Twenty-One
Caiden
I don’t sleep, which is no surprise to me anymore.
I lie down; I close my eyes; I even do the whole slow-breathing thing they tell you to do when you’re keyed up after an op.
But sleep? No chance. Every time my brain edges toward it, it gets blindsided by a flash of memory so vivid I could swear I’m still in that broom cupboard.
Ari’s breath against my lips, his hand wrapped tight around my throat, and the sound he made when he... Yeah. That.
So instead of sleeping, I stare at the bunk slats above me and run through all the ways this was a catastrophically bad idea. First, I got off with a Russian sergeant, on a Russian base, in a fucking supply cupboard.
Also, I want to do it again.
That’s the worst part. Not the danger, the guilt, or the fact that I broke every one of my own rules in about thirty seconds. It’s the way my body keeps replaying it like a highlight reel and going, ‘yes, God. More of that, please.’
By the time morning actually shows up, the base is already awake, my eyeballs feel like sandpaper, my head is buzzing, and my whole body has that weird light feeling you get after sprinting for too long.
I drag myself out of bed. The lads in my bunk room don’t notice anything off. Why would they? There’s the usual half-awake swearing, jostling and arguing over whose socks smell like they died in 1983. Nobody looks at me twice — which is good. Great. That’s what I want.
I pull on my uniform, putting everything in its place. Nothing about me says “I let Sergeant Arseny Zakirov suck me off in a supply cupboard last night.” Except all of me says it, on the inside.
I catch sight of my reflection in the tiny scratched mirror above the sinks. I look like I’ve spent the night either crying or violating the Geneva Convention in some way. “Pull it together,” I mutter at myself. The mirror, unhelpfully, doesn’t answer.
The day starts the same as any other: cold that hurts, drills that hurt more, and officers pretending they’re not tired.
Niko is out on the training field when I get there, bundled in his jacket, his breath steaming, and his clipboard tucked under one arm.
He’s talking to one of his sergeants; his expression is serious until he sees me, and it switches into a grin.
Something in my chest eases just from that look.
Stupid, I know, but there it is. “Morning, Lance Corporal,” he calls. “You look like shit.”
“Feel like it too, sir,” I say. “Nice to know it’s showing.”
“We’ll run it out of you,” he snorts, clapping my shoulder once. “Form up.” Simple. Normal. Safe. I latch onto it like a lifeline.
Lines form, and orders are barked. We move, run, drop, repeat until my muscles burn, and I throw myself into it with more force than strictly necessary.
It helps a little. Pain is easier to manage than thinking.
Keep your form, keep your breathing steady, and don’t think about...
“Fuck, Caiden...” don’t think about that.
I push harder, and we switch to combatives.
Pairs, pads and strikes, then we rotate.
By the end, my knuckles ache, and the ache in my chest just sits there, being fucking stubborn.
If I don’t look for him, maybe the universe will be nice to me and keep him away.
That thought lasts about twelve seconds.
I feel him in the air, same as always. It’s like my body’s radar tuned itself to ‘Arseny Zakirov, danger, do not approach.’ He’s over by the equipment sheds, going over something on a clipboard with another sergeant, his head bent over, his hair falling forward over his face.
He’s out of the training rotation this morning, apparently. Someone said something about equipment inventories. Which is good because I don’t think I could handle him in my personal space right now without doing something incredibly stupid.
Like last night. You know, for example.
I tear my gaze away and focus on the drill when Niko shouts my name, and I snap back into it.
Time fractures into small, manageable pieces, thirty-second bursts of effort, corrections, then water breaks.
Through all of it, I can feel him on the edge of everything — the way you know where the nearest exit is without looking.
When we change stations, I glance toward the sheds again. His head is up now; he’s watching the field, watching us. He doesn’t look at me directly, there’s no obvious tension, and if I didn’t know better, I’d think nothing had changed. It’s like the broom cupboard never happened.
There’s a petty, wounded part of me that wants to march over there and say, ‘hey, remember how you came apart on my hand? Or did we file that under ‘just another Thursday’ in your personal chaos log?’ I don’t move. Obviously.
Niko calls a break, and people scatter for water, cigarettes, and stretching out whatever aches. I end up sitting on a low concrete block at the edge of the field, my head tipped back, sucking cold air into my burning lungs.
Boot steps crunch to my left, and for one wild second, I think it’s him. Mason plonks down beside me with a groan. “Thought my legs were going to fall off back there,” he mutters.
“Pity it wasn’t your mouth,” I say automatically. He snorts and nudges my shoulder. We talk shit for a minute about the Russians’ obsession with cold-weather drills, just as Collins comes over to sit with us.
“Zakirov looks pissed,” Mason says, squinting past me. My heart, unhelpfully, tries to climb up my throat. “Other one,” he clarifies quickly. “The younger one. The feral goblin.”
“That’s just his face,” I say, before I can stop myself.
Collins barks out a laugh. “You’ve got a death wish, mate, talking about a Russian NCO like that.”
“He said ‘goblin’ first,” I point out.
“Yeah, but you’re meant to be the responsible one.”
God help them all.
I risk a glance toward the sheds. Ari’s still there and still watching the field. Our eyes meet, and I swear I feel it in my chest, that little jolt of recognition. His gaze is cool, flat, and unreadable from this distance.
He doesn’t look away quickly, which somehow makes it worse. He holds my stare, then shifts his attention to something over my shoulder, says something to the sergeant beside him, and walks away.
My stomach twists as Collins is still rambling on about home leave. I nod in what I hope are the right places, but my brain’s miles away. What did I think was going to happen? That he’d be hovering round me, prowling, snarking, and demanding a repeat performance behind the nearest locked door?
I’ve noticed that Ari doesn’t chase, not really.
He circles, he pushes, and pokes until people chase him.
It shouldn’t sting that he’s suddenly normal, professional, and distant.
Except it does, because now I’ve seen the part under the teeth, jokes and threats.
I’ve seen the hunger in his eyes and the way his breath stuttered when I touched him.
But now he’s just... fine? Like he’s decided to slam the door and leave me standing there with my hand still half-raised.
It’s safer this way. I tell myself that on repeat for the rest of the morning and don’t believe a word of it.
By lunchtime, I’m frayed. Outwardly, I’m the picture of ‘fine.’ I eat, I report, and I follow orders. If anyone looked at me, they’d see a slightly tired Lance Corporal doing his job. Inside, though? It’s a mess.
Bits of last night keep ambushing me between tasks.
It’s the stupid, sensory details that won’t let go.
The scratch of his stubble against my face, the way his knees hit the floor, and the sound he made when he came.
I keep expecting the guilt to win. To roll over everything else and flatten it.
That’s how it usually works: want something, panic, shove it down until it stops twitching.
But guilt and wanting it are just sitting next to each other, glaring. And layered over both is fear.
If anyone had opened that cupboard door, if anyone sees the way my eyes keep scanning rooms just to confirm where he is — shit. I catch myself doing it in the mess hall and want to bang my head off the table.
At lunch, he isn’t there, but Niko is. He plonks his tray down opposite me with the tired grace of a man who’s been awake since before dawn and intends to stay upright through spite alone. “Eat,” he orders.
“Yes, sir,” I say, obediently, forking some unidentifiable starch into my mouth.
“You look better,” he says, eyeing me for a second.
Better than when? Yesterday? Last week? Before I started letting his brother unmake my entire sense of self in dark rooms? “Drills helped,” I lie.
He hums noncommittally. “You’re still too in your head.”
“That’s where my brain lives, sir.”
“You know what I mean.” He tears bread, dips it into whatever passes for stew today. “You think too much.”
“Thought that was why you liked me,” I say, before my own brain catches up.
He smiles. “I like you because when I say ‘jump,’ you ask, ‘how high’ and then go higher just to prove a point.” Flattering, in a masochistic sort of way.
We talk about training blocks, comms updates, and boring, necessary things.
After a while, he gets pulled away by another officer, and I’m left staring at my tray.
I silently ask myself where Ari is, as if the answer matters. It’s probably somewhere on this base, deciding whether last night was a mistake.
The first time I actually see him up close is mid-afternoon.
I’m on my way from the comms room back to Admin to grab a file.
Paperwork shoved under one arm, head down, rehearsing in my head how I’m going to phrase something in a report so it doesn’t sound like ‘your antenna is held together with tape and hope.’ I turn a corner, and he’s there, walking the other way down the corridor with a folder in his hand and his baseball cap on backwards.
We both stop abruptly when we see each other.
It’s a narrow corridor, and two people can pass without touching if they really try.
For a second, neither of us moves. I realise, with a strange, embarrassed jolt, that I was braced for him to smirk — or say something filthy under his breath.
Then silently, half hoping he would pin me to the wall and pick up where we left off.
Instead, he just stares at me with that flat, evaluating look. “Lance Corporal,” he says.
His tone is exactly professional enough to make me want to hit something. “Sergeant,” I manage. My voice sounds rougher than I’d like. We stand there like idiots staring at each other for what feels like five minutes. I break it first, stepping sideways, muttering, “Excuse me.”
He mirrors the move so we don’t shoulder-check each other, but our arms brush anyway.
It’s a whisper of contact, but my whole body reacts like he’s grabbed me.
I don’t look back as I go past, and force myself to walk at a normal pace.
Halfway down the corridor, I hear him move on.
There’s no footsteps hurrying to catch up, or hand on my shoulder, just the usual noises of a busy base.
I take a detour into the barracks storeroom, shut the door harder than necessary behind me, and lean back against it for a second, with my heart trying to escape through my ribs.
Right. Okay. So that’s how it’s going to be.
Distance, professionalism, and pretend the cupboard was a one-off and never speak of it again. It’s safer, smarter, and exactly what I told myself I wanted. So why does it feel like someone’s yanked the floor out from under me?
By evening, I’ve run out of places to hide from my own head. The training is over, the reports are done, Niko’s tied up in another briefing, and the lads are drifting toward the mess or their bunks.
I end up in the quietest corner of the rec room with a dog-eared manual open on my lap, staring at the same paragraph for ten minutes straight.
The words might as well be in Latin. Every time I blink, my brain supplies images that I've been trying to keep at bay all day.
His mouth, his dick, the way he said my name when he—
I snap the book shut. Enough!
If he can act like nothing happened, so can I. I’m not some lovesick teenager, I’m a grown man, a trained soldier, and if Arseny Zakirov wants to pretend the fact we nearly fucked in a cupboard is no big deal, I can match that level of denial.
But underneath all the bravado, swearing, and self-pep talks, something small and relentless keeps whispering, “you liked it, you liked him, you want more.” And the worst part is, some ugly, stubborn part of me wants him to prove he didn’t just use me to take the edge off and then move on.
I don’t know what that makes me. Needy? Stupid? Pathetic? Probably all three.
I sit there until the light in the room goes from grey to yellow.
People drift in, and the low hum of conversation starts up, then it feels weird for me to be in a corner on my own.
I put the book away, stand up, and go to find some food.
Because whatever else is happening, I still have to show up tomorrow and do my job.
I still have to drag myself out in the cold, follow orders, run, hit, and repeat.
I still have to stand in the same rooms as him and pretend my heart rate doesn’t kick every time he walks through a door.
The broom cupboard happened, the base didn’t explode. No one died and life goes on.
It’s just that now, going through the motions feels like I’m trying to act normal after stepping on a land mine.