19. Nikolai
NIKOLAI
The fire escape outside our apartment was never built for two people who had spent the whole day being handed pieces of a truth neither of us wanted, but we sat there anyway, my back against cold brick and her knees pulled up against her chest beside me, the city loud and entirely indifferent to either of us three floors below.
I had chosen the spot on purpose, the way I chose every room I ever sat in, two clear ways down and nothing at our backs but open air. Some distant part of me noted the irony of picking a fire escape to finally talk about the one fire I had spent six years refusing to name.
I had promised her the whole truth once the day ended. The day had ended. There was nowhere left to stand except inside that promise.
"Four of us went into that warehouse," I said, and felt the sentence land somewhere I had not let words land in six years.
"I was the only one who walked back out of it."
Isla did not say anything. She simply turned her head toward me and waited, the same patient stillness she had given me the night I first showed her my arm, and something about that silence made it easier to keep going instead of harder.
"It was a shipment we were meant to secure and move before daylight," I said. "Orlov's men, on paper."
"In practice, Orlov himself, though none of us knew that yet."
I looked out at the skyline instead of at her, because some of this I could only say to a city that was not looking back.
"Pavel called it routine. Nothing about that night turned out to be routine."
"What were you moving?"
"Weapons. Nothing that should have been worth four lives to protect, and certainly nothing that explains why Orlov would rather burn a warehouse to the ground than let a shipment fall into the wrong hands."
"You still don't know why."
"I have had six years to guess, and every guess has cost me more sleep than the fire itself did."
"Is he the same man?" she asked. "The one doing this now?"
"He is." I had turned the fact over in my head so many times over six years that it had finally gone smooth enough to hand to someone else.
"Orlov went quiet the day that report closed the case, and built Kovalenko Restoration and Claims to hide behind instead, a name that was never his to begin with. "
"Pavel confirmed it three days ago, so I would stop guessing." My voice had gone flatter than I meant it to.
"There was never two men to hunt, Isla. There was only ever one, wearing a company's name instead of his own."
"What happened?"
"The building went up faster than anything I have seen before or since." I flexed my hand once, an old habit, checking that the scarring there was still only skin and nothing worse.
"No warning, no smoke to speak of first, just heat and then flame all at once, like the whole structure had been waiting for a single spark to justify itself."
"A timer. We know that now."
"Six years ago I only knew that the exits I had counted on walking in were not the exits I found on the way out."
"How many of you didn't make it?"
"Three."
I let the number sit there in the air between us, because it deserved the space, and because I had kept it to myself for so long, waiting for someone who might actually understand what it weighed.
"Grisha went first." My voice had gone flatter than I meant it to, the old defense mechanism arriving before I could stop it.
"He was closest to the east wall when it came down. I do not believe he felt more than a second of it."
"Dima made it almost to the loading door."
"Almost."
"And the third?"
I was quiet long enough that she reached over and set her hand on my knee, not asking anything of me, just there, the way she had learned to be there without ever demanding something back.
"Pasha," I said finally. "Pavel Sokolov."
"We called him Pasha because there were already two men named Pavel in the crew, and somebody needed a name that would not cause confusion at the worst possible moment."
"You were close to him."
"He was twenty-six. Barely that." My throat closed around the next part before I could stop it, and I made myself push through anyway.
"He had a mother in Kiev who still believes, to this day, that her son died fixing a faulty circuit breaker, because that is the report Orlov's people filed."
"I have never once found the courage to send her a letter that told her anything closer to true."
"Nikolai."
"He taught me the word for coward in four languages, just so he could call me one properly whenever I refused a second helping of his cooking." A small huff of something that was almost a laugh escaped before I could stop it, gone as quickly as it arrived.
"He was better at knowing which parts of a person to laugh at than anyone else I have ever known."
"He was the only person in that life who ever made me laugh without meaning to." I stopped there, because the next sentence wanted to come out sounding like a eulogy, and some part of me had always refused to deliver the one Pasha actually earned.
"He used to lose entire nights of sleep worrying about my discipline. I do not think I ever thanked him for caring more than I believed I deserved."
"I got him partway to the door. I had my hand around his arm."
"And then the ceiling gave way between us, and by the time I found footing again on the other side of it, there was no other side of it left to reach."
Isla's hand tightened on my knee, not pulling away, not offering false comfort either, simply staying exactly where it was.
"I have spent six years telling myself the scars are the bill for that hand slipping." I finally turned to face her, because the rest of this deserved to be said to an actual face and not a skyline.
"That I am still paying something off every time someone looks at my arm and looks away."
"Guilt has never meant much to me as an idea. This has always felt like a debt instead, and I have never once managed to pay it off."
"That is not what a scar means," she said, quiet but absolutely certain, the particular certainty I recognized from every time she had ever corrected a resident twice her age in a hallway.
"I have spent years around burns, Nikolai. Years."
"I have never, not one single time, looked at a scar and thought failure."
"Then what do you think, looking at mine?"
"I think your body did not give up, even when everything about that night was telling it to." She held my eyes while she said it, refusing to let the sentence go soft around the edges the way I half expected it to.
"Every ridge of that scarring means you kept fighting when it would have been easier to stop. That is the only reason you are sitting on this fire escape talking to me right now instead of being a name on a report nobody bothered to investigate properly."
"Scars are not what failure looks like. Scars are what staying looks like."
"You are being generous with a story you did not live through."
"I am being accurate about a body I have spent my entire career learning to read." She did not blink, did not soften it, did not let me have the smaller, easier version of the argument.
"You did not fail Pasha by living."
"You are only telling yourself that because living without him still feels like a theft you have not finished paying for."
"You did not see the ceiling come down." My voice had gone rougher than I wanted it to, an old wound finding air for the first time in years.
"You did not have his arm in your hand and then simply not have it anymore."
"There is a version of that night where I hold on half a second longer, and he is alive somewhere right now, annoying his mother about grandchildren she will never get to meet."
"There is also a version where you hold on half a second longer and the ceiling takes both of you instead of just him." She did not look away from me once.
"You do not get to pick whichever version punishes you the most and decide that one is the truth."
That landed somewhere I did not have a wall built for, one more room in a house I had spent six years reinforcing against exactly this kind of argument.
"You did not know him," I said, quieter now, the anger going out of it as fast as it had arrived. "You do not know what he would have wanted, or what I owe him for still being here when he is not."
"I know you loved him enough that his name still catches in your throat six years later." Her hand had not left my knee once through any of it.
"That is not nothing, Nikolai. That is grief, and you have been treating it like a punishment instead of just letting it be what it is."
"I built a version of myself over six years that did not need anyone to see any of this," I said finally, quieter now, the last of the argument going out of me like air out of something finally punctured.
"It was easier that way. Nobody flinching at a sleeve I never rolled up."
"Nobody asking questions I did not want to answer."
"Easier for who?"
"For me."
"Was it better?"
I did not have an answer ready for that one, because the honest answer had been sitting inside me for six years, waiting for someone patient enough to actually ask the question properly.
Nobody ever had, until her, and I was beginning to understand that had been the actual point of building the wall in the first place.
Something in me broke open then, quietly, nothing like the dramatic collapse I had always imagined it would feel like if it ever happened, and it just gave way, finally, in the one place nobody had ever thought to check.
"You have spent this entire conversation telling me my scars are not what I have always believed them to be," I said, and heard my own voice go rougher than I intended it to.
"I believe you, Isla. I do."
"I have believed every word of it since the moment you first said it, and I do not know what that leaves me standing on instead."
"Then what is left?"
I looked at her for a long moment, at the steady, unflinching way she had watched every worst part of me without once turning her face away from it, and understood, with a clarity that arrived far too late to be comfortable, exactly what the actual problem had been all along.
It had never been about whether she could look at the scars without flinching, something she had already proven a dozen times over, in a kitchen under a light with no shadows in it, on a fire escape three floors above a city that did not care either way.
The problem had always been mine, sitting quietly underneath every version of myself I had ever built to keep people from getting close enough to ask.
For six years I believed the scars were the thing standing between me and being ordinary, and only now, sitting on a fire escape with her hand still warm against my knee, did I understand that the scars had never been the obstacle at all. I was.
The city kept moving beneath us, indifferent and enormous and entirely unbothered by anything happening on one small fire escape three floors above it, and for once I let it, because some things only get said once a person runs out of anywhere else to hide.
I said it anyway, and did not look away from her while I did.
"I do not know how to be looked at without flinching myself," I said.
It was the truest sentence I had spoken in six years. Saying it out loud cost me nearly everything discipline had ever taught me to hold onto.