.
A teenager behind the counter glances up, takes in my age, sees the uniform, and immediately loses interest. I’m not here for anything he understands, so I let him stay ignorant.
I choose a computer at the far end with my back to the wall, the habit overriding the fact that this isn’t a hostile environment. I set my folder beside the keyboard, and I even sit as if I belong here.
Like I’m not about to do something painfully stupid.
This should be the part where my brain tells me it’s a bad idea. But my brain is apparently on holiday. Instead of waiting for it to come back, I wake the screen.
The browser loads slowly, and I type the address from memory without hesitation.
The inbox appears. Unread: 1.
One message. One week. One decision Caiden made the moment he was alone enough to do it.
He did write.
The relief hits me in a wave I wasn’t prepared for. Why wouldn’t he? He’s the sort of man who sees distance and immediately starts building a bridge.
Even if it kills both of us.
I don’t open it immediately. I look at the sender first, returnfire, shockingly accurate. The timestamp confirms what I already knew.
He didn’t wait long.
He landed, gave it a day, found privacy, and wrote to me because that is how he handles separation, by closing distance wherever he can.
I should hate that about him.
But I don’t. I love it.
I open the message, and I read it slowly, once, then again, letting his voice form in my head with uncomfortable clarity.
The logistics are first. Safe, landed, nothing exploded. The part he knows I need before anything else. My mouth tightens into something that’s almost a smile. It’s annoyingly considerate.
It makes me want to bite him.
The familiarity of his tone does more damage than the words themselves. This isn’t the careful distance I prepared for. This is him, unguarded in the specific way that always undoes me.
I keep reading.
He misses me, which makes sense. I can hear the way he would say it, dry and understated, then annoyed with himself for saying it.
Then I reach the line, and he doesn’t soften the blow at all.
I love you.
Plain. No apology. No attempt to make it easier for me to swallow. Just the truth, placed carefully at the end of a sentence. He knows exactly how much weight it carries and refuses to pretend otherwise.
Caiden is irritatingly consistent this way.
Outwardly, nothing about me changes. I’m just a man, reading an email in a forgettable café.
Inside, something gives way enough to count as breaking.
It’s enough that I feel the release of tension, the dangerous slack that comes when something you’ve been holding back finally presses through anyway.
It’s the same feeling as loosening a tourniquet. Relief and danger, hand in hand.
When I reach the end of the message, I sit there staring at his name. I open a reply and for a moment, the cursor blinks in the empty space. I consider saying something safe. I could tease him or pretend I’m above all of this.
But I’m not above anything when it comes to him.
I delete an entire sentence and replace it with another. Then I stop editing. If I’m going to do this, I won’t do it halfway.
From: [email protected]
To: returnfire@
Date: Friday, January 19, 1996, 14:32
Subject: RE: Sneaky Russian
—Caiden
I waited until I knew you’d be back, then waited a little longer, just in case.
I’m relieved to hear you made it back safely.
I’m happy you wrote. I wasn’t sure that you would, but I’m pleased you have proven me wrong on this occasion.
Don’t make a habit of it, though.
What you saw with Mason would rattle anyone with a working sense of self-preservation. Yes, the line is thin and dangerous. You’re not wrong to be shaken by it.
But I’m glad you decided to write regardless.
I miss you too, more than you know.
There may be times when I can’t write back as quickly as I would like. This email isn’t accessible from base; it can be difficult to get out, as you know. I just wanted you to know that in case there’s a delay.
I love you too. I have no idea how this works either, but I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere.
Write back soon.
—Ari
(The Sneaky Russian)
When I’m finished, I read it through again, then I send it. The message disappears, the inbox refreshes, and I log out. I close the browser, stand, and leave the terminal exactly as I found it.
Outside, the street noise rushes back in. I welcome it for the distraction. I get back into the car and pull into traffic as if nothing has happened.
But everything has.
Caiden reached across the distance and made himself present in the one way I can’t neutralise or outrun, and I know with perfect clarity that borders on dread that this is the moment the careful equilibrium I’ve built will shift.
Love, I’ve learned, doesn’t announce itself quietly. It simply makes every choice heavier than it was before.
And it makes you stupid enough to choose it anyway.