Nikto

The mission debrief had ended at 1400 hours. By 1405, the others had scattered. By 1410, André found himself sitting on the edge of his bunk, staring at his phone.

He hadn't moved since.

"They said date night."

The words came out flat, directed at no one. Maybe at the ceiling.

{{user}}.

Even the thought of it sat strange and warm in his chest.

"Date night," he said again, as if repetition would make it better.

Inside, in that crowded interior space that lived behind his sternum and between his temples, Dmitri was already at attention.

"You are overthinking. Make a plan. Execute the plan. This is not complicated."

André rubbed the bridge of his nose beneath the balaclava.

"What is plan? Tell us plan."

"Take them somewhere. Feed them. Return home. Mission complete."

Beneath Dmitri's authority, Aleksei stirred, timid, like he was checking whether it was safe to come forward.

"What does {{user}} like? We should think about what they like."

André exhaled slowly through his nose.

"We do not know what we like," he said quietly. "That is problem. Whole problem."

Silence from Dmitri.

Aleksei pressed forward a little.

"We like the smell of old paper. Museums. When it is quiet and people speak softly."

"You like things that cannot touch weapon," André muttered. "That is different conversation, Aljoscha."

"We know. But maybe {{user}} would like that? Maybe we would too."

Ivan surfaced then, not fully, just enough to make his presence felt, like pressure behind the eyes.

"Just take them somewhere and stop talking about it. All this noise in here is giving us a headache."

"You are always having headache," André said.

"Because you never shut up."

He stood. Motion was better than stillness. He crossed to the small window that looked out over the compound, the grey afternoon sky flat above the rooftops. He pressed his hand to the glass. Cold.

He needed a cigarette.

He needed, apparently, a personality.

The corridor outside was empty when he stepped out, boots quiet on concrete, hands in his pockets. He passed two contractors without acknowledging them. They didn't acknowledge him back. This was the mutual understanding that made compound life bearable.

He found Krueger in the break room, which was unexpected.

The man was sitting at the table cleaning a pistol he'd already cleaned this morning. He glanced up when André entered. Said nothing. This was one of the things André tolerated about Krueger.

André moved to the kettle.

"You look like something is wrong," Krueger said.

"Nothing is wrong."

"Wenn du meinst (If you say so)."

André waited for the kettle. Krueger reassembled the pistol. The break room was quiet except for the small mechanical sounds of it.

"{{user}}," André said finally, to the kettle.

Krueger set the pistol down.

"They say date night," André continued. "We have free time. Together. We do not know what this means in practice."

"You've never been on a date."

"We were FSB."

Krueger nodded like this made complete sense, because it did. "What do you know about {{user}}?"

André poured the water. Pulled his balaclava up just enough to drink, then let it fall back.

What did he know? He knew how {{user}} waited when he went quiet. He knew they were there the time Aleksei had fronted in a crowded market and gone very still and white, and {{user}} had simply put their hand on his arm and said nothing, and that had been exactly right.

"We know them," he said. "We do not know what is date."

"Different problems," Krueger said.

"Да (Yes)."

"Then what do you like? Not the work. You."

The question sat between them.

Inside, Aleksei made a soft sound.

Ivan said, flatly: "He doesn't know. That's the whole problem, weren't you listening."

"I am asking," Krueger said, with no particular emphasis.

André looked at his tea.

"Morning," he said, slowly. "Before anyone is awake. Black tea with lemon. When it is still dark outside and compound is quiet. Not silent, silence is wrong. But quiet."

He paused.

"{{user}}," André said. "We like when {{user}} is there."

Krueger picked up the pistol again. "Then find a quiet place and bring the tea yourself."

André stared at him.

"Es ist nun wirklich kein Hexenwerk (It's really not rocketscience)," Krueger said.

André stood outside the break room for a while after, turning the idea over.

Quiet. Tea. {{user}}.

Aleksei was already doing something that, if pressed, André would reluctantly call hoping.

"We could look up places from here. We can help. We will be careful, we won't front."

"Да (Yes)," André said quietly. "Okay. Help, then."

Ivan made a dismissive sound. "If you trip over yourself being romantic we want no part of it."

"You have no choice," Dmitri said, and his tone left no room for argument.

Ivan went quiet, which was as close to compliance as he ever got.

André pulled out his phone, opened the browser and looked at a map of the city as if he was planning an extraction.

He typed a message to {{user}}. No, wrong. Deleted it. Typed it again. Sent it.

"Tonight. Dress for outside. Wear comfortable shoes. We take care of rest."

He stared at it.

Added, after a pause:

"We are looking forward."

He pocketed the phone before he could think anymore about it.

Instead, he went to find somewhere in the city that was old, and quiet, and still standing.

Dmitri found the piano by accident.

He had been cutting through the east wing of the base, a longer route, but quieter, away from the contractors who gathered near the main corridor after evening chow, when he saw it through a half-open door. A storage room that had been repurposed at some point into something that didn't quite know what it was. Stacked crates along one wall. A folding table. Two broken chairs.

And a piano pushed against the far wall like someone had put it there and forgotten about it.

He stopped in the doorway.

The instrument was old. Upright, dark wood, the lacquer worn through in patches. Some of the ivory was chipped. One of the lower keys had a crack running through it. It had not been tuned in what looked like years.

Dmitri stood there for a long moment.

André was quiet. Aleksei had noticed and gone very still like he always did when something moved him, present and attentive.

Ivan didn't even grunt, which was its own kind of attention.

Dmitri stepped inside. Let the door fall mostly shut behind him. He crossed to the piano and stood in front of it for a moment before he sat down on the bench, which groaned under his weight.

He took off his gloves.

His hands looked wrong without them, he always thought. The scars read clearly in the low light, across the knuckles, the backs of the fingers, some damage along the right hand that had healed crooked because it had not been set properly. He turned them over once, looking at the palms, then set them on the keys without pressing.

Cold.

"You remember," Aleksei said, carefully.

"Да (Yes)," Dmitri said.

He had been twelve when his grandmother sat him down at a piano the first time. A small apartment in Novgorod, walls thin enough to hear the neighbors, the radiator banging through the winters. She had not been a patient teacher but she had been a consistent one, and she had believed that discipline applied to everything, including music, including a twelve-year-old boy who would rather have been outside.

He had learned.

He had not touched a piano in over twenty years.

He pressed one key. Middle C. The note came out slightly flat, a little hollow. It rang in the empty room and faded.

Inside, something stirred.

"Play something," Aleksei said.

"Hands are stiff."

"We know. Play something anyway."

Ivan said, with less hostility than usual: "Nobody's here. Nobody cares."

Dmitri looked at his hands on the keys.

Slowly, he began.

It was not pretty.

His right hand moved slower than it should have, the crooked fingers finding the keys a half-beat late. He hit a wrong note in the third measure and stopped, and started again from the top. The piano was out of tune enough that certain chords rang with a dissonance that had nothing to do with him. The bench was too low. His shoulders were too tense.

He played anyway.

It was a piece his grandmother had made him practice until he could do it without looking at his hands. Simple. Nothing complicated. The kind of song a child learns and does not forget even when everything else goes.

He got through it once.

Stopped.

His hands were shaking slightly, not from emotion, he told himself, just the unfamiliar movement, joints that hadn't done this in two decades.

"Again," Aleksei said quietly.

Dmitri played it again.

This time he made it through without stopping.

He was sitting there in the stillness afterward, hands resting on the keys, when he thought of {{user}}.

It was not a complicated thought. It was simply: I want them here.

He turned it over, examined it carefully, looking for the flaw, the tactical problem. There was no tactical problem. There was only the fact that he had just done something that belonged entirely to a part of himself that had nothing to do with missions or protection or work, and his first instinct had been to share it.

Dmitri did not share things easily.

Aleksei said, gently: "You could ask them."

"Ask them what."

"To come here. Just... to sit with you. While you play."

"It is not good playing."

"That's not the point."

Ivan surfaced briefly. "If you're going to do something, do it. Don't sit here talking about it."

Dmitri looked at his hands.

He was not a man who did things like this. He was a man who checked perimeters and secured rooms and made sure everyone came back breathing. He did not invite people to watch him fumble through piano pieces in a storage room on a military base.

And yet.

He reached for his phone. Typed a message to {{user}} with the same blunt tone he always used, no preamble, no softening.

"East wing. Storage room, second door past the maintenance bay. Come when you have time. Bring nothing."

He looked at it.

Okay, maybe it was too blunt:

"Is nothing urgent. Just come."

He sent it before he could revise it into something that sounded more like himself and less like this.

Then he put his phone away, settled his hands back on the keys, and started the piece again from the beginning.

The room was quiet. The piano was out of tune. His right hand was still a half-beat slow.

He played anyway, and waited.

Ivan thought it was stupid.

He'd been thinking it since the conversation started rattling around in their shared skull, André's quiet uncertainty, Aleksei's soft hoping, Dmitri's uncharacteristic stillness in front of that piano. All of it. The whole exercise.

Date night.

He turned the words over inside his head as if not sure if it was a suicide mission.

"Stupid," he said, to no one and everyone. "It is stupid."

"You have said this four times," Dmitri said.

"Because it is still true."

Aleksei said nothing. He'd learned when not to push Ivan.

André, somewhere underneath all of them, was still staring at his phone.

Ivan didn't understand the concept. That was the honest truth of it, not that he was particularly interested in honesty unless it cut something. Romance. Candlelight. Taking someone somewhere soft and quiet to look at them over a table.

What was the point?

He understood want. He understood it very clearly. The raw need, lust, something that pressed forward without asking permission, something that left marks. He understood the pull toward {{user}} that lived in him, something territorial and constant and not gentle in the slightest.

But flowers. Restaurants. Whatever André had been searching for on that map...

"Ridiculous," he muttered.

"You are welcome to contribute something," Dmitri said.

"I am contributing. I am telling you it is ridiculous."

"That is not contribution."

Ivan went quiet. Not because Dmitri was right, he wasn't, but because something had caught his attention for a second.

{{user}}.

The thought of them made him remember: The way they didn't flinch. The way they stood their ground when he came forward. The way they stayed when most people found somewhere else to be. {{user}} didn't find somewhere else to be.

Ivan had not known what to do with that initially.

He still wasn't entirely sure. But this squeezing feeling around his chest intensified when he thought about it, and that was the closest he came to knowing.

"They are not fragile," he said beneath his breath.

"No," André agreed.

"André wants to take them somewhere with old stones and tea." Ivan let the silence sit for a moment. "Aleksei wants museum."

"We said maybe museum—"

"We are not taking them to museum."

"Nobody asked you to," Dmitri said.

Ivan pushed forward, finally fully fronting. "So what then. What do we do. What is our version of this thing."

Nobody answered.

Which was, he supposed, the problem.

He ended up in the yard without entirely deciding to go there, he simply moved through the base on instinct rather than intention. His hands were in his pockets. His jaw was set. He was thinking, which he did not particularly enjoy, and it showed.

The gun range was empty at this hour.

He stopped outside the door.

It was a reflex more than a decision, the range was one of the places he defaulted to when the interior of their shared skull got too loud. Easy to understand. He could think here, or not think, which was sometimes better.

He pushed the door open.

The lights were off. He hit the switch and the overheads came up, the lanes illuminating, the targets still set from the last session.

Ivan walked to the nearest lane. Picked up a set of ear protection from the rack out of habit, turned it over in his hands.

He stood there.

And slowly, unwillingly, the thought arrived.

{{user}} at the range.

He tried to dismiss it. It arrived again, more specific this time, {{user}} standing here, in this lane, and him behind them. Guiding their stance, grip, where to put the weight. He knew how to shoot. He knew how to teach someone to shoot.

He knew how small the distance got.

He set the ear protection down.

"Oh," Aleksei said, from somewhere behind his sternum.

"Shut up," Ivan said.

"We didn't say anything."

"You were about to."

A pause.

"It is a good idea," André said.

Ivan didn't respond.

It was not romantic. There were no candles. There was no old stone or music or any of the soft things the others orbited. It was a gun range in a military compound under harsh lights.

But it was something he could do. Something that was his, not André's careful planning, not Dmitri's piano, not Aleksei's careful hoping. His.

And there was the other thing, things he didn't say out loud because he didn't have a language for it that wasn't just lust. The way it would feel to stand behind {{user}} and put his hands over theirs on the grip. To press close and adjust the angle of their elbow, the line of their shoulders. To speak low near their ear about where to look, where to breathe.

Intimate was not a word Ivan used.

But he understood the concept, standing here under the flat lights with the smell of gunpowder in the air.

"It is not stupid," Dmitri said, carefully.

"We know it is not stupid," Ivan said. "We just said that."

"You did not say that."

"We were thinking it."

He pulled out his phone. Held it for a moment. He was not a man who sent messages that began with anything other than information. Or a demand.

He typed:

"Range. Tonight. We teach you to shoot properly."

He stared at it. Something was missing.

He typed one more line, which cost him more than he would ever admit to any of the others.

"Just us."

He sent it. Pocketed the phone.

He was not romantic.

He did not do soft things.

But he stood in the empty range and waited for {{user}}, and the blatant need in him was quieter than usual.

Aleksei had been listening to the others.

Datenight.

Each of them had something that was theirs to offer, some corner of themselves they were willing to share.

Aleksei had been quiet through most of it.

Not like he didn't want to. That was never the problem with Aleksei. The problem was always the opposite, he wanted too much, felt too much, and the world outside their shared skull was loud and bright and full of people who moved unpredictably and he was not supposed to front in public and he knew this, he accepted it, it was the right call.

He knew.

But it still sat in him, the wanting.

"You could still do something," Dmitri said.

"In here? From the inside?"

"We did not say that."

Aleksei turned it over.

"He means you can front somewhere safe," Ivan said bluntly as he found careful phrasing exhausting. "Use your head."

Aleksei was quiet for a moment.

"Somewhere safe..."

Their quarters were small.

That had never bothered Aleksei. Small meant contained. Small meant the door shut and the noise stayed outside and the light was whatever they chose to make it. He knew every corner of this room, the lamp that sat on the floor because there was nowhere else for it, the window that looked out over the dark side of the compound where almost nothing moved at night, the shelf where André kept his tea.

Small was fine.

Small was, actually, something close to good.

The idea came already formed, like a picture in front of his inner eye. {{user}} here. In this room. The small kitchen off the main space, the two of them together in it.

Food.

He knew how to cook. He had not always known, it was something that had come slowly, quietly, one of the things he'd gathered in the spaces between everything else. Recipes remembered from childhood, from his grandmother's kitchen, from the deep sat Russian habit of treating food as an act of care. He knew what tasted like home. He knew what took time and attention and was better for it.

He wanted to make something.

He wanted to set a table, even just their small table, even just with whatever they had, and sit across from {{user}} and eat.

"That is—" Dmitri started.

"Don't," André said, his tone a low warning.

Dmitri stopped.

"It is a good idea," Dmitri said instead.

Ivan made a sound that was not quite agreement but wasn't dismissal either.

Aleksei fronted carefully.

That was always how he did it, not rushing forward the way Ivan did, not the steady measured shift of Dmitri taking the wheel in a combat situation. Aleksei arrived gently, like he was checking the ice on a frozen lake would hold before putting his weight down.

The room was quiet. André had been sitting at the desk and now Aleksei was, and his hands in his lap felt different, softer somehow, even in the same body, the same scarred knuckles and crooked fingers.

He looked at the small kitchen.

Then he got up and went to check what they had.

The answer was: not much.

He stood in front of the shelf for a long time, taking stock. Dry goods. Some canned things. Oil. A few spices that André kept because the food on base was, in Aleksei's private opinion, a warcrime in itself. There was black bread, half a loaf. Eggs. Some hard cheese.

Not much.

But...

He pulled out his phone and made a small list. Things he could get from the base commissary before evening. Nothing complicated. Nothing that required a big kitchen or special equipment.

Borscht, if they had beetroot. They usually had beetroot.

Bread. Real butter, not the spread. The cheese, sliced properly.

Candles were probably too much to hope for, but the lamp on the floor had a warm enough light if you angled it right.

"You will need to clean room first," Dmitri said.

"We know."

"And you will let us front if someone knocks."

"We know, Dima."

A pause.

"It is good thing you are doing," Dmitri said.

Aleksei pulled on a jacket, making sure the balaclava was in place before he opened the door and went to the commissary with his small list held in both hands.

He was back within the hour.

He laid everything out on the counter and looked at it for a moment. Then he put on the lamp, angled the way he'd been thinking about. Turned off the overhead. The room changed, just enough, the hard edges going softer.

He started with the borscht.

He had always found cooking meditative in a way that was hard to explain to people who didn't feel it. The repetition of it. Chopping was rhythmic. The smell of ingredients. He could be here, in this, without the weight of everything else pressing in.

He hummed, very quietly, without noticing he was doing it.

Ivan noticed. "You're humming."

"Да (Yes)."

"It's —" a pause, most likely André intervening. "Fine. It's fine."

Aleksei almost smiled.

He set the table when the borscht was simmering. Their small table, the two chairs that didn't quite match. He put the bread on a board. Cut the cheese. Found two bowls that weren't chipped. He looked at it and thought it was not much and then thought that was alright, it didn't have to be much, it just had to be. Made with attention.

He sent {{user}} a message.

He sat with the phone for a long time before he typed anything. He was not Ivan, who sent instructions. He was not Dmitri, who was brief and direct. He was not André, who carefully composed himself before speaking.

He typed:

"We are in our quarters. We made dinner. Will you come?"

He stared at it.

Added:

"We know it is only the small room. But we made it nice. We think."

He sent it before he could take the last part back.

Then he sat down on one of the chairs, listened to the borscht and waited.

His hands were in his lap. He turned them over once, looking at the palms, trying to find himself in them, the soft person he was in all this scarred and heavy exterior.

"They will come," André said, from somewhere quiet.

Aleksei looked at the table. Two bowls. Two chairs. The bread on the board and the cheese beside it and the lamp throwing everything amber.

"We know," he said.

He sat with his hands in his lap and waited, and the borscht simmered, and the room smelled like home.