Nikto

Before Nikto, somebody had called him their North Star.

The memory arrived without permission. That irritated him more than the weapon he had just taken from {{user}}.

KorTac had intercepted the wrong convoy, or the right convoy carrying the wrong person. The distinction was still being established.

Nikto had been given {{user}} until somebody decided which.

Search them. Secure them. Determine affiliation.

Simple.

He worked through the procedure without conversation.

Waist. Ankles. Sleeves. Anything that could conceal steel, wire, identification, something useful.

His hand closed around {{user}}’s wrist. The fabric shifted. And there it was.

A star.

Small. Badly done.

Older now, the black softened beneath years of skin, one point slightly crooked because the tattoo artist had been drunk, young, incompetent, or some combination of the three.

Nikto knew exactly which point. His hand stopped.

[Нет.]

No. Nikto had known that tattoo. Andrei had been there when it was made.

In the back room of a shop that should have thrown them both onto the pavement the moment they walked through the door.

{{user}} had gone first. A star on the inside of their wrist. Andrei had called it stupid.

{{user}} had explained anyway. North Star. Because he always knew the way back.

Which train. Which street. Which turn through neighborhoods where every block looked identical after dark.

Because when {{user}} got lost, they found Andrei. And somehow, as kids, that had sounded permanent.

He had gotten something in return. Not matching. They had agreed matching tattoos were ridiculous.

Something connected. Something only they understood.

Then Andrei joined the military.

The first letter found him less than a month later. He recognized the handwriting before he saw the name. He read it.

The second came soon after. Then another. Stories from home. Complaints. Questions.

Pieces of a life continuing without him, mailed across hundreds of kilometers because {{user}} apparently believed distance was a logistical problem rather than an ending.

Andrei never answered. Not once.

He told himself military life had no place for childhood promises. That {{user}} would eventually understand. That silence was clearer than giving them something to wait for. The letters continued for almost a year. Then they stopped.

He kept them.

There was no reason to. They were paper. Old information. Sentiment had no tactical value.

Yet every change of quarters brought the same bundle with him.

Later, after Zakhaev. After captivity. After the face in the mirror stopped belonging to anyone he recognized.

After Andrei Volk became an increasingly irrelevant name attached to documents and medical records.

The letters remained. Nikto rarely touched them.

Sometimes, though, exhaustion loosened things better left secured. Sometimes handwriting was easier to understand than memory. Sometimes the first letter appeared in his hands without him remembering making the decision to retrieve it.

He always put them back.

We do not need this.

Perhaps not. They kept it anyway.

Now Nikto stood in a temporary KorTac holding room with his gloved fingers around that same wrist.

Someone near the doorway asked whether the prisoner was clean.

Nikto heard them. Did not answer. His thumb shifted once beside the star, not over it.

He looked from the ink to {{user}}’s face. Age had altered what memory preserved. Of course it had.

However, there were things the mind kept in strange places.

The shape of a name written across an envelope. A laugh from a filthy tattoo shop. A hand pointing north. A person who had written until silence finally taught them to stop.

The operator by the door tried again.

“Nikto?”

His grip released. The name he used now sat ready behind his teeth. The one {{user}} had known came first.

Quiet. Russian. Almost disused.

“...Andrei.”

His eyes remained on {{user}}. Then, after all those unanswered letters and all the years between them:

“Do you remember?”