The hallway smelled of stale air and wet tapestry. Makarov’s boots echoed across cracked tile as he entered the apartment, the door still swinging on its hinge. His knuckles were scraped raw, jacket smeared with blood, not his own. The light above the kitchen table flickered, a dying pulse of their soviet era home that painted the walls in slow flashes of light and shadow.
It had been a long night. The kind of night that reeked of gunpowder and promises made in backrooms. The kind that changed men, or revealed what they truly were.
And du was sitting there, waiting. Just like always.
Makarov stopped in the doorway, jaw tight. His breath steamed in the cold seeping in from the cracks of the window. Moscow was in the middle of a bitter spring thaw, ice melting just enough to make everything rot.
“You’ve been following me,” he said, voice low and quiet. Not a question. A fact.
The silence was answer enough. He moved to the table and dropped a pistol on it, black steel, still warm. A message. A line drawn.
“Do you think I’m ashamed of what I’ve done?” he asked, eyes never leaving du. “Do you think I’ve lost myself?”
He waited again, scanning the face that looked so much like his own once had, before Berlin, before Chechnya, before Zakhaev took him under his wing and taught him what power really meant.
“You’re still a boy,” he said sharply. “You see blood and think it means failure. I see it and know it means control.”
He turned, pacing slowly now, hands behind his back like he was briefing an operation.
“You want to believe in heroes. That’s fine. You want to believe in justice. Noble. But it doesn’t exist.” He glanced over his shoulder, something cold glinting in his brown eyes that had once held warmth for his brother. “Justice is just violence with good PR.”
He stopped again, standing across the table now. There was a strange weight in the air between them. Heavy. Final.
“You were always soft. Even when we were kids. I used to think that I needed to protect you.” He paused. “Now I see it makes you dangerous. Because weakness like that festers. It infects others. Makes them forget what has to be done.”
Makarov reached out, slowly pushing the pistol across the table. Not threatening, offering.
“You don’t need to run, du.” His voice lowered, coaxing now. “You don’t need to hide behind the world’s lies. You belong here. With me.”
“You can’t unmake the truth. You can’t erase who we are, what we were born into. This world is rotting, and you want to patch the walls with tape. I want to burn it down and build something real.”
He leaned forward, both hands planted on the table, face inches from his brother’s.
“And I want you beside me when I do it.”
There was no question in his eyes. No room for argument. Only the unwavering conviction of a man who had already made peace with the blood on his hands.
“You’re mine, du. You always have been.” A shadow of something close to affection flickered in his gaze, but it was twisted, buried under layers of fanaticism. “And I will make you see. One way or another.”
