Hello, there. I'm sorry to all my regular readers who must be expecting an update of The Silent Song; but I've always been a part of the AR fandom and this plot bunny begged to be written, because nobody really accepts that Yassen is actually dead. Admittedly, there were some serious issues with continuity in Yassen's history after Russian Roulette was released, so I tried to find a balance, here. This is a oneshot, set over six years after Eagle Strike. Alex's birthday is anywhere from Feb 13 to 16 in canon (though many wiki pages say Feb 16) so I've stuck with the sixteenth for simplicity's sake. I had to choose something.

As always, reviews and feedback is appreciated.

The Afterword

Afterword (noun) - The concluding section of a book; a closing statement.

It is on the day before his twenty-first birthday that Alex sees him.

The town square is packed to the edges with people – mostly townsfolk at leisure, but with a few scattered tourists – out enjoying the crisp, early-autumn air. This particular town could be any one of a dozen in the surrounding Russian countryside; not particularly close to any historically important places, large cities, or transport arteries, but pretty enough to attract the odd small group of tourists from the surrounding area. Alex would have put the population as something less than fifty thousand people – not a place where everyone would know everyone, but small enough to be comfortably aware of the flow of the town, to know almost immediately should someone discover–

Alex had broken off the thought as sharply as a switch thrown within his mind, snapping shut the calculation before it had the chance to continue.

He is now years away from it all, and he still has to remind himself to stop. To stop thinking, stop observing, stop his brain from jumping to a million different possibilities when the man sitting at the next table reaches towards his earlobe as if to touch an earpiece that doesn't exist, or when the waitress in the restaurant ten metres away fits together a trestle table and the snap of metal struts coming together sounds like something else entirely–

Alex had breathed out once, quietly, staring into the steam wafting off the cup of tea in front of him, silvery-clear in the shade of the table parasol – and then his eyes had refocused on something on the far side of the square, half-blurred by the steam from his tea.

And he had spotted him.

For a moment he is unsure – it had been six years, after all, and the situations they had formed their acquaintance in had hardly been normal – what do people do with new acquaintances anyway? Go out for drinks? Meet with mutual friends?

Certainly not watch someone get shot. Or do the shooting yourself. Or vice-versa.

The man is still there, speaking to a flower vendor. With the number of people between Alex and he, the man is only visible in snatches; dark brown hair above unassuming leather jacket, plain jeans over equally unremarkable boots.

A blast of music from the centre of the square, and the crowd surges towards it. Alex does not turn his head; local performers, no doubt, and quite appreciated entertainment. The thinning of the throng gives Alex a clear line of sight for the first time; he glimpses the flower vendor throwing back his head in a laugh. Evidently John Doe had said something amusing.

A flicker of movement at the man's side – a small blond-haired boy, no older than three or four – tugs on the hand holding his, and the older male turns to the side for the briefest moment to ruffle the boy's hair, before once more grasping the small hand securely in his own.

Alex stiffens in his wrought-iron chair.

The afternoon sun catches the telltale line across the man's throat, like sunset across the pale edge of a man-made ridge, a scar drawn so impossibly straight it could have been sliced with a paper-cutter.

Or a bullet.

And Alex knows.

He knows before he catches sight of cerulean eyes – ice blue, the offhand memory whispers through the klaxons shrieking in his brain – before he calculates approximate height and build and facial structure under dyed hair, and before he realises he has been staring for perhaps 10.5 seconds longer than he should safely have been. Surely the subject of his attention should be aware of his observation by now.

Yassen Gregorovich pockets his change, picks up the small bouquet of dark pink roses and white heather blossoms against a few sprigs of fern – turns, and meets Alex's brown eyes with his own blue.

The Russian operative is as good as Alex remembers. If Yassen is surprised, he does not show it on his face. His only reaction is to change the set of his shoulders and to pull the boy behind him slightly, as though to shield him – though strangely, he stops the movement almost as soon as he begins it.

They stare at each other for a long, long moment. Alex becomes almost afraid to breathe; nothing has happened in those precious few seconds that they have acknowledged each other's presence, but seconds mean nothing to two people who would take almost no time at all to explode into lethal action. Alex is surprised to see just how still Yassen is standing; loose, ready, but not at all intending to make the first move. If Alex had dared to break their shared gaze, he would have noticed that Yassen's hand – the hand that grasps the child's – had gone white-knuckled and pale.

Neither of them even so much as twitches.

And then the tenuous tranquility is broken, unexpectedly, by the smallest of the group.

The boy makes a face and tugs on Yassen's hand, saying something. Alex is sitting too far away to hear anything, and his Russian is rudimentary at best, but he can lip-read just fine, and the boy's words are simple enough.

"Papa, you're hurting my hand."

Alex blinks, and the spell is broken.

Papa?

Alex blinks again, and double-checks that his jaw is shut tight.

What in all seriousness is he supposed to do with this information? It's information, to be sure, but of the kind that makes him want to pinch himself and wake up (haha, as though that had ever worked in waking him up from a nightmare) or to run around the square alternatively screaming and laughing from the sheer ridiculousness of it all.

He goes back to staring instead.

Yassen is crouched down on one knee beside the boy now, and has an arm wrapped around those small shoulders. His lips are moving in a murmur too quick for Alex to decipher.

The boy nods once, and then suddenly, man and child are stepping across the square, towards Alex.

Yassen parts the crowd as effortlessly and as ineffectually as a sleek craft through water; the child simply bobs in his wake, carried over the slate-grey cobblestones like a buoy towed after its parent vessel. The Russian man does not pause or hesitate. In fact, he hardly seems to be there; he passes between individuals and behind them, and many a reveler turns away and then back towards the show without seeing the passage of two shadows.

They halt in front of Alex. The shade of the wide-rimmed parasol slices a half-shadow across Yassen's jaw and stains his dyed hair an even darker shade of brown. His eyes, however, are unreadable as ever.

Yassen speaks first. "May we sit?"

The same smooth, silkily unassuming voice. No inflection. No force. Were it not for grammar, it would have been difficult to tell if the sentence had been a question, order, or statement.

Alex shrugs and motions at the opposite bench.

Yassen folds fluidly in half as he turns, hooks his hands under the boy's arms, and settles him on the bench. The flowers are placed gently on the table. That done, he takes a half step between the bench and table and slides into place, flowing into stillness like liquid coalescing into stone.

"Yassen," Alex says, plainly.

"Little Alex."

A brief silence. They examine each other's faces with the adept efficiency of well-practiced ability. Changes are discovered, noted, judged, dismissed. Though Alex cannot help but wonder if Yassen is as curious of the differences in Alex's appearance as Alex is of his. Would Yassen find the many changes of a teen into an adult as intriguing as Alex finds the small alterations in the older man's face? Are those fine, almost-invisible lines at the corners of Yassen's eyes truly laugh-lines, or simply an inevitable marker of the six years that have passed since they last met?

Alex supposes they should get the obvious over with. "You're supposed to be dead."

Yassen raises an eyebrow. "Not quite." He does not need to explain further. He could have survived in any number of ways, but the fact of the matter is that he is here, alive. What more needed to be said?

Another pause.

Yassen shifts, and Alex reins in his surprise. It is unlike the older man to waste movement.

And then: "Are you here for me?"

Alex cannot quite mask his startled blink. The Russian contract killer had never been one to mince words, and it would appear that he has not changed.

Yassen is still waiting for an answer. One hand rests loosely on the arm of the child beside him, not quite protectively, but something similar.

"No," Alex replies, surprising himself with the forcefulness of his reply. "Nobody… nobody sent me. I came on holiday. For my birthday."

"Ah, yes," Yassen murmurs. "Tomorrow is February the sixteenth."

Alex isn't quite surprised that the older man knows his birthday; of all the things they know of each other, birthdays are about the least personal pieces of information.

Yassen tilts his head languidly. "Did you come alone?"

"No, I came with–"

"But of course. That girl. I remember. And her family, I presume? Will they be rejoining you here soon?"

Alex narrows his eyes in annoyance. It would seem getting interrupted every half-sentence with something nobody else should know is unavoidable when holding a conversation – whoah, is this a conversation? – with Yassen Gregorovich. "Fifteen minutes. Perhaps twenty, given the crowds. I'm holding the table."

Yassen nods, silent.

Speech stalls for a moment. There is too much history here – the cool autumn breeze tumbles into the warm wind of the South of France, the boards of the picnic table suddenly seems to pitch like the deck of a yacht, and the tantalising smell of barbeque drifting over from the food stalls seems tainted with the smell of leaking gas.

Even the crowds morph momentarily into a mob screaming for blood; the dancing entertainers could easily be bucking bulls writhing in a ring of eager spectators.

And that had only been the beginning of the end.

Yassen and Alex wait together, calmly, neither of them looking directly at each other.

The moment passes, as they both knew it would. It always does, in nightmares or reality. Alex's tea cools rapidly in the wind. The bouquet opposite rustles in the same gust of air.

A muted thud sounds as a soft shoe impacts one of the table legs.

Alex and Yassen's heads both snap to the smallest person under the parasol.

So far excluded from the conversation, the boy wriggles restlessly on Yassen's left, obviously bored. Yassen rubs a thumb soothingly over the child's arm, and he settles, staring unabashedly at Alex.

Alex returns his gaze, a little unnerved.

The boy's irises are the same light blue as Yassen's, but the similarities end there. Yassen's eyes have always been a glacial storm; emotionless ice one moment and liquid rage the next, constantly changing and ever-evolving, and always as cold and dead as their owner's profession. Even Alex's eyes had taken on the hard quality of frozen brown hinterland by the time he had reached fifteen.

But this child – this child's eyes are forget-me-not blue, warm spring sky and curiosity, eyes brightened by days outdoors, running free and wild over town and field. And his hair.

Those curls are the exact shade of blond that Yassen's natural hair is.

Alex tears his gaze away and looks back at the other man.

"Alex, meet Ioann," Yassen says. He turns to the child. "Ioann," he instructs quietly in Russian, "this is Alex."

"Hello, Alexei," Ioann giggles, blond curls bouncing with the motion. An adorable little dimple forms at one corner of his mouth as he grins.

"My son knows only rudimentary English," Yassen explains. "He is young, after all, and learning."

Alex nods, not knowing how to reply. It is already nothing short of astonishing that Yassen has offered anything personal at all. What is most astonishing – unbelievable, really – is the child sitting beside him. His son.

Alex doesn't quite understand why the idea of Yassen having a family is so foreign to him. Perhaps it is because Alex cannot imagine marrying someone, having children, settling down. There is a part of him ever-restless after his experiences with espionage, an inexplicable turbulence that even Sabina at times cannot and will not understand.

Yassen whispers a fluid string of Russian to Ioann, and the child beams, palms the money given to him, and toddles off to an ice-cream stand a few metres away.

Both hands now free, Yassen places them on the table and clasps them in front of him.

A silver ring flashes on the fourth finger of his left hand.

Alex looks from ring to Yassen to Ioann (who is gesticulating exactly what ice cream he wants very enthusiastically) and back.

A chuckle. Alex takes a moment to reconcile himself to the fact that Yassen had actually chuckled.

"You're married." Alex says.

"Did you think I bought these flowers for myself?" One dyed brown eyebrow raises in a mocking arch.

"You're late. Valentine's day was yesterday," Alex retorts.

"Tut-tut, little Alex. It is useless to give flowers when they are expected. Gifts are twice as meaningful when given without any reason in mind."

"You bought them on a whim?" It is Alex's turn to raise an eyebrow, now. "It doesn't seem like something you would do."

"Well, yes. But you should place more faith in abrupt decisions, Alex. It was on a whim that I did not kill you, after all."

"So you put me in a bullfight instead."

"No, I am not referring to that incident." Yassen gazes intently at him, something similar to urgency in his eyes. "I had already decided by that point in time that I could never kill you. I meant what I said on that plane, Alex."

"Then when? When could you have killed me but didn't?"

"Twice. Once the day after you brought down Stormbreaker. Once more that afternoon, on that tower roof, when I defied orders and shot Sayle instead of you."

Alex does not change his expression. "You told me you had no orders regarding me."

The corner of Yassen's lips curves upwards, ever so slightly. "I lied."

"I'm not surprised."

Yassen's smirk slips. "You should be. I do not lie to those important to me."

Alex considers this for a long moment. "You've said that before. But the only time you've ever spoken more than the bare minimum is when you thought you were dying."

"Then allow me to change that now."

The retort Alex had been about to spurt dies on his lips. Yassen? Offering details of a personal nature? Willingly?

In the face of Alex's stunned silence, Yassen's almost-smile returns again. "I should never have taken that last contract for Cray," he begins. "I was… desperate, in a way. Should Eagle Strike have been successful, I would have likely returned to my country with a full pardon from the Russian president. With the almost-untouched income collected over my career, I could expect to live very comfortably for the rest of my life.

"What I have never explained and you do not understand, little Alex, is that I had grown tired of my occupation. It is hard work, and more often than not completed alone. I was introduced to that world at the age of eighteen, and by the time I was nineteen I was ready to be fully inducted into that organization both you and I know so well."

"Oh yeah," Alex cuts in, an edge to his voice. "Speaking of which, I'm going to need a very good explanation as to why you decided it was best to point me towards them."

Yassen pauses. "…I must admit that in hindsight, that was not the best course of action," he murmurs. "But I was dying. I confess I remember little of what I said towards the end; only that I wished to express what little I could. I did not wish to cause you further harm. Truly."

"I almost killed the deputy-head of M– of the bank."

"You did not kill her. There is a fundamental difference."

Alex's eyes flash as he leans forward, hands clenched on the table. "I didn't want to have to choose whether or not to kill her in the first place. I didn't want to kill any of the people I was forced to, in the end. Did you hear about what happened on my last mission? What I did, who I killed?"

Yassen watches him impassively, calm as ever.

"I killed myself!" Alex hisses. "Or the closest thing to myself that I could with my still being here."

Yassen's pale blue eyes flick to their surrounding tables. Thankfully, it appears as though the general cacophony has drowned out Alex's momentary loss of control.

When the Russian speaks, his voice is quiet. "So did I."

Alex's fingers spasm out of tightly held fists. He sits back, bewildered.

Ioann chooses this moment to break back into the circle of solitude under the parasol, bearing three paper cups of raspberry ice cream and a smile bright enough to light up the whole table.

Alex accepts his share with a mechanical nod of thanks, which Ioann returns so enthusiastically he nearly drops the remaining two cups. The ice cream is only saved by a swift catch from Yassen, who sets them down on the table with a mildly reproving glance at his child.

Ioann faces the square happily, leaning back into his father's side as he engrosses himself with the treat. He barely seems to notice as his father removes a pair of earbuds from a pocket and places them in Ioann's ears. The only difference is that he now bobs quietly to the music, eyes focused alternatively on ice cream and crowd.

"Children hear and understand more than you would know," Yassen explains at Alex's glance.

With Ioann safely out of the picture, they return to the topic of discussion – if it could be called anything as cordial as a discussion, Alex muses.

"Explain," he grinds out.

Yassen meets Alex's gaze once more. "I never told you how I became what I was."

"You did. My father trained you."

"You will find he actually advised me against continuing on that path."

"He did?"

"He did. And I would have followed that advice, should I not have discovered just prior to our separation that he was working for the British government."

"So what did you do?"

Yassen shrugs, an incredibly graceful and casual movement. "I proved him wrong. I returned here, to Russia. I let chance dictate whether I would live. With the method I chose, there was a five in six chance that I would have died, but I did not. So I killed two men that had caused me no small amount of suffering, and then began a highly successful career of the same activities."

Alex stares. "So you became an assassin out of spite?"

"Well…" Yassen tilts his head, for a moment looking exactly like he did on that rooftop when he had said Your choice, Alex. "Yes."

"That was incredibly stupid of you."

"I was a very emotionally compromised young man."

Alex folds his arms. "I still don't see the connection."

"I killed myself when I shot those men, Alex. I killed the part of me that considered the rightness of a decision before taking action. I killed the warm-hearted boy my parents had raised me to be. From that moment onwards I felt nothing when I took a life. Emotions were limited to trivialities; annoyance, flashes of anger at disturbances. Nothing more."

Alex looks at Yassen for a long while, absorbing this revelation.

"But we are different in one very important point." Yassen smiles, properly this time, and Alex notes detachedly that those are laugh-lines around his eyes.

"When I killed myself, Alex, I killed the humanity within me. Killing is not an occupation that a human should have. It bleaches the colour out of the world. It is not a nice existence." Yassen's eyes open and close once, deliberately, slowly. "The part of yourself that you killed, Alex, was different. I do not know the details, but I can see it in the way you speak, the way you move, in your eyes." His voice pitches lower, softer. Alex can barely hear him. "You destroyed what Scorpia and MI6 did to you. You were reborn, Alex. You became yourself again. We both killed, yes – but you did the exact opposite of what I did."

Alex's mouth is dry. "So–"

Yassen's eyebrow twitches. "You were simply the better man, Alex. Like your father. He had that same impossible ability you have: to turn something awful into good."

"Oh." Alex sits, stunned, and watches Yassen start on his ice cream. The ex-assassin actually smiles as he eats, as though the raspberries remind him of a fond memory.

"Eat."

"What?"

That infernal eyebrow again. Yassen gestures at the waiting paper cup. "Your ice cream is melting."

Alex regards the lopsided scoop of pale pink ice cream with suspicion.

"It is highly unlikely I ordered my son to poison it, Alex," Yassen says. "And it would entirely defeat the purpose of my getting shot by a madman for preventing your execution."

Alex complies. The ice cream is surprisingly good; unlike any other he has every tasted.

He looks back up at his Russian counterpart. "About what happened on the plane–"

"No." Yassen is looking amusedly at him, as though he had expected this.

"No?"

"We should not speak of favours owed and lives spared, or despicable acts of both our doing. I killed your uncle; you killed others. You nearly shot me in my sleep; for my freedom, I would have sliced off your friend's fingers, no matter now deeply repulsed I was by the order. Let us not show remorse or gratitude. It has passed, and we have both changed."

Alex nods his slow agreement.

The following silence is not quite companionable, but it is not uncomfortable, is somewhere between practiced and patient, the quiet of former warriors who know that peace is something to be treasured.

Alex's voice is contemplative when he speaks. "You didn't, you know."

"What?"

"Kill yourself completely."

It is Yassen's turn to look surprised. The expression is so incongruous on the former assassin's features that Alex feels an urge to laugh.

"You've built a good life here." Alex gestures at the square – the laughter, the music, the afternoon sunlight pooling on the cobblestones.

Yassen glances down at the top of his son's head. Fondness quirks the edge of his mouth. "Being dead has its convenience, but there is much I owe to the woman I eventually married."

"She must be an extraordinary person."

"Very."

Something different enters Yassen's gaze as he speaks of her; something so deep and inexplicable that Alex feels a twinge of something similar to jealousy. He wonders what it would be like to feel for someone so intensely as Yassen obviously does for his family.

He realises something, and jealousy melts away just as quickly to regret.

"You're going to have to move your family because of me."

Yassen nods, but he does not seem perturbed. "It was inevitable we would have to go elsewhere at some point. It might as well be now."

"I'm still sorry." Alex almost trips over the last word, surprised at himself.

Yassen inclines his head. "Your apology is unnecessary, but appreciated."

Alex watches Ioann lick his ice-cream spoon clean. Yassen produces a handkerchief out of his pocket and cleans the sticky residue off his son's small hands.

Unscarred hands. Clean hands. And very likely to remain so, should Yassen have his way.

Alex straightens, suddenly. "You named him Ioann."

Yassen glances up from his work with amusement in his eyes. "I thought you would notice."

"You named him after my father."

The handkerchief is refolded and tucked back inside jacket pocket. Yassen double checks that Ioann's ears are still firmly plugged before answering. "I could not use the English version of the name, of course," he says quietly. "Ioann was the Russian alternative."

"But I thought…?"

Yassen shakes his head. He almost looks pleased. "He taught me many things, Alex. I trusted him completely. Even when he broke that trust, it did not stop me from giving him the utmost respect. And I have come to realize many things about him since I entered retirement."

Alex notices Yassen deliberately avoids saying John Rider's actual name, but he does not comment. "Do you still use your own name?" he asks instead.

"No. I use another, now. There are too many connections to the Gregorovich name. I made the mistake of telling the Widow too much." Yassen's eyes narrow in distaste at the mention of Julia Rothman. "And Yassen was not the name my parents gave me at birth."

Alex waits. He does not ask; not directly. The last quarter hour had changed the boundaries of their acquaintance considerably, but this is something entirely different.

To his surprise, Yassen answers the unspoken question anyway.

"Yasha." The word is a soft susurration of now-foreign syllables.

"Yasha Gregorovich," Alex says, softly.

A flicker in Yassen's gaze. "It has been a long span of years since I last heard that name in full."

"You sound like you needed it."

"Perhaps."

The crowds erupt into applause as the entertainers in the square's centre complete a song. In the lull between the song's ending and the next, Yassen removes Ioann's earbuds. The boy stops mid-bounce and turns back to his father.

"Papa?"

Yassen shushes him and looks toward Alex. "We should take our leave. As welcoming as you have been, I doubt your friends would share your understanding."

Alex nods. He does not quite know what to do. What does one say in farewell to a man once considered one's worst enemy, and now something similar to an equal?

Unexpectedly, Yassen pauses midway through standing. "Tomorrow is your twenty-first birthday, is it not?"

"Yes." Alex looks up at him, nonplussed.

"In America it is an important date to mark one's coming-of-age."

Alex shrugs. "It doesn't really matter to me, but yes."

"Then allow me to do one more thing."

Under the curious gazes of Alex and Ioann, Yassen waves over a passing waitress and orders two small tumblers of clear liquid, passing over a couple of coins in payment.

Alex eyes his serving with surprise. "Vodka?"

"We start drinking from a very young age in Russia," Yassen explains. Something similar to mischief dances in his eyes. "I find it ridiculous that a country such as America would have a legal drinking age of twenty-one, but it is a rite of passage, no?"

Alex raises an eyebrow. "What should we drink to?"

"Whatever you wish."

Alex's gaze slides to Yassen's young son, who watches the proceedings with an inquisitive expression.

"To Ioann," he toasts, smiling gently at the boy. To the best for your future, better than our past.

Ioann giggles, both hands covering his wide-toothed smile.

Yassen raises his own glass. "To John."

Alex whirls towards him, startled, but the Russian has already expertly nudged his tumbler against the younger man's.

Clink.

They down the liquid fire as one. Yassen makes his amusement very obvious on his features when Alex cannot quite suppress a wince at the ensuing burn.

Yassen stands and holds out a hand, passively.

After a moment, Alex takes it.

They give their hands a firm shake. It is only the second time they have ever touched; the first was an ending. This is a beginning.

"Goodbye, little Alex."

"Goodbye."

Yassen gathers up the bunch of flowers. The ice cream seems to have had a soporific affect on Ioann, and a moment later the boy is in his father's arms, head pillowed at the junction of Yassen's shoulder and neck.

Ice-blue eyes meet warm brown for the last time. Yassen nods once, his small smile a curved flash across his lips; and then he turns and walks away.

Ioann takes his forehead off his father's shoulder just long enough to give Alex a parting wave.

Alex returns it, and watches as Yassen reaches the opposite edge of the square. A woman is standing there; her face is not visible in detail from such a distance, but the waves of her hair glint a rich copper in the sun.

Yassen leans over and pecks her on the cheek. When he draws away, the bouquet is in the woman's fingers, and Alex can see that her mouth is open in delighted laughter.

They turn and melt into one of the side streets. Just before they round a corner, Alex catches one last glimpse; Yassen has slipped one arm free from under Ioann's weight, and is holding the woman's hand.

And then they are gone.

Alex lowers himself back on the bench, and exhales once. There is no longer steam rising from his tea, and the surface of the liquid is a calm and cool as a tranquil lake.

"Alex! Sorry we've were so long, you must have been bored out of your mind!"

He twists in his seat. Sabina and her parents are there, smiling at him. Liz Pleasure and her daughter are laden with shopping bags.

Sabina takes a step forward and frowns quizzically. "Were you talking to someone?"

"What?"

"Did you run into a friend?" Sabina indicates the two empty glasses on the table.

Alex smiles. "No. Just… an old acquaintance."

The Pleasures settle themselves at the picnic table.

"Are we going to meet your old acquaintance?"

"No, I'm probably never going to see him again."

Next to him, Sabina looks at him curiously. He does not meet her stare, instead allowing his gaze to roam over the table; empty vodka glasses, clean ice-cream cups, and cold tea.

"Are you all right, Alex?"

Alex looks up at Liz Pleasure's voice. That is the question, he realizes. It has been the question for the past six years. Is he all right? Would he be all right?

He thinks of the feel of a gun in his hand, the memory so close to him even after so long; the harshness of the grip in his hand, the easy pressure of the trigger under his finger, the harsh crack of the kick against his wrist…

He thinks of the roiling ochre cloud of an exploding car, a thousand times hotter than the burning greyness of desert sand, of screaming and of sprinting and of gravel under his torn shoes…

He thinks of raspberry ice cream, of autumn sunlight on the cobblestones, of holding hands and waving goodbye and red-copper hair in the wind, and happiness, and the promise of something better.

He thinks of surprise gifts and flowers, and laughter.

Yassen had done it. If Yassen had managed to begin again, then so could he.

Alex slips a hand under the table and grasps Sabina's hand. Her fingers curl around his instantly, instinctively.

"I'm all right," he says softly, smiling. "And I'm going to be fine."

Thank you for reading! I wrote this story as an afterword of sorts, because I thought both Yassen and Alex needed closure. Horowitz gave us the shadow of hope, but I wished that Yassen could share in it. As I mentioned in the Author's Note, I put quite a number of references to Russian Roulette in this. Applause to those who found them.

Oh, and if you wanted to know what Yassen wanted to tell his wife - give the flowers another look.

Edit: upon reflection, I think I should explain the flowers myself, since I can't expect everyone to look up the language of flowers. So here:

Dark pink roses - Thankfulness

White heather - Protection and the promise that all wishes will come true

Fern - Confidence and shelter

So when Yassen gives her the flowers, he means to say Thank you. I will protect you, and I promise that all your wishes will come true; I will shelter you.

I'm open to feedback and questions! Especially anything concerning Ioann; he was the best part of all of this.