Chang endured the first seven days post-Balalaika by drinking hard in the cold light of his television. One more glass of bourbon while another pointless movie whirled in the DVD player made time slip past him almost painlessly. He watched classic wuxia epics during the maudlin evenings, graduating to gun fu flicks in the best part of the night. He saved the chop-socky for the black hours, when not even sleep would claim him. (Why would it, after what he had done?)

In the early hours of the eighth day, Chang found himself at the bottom of yet another bottle. It was an arduous journey up from cool leather of the sofa and over to the phone on his nightstand, but the call down to the kitchen staff only took a few seconds. Chang returned to his movie when it was done.

He heard the knock over the blare of the staged gunfight and elected to ignore it. Another knock, and the door opened, as Chang expected. He held out his crystal highball for the refill, his eyes never leaving the screen. The familiar weight of the glass disappeared, and a mug of something hot took its place. Chang, even mostly drunk, managed to suppress a very uncool and unmanly yelp. In his rush to set the mug down on the table, some of the black coffee sloshed over the rim and ran down the back of his hand. Damn, it burned.

Shaking the scalding stuff from his rapidly-reddening fingers, Chang swung his head to see his visitor.

Biu looked down at him, his face a blank behind dark glasses.

Chang felt grateful for his own shades and what they kept hidden.

"Sir," Biu said.

"Biu," Chang acknowledged.

Bui offered a curt nod and then left.

Chang let his sigh slip as the door closed. Biu certainly had a way with words.

The television answered its remote and blinked into silence while Chang drained the first mugful of coffee. He polished off the rest between a shower, a shave, and a fresh suit. His overcoat smelled like stale booze and self-loathing, but the custom .22s at his back felt his the handshake of an old friend.

He spared a glance back to his private quarters when he lit a fresh cigarette at door. The rumpled sheets. The haze of days-old smoke in closed rooms. Biu was right; Chang had stayed inside with the blinds drawn for long enough. He needed to get back to who he was.

Outside, Roanapur waited for her Heavenly King.

Weeks passed, then months.

Chang went on as he always had.

He saw his organization surge in profit, recruitment, and retainment as the seeds of his much-needed "house-cleaning" reaped larger than expected rewards.

He reaffirmed status as beloved benevolent dictator at an especially decadent meeting of Thailand's Triad deputies.

He took that long-put-off trip to Hong Kong, ever the charismatic figure with his smooth style and newly trimmed physique. (He found that he had an abundance of energy and frustration to pour into his work-outs as of late.) He so impressed the inner circle that his rivals attempted to assassinate both him and Biu on the return trip to Roanapur. Twice. Chang took it as a quite the compliment, although Biu was new to such attentions and intent on revenge.

He staved off disasters and performed the impossible, as was expected of the one and only Wan-Sang Chang.

And he kept his mouth shut until his heart's secret stopped being a secret and became a memory. After a year, he could meet with the other heads of Roanapur's criminal organizations without the aid of pharmaceuticals. He could look on Balalaika's marred face, sneering at Abrego from across the square of chairs, and no inner storm of guilt and panic would rise up in him anymore. It was over, long over, so when her number flashed on the screen of his cell one evening, Chang answered.

"Hello, Balalaika. It's been awhile."

"It has," she said. "I will be brief."

"Take your time," Chang said to prove that he could. He was standing by his pool, enjoying a beautiful evening in Roanapur. He would never be more prepared than this.

"Very well," she replied. "I will be out of the city with a faction of my men to attend some business. The timeframe for departure is three days with an expected return in two weeks. Given Roanapur's propensity to, shall we say, destabilize whenever the status quo is disrupted, I wanted to alert you personally."

Chang smiled for the benefit of the skyline. "I'll keep the city from burning to the ground while Hotel Moscow is away. I always do."

"I appreciate your reliability," she said with enough of an edge that something in his chest cracked open and oozed. Chang winced as the familiar poison seeped into his blood.

He was a fool to think that he was over her.

"You can thank me when you get back," he managed to get out. "Two weeks, right?"

"Yes."

A silence began. It stretched on the line between them. He could not find the strength to hang up on her again.

"There is something I wish to say to you," she said at last.

Chang had to wrangle his traitor tongue into responding. "By all means."

"You did quite the favor for me, Chang. I wish to thank you."

Chang's balance went, and he had to put a hand on the balcony's banister to stay upright. He had held her down, reminded her of the horror of her past, and then abandoned her. Now, she was thanking him. He wanted to laugh in the face of the wind, but his traitor tongue broke free.

"Why?"

"Still so intent on learning my secrets, even after all this time?" she said with that sexy lilt in her voice. "You are lucky that my gratitude is such that I will explain."

He heard her take a distant breath and remembered the way it felt on his bare chest.

"Once upon a time in Afghanistan," she began, "I served with a man who treated me as his equal, even though he was my superior officer. He was a man of great character and skill, and that I was a woman, which my country valued as little more than secretaries and nursemaids in the war, had no bearing on the respect with which he treated me as his comrade-in-arms. We shared an uncommon understanding and a deep friendship.

"We served together for a long time, so I suppose what happened was inevitable. After the rounds one evening, he invited me into his tent. I refused because I believed that I could not be both his comrade and his lover. His respect, and the respect of our men, mattered more than his love.

"Only many years after his death did I come to understand what I had done. I had chosen to be Balalaika, alone. Since I had refused him, that great man, I vowed to refuse all men. And for a long time, it was an easy vow to keep because no man seemed to compare to him. But then-"

She paused again. Chang knew what would come next, but he wanted her to say it, needed to hear the words from her mouth.

"But then, there was you," she finished.

The words rushed out of him before his mind could reason. "Where are you?"

Her laughter was brittle. "You do not know? You used to watch this place like a man obsessed. I am standing where you first looked at me as he looked at me that night, as a man looks at a woman. It was raining then, and you were being such a baby about it."

The building top. Christ. Chang's speed did not fail him. He had the forgotten binoculars pulled from a drawer and levelled at Roanapur's skyline within seconds. There she was, the wind whipping through her hair as she stood on the rooftop looking directly at him. No human eye could not see him clearly across that distance, but Chang felt the old familiar heat of her gaze just the same.

He was a fool to think that he would ever get over her.

"Do you understand my gratitude now, Chang?" He voice had dropped low and hot, but so blue that it tore his heart. "I nearly forgot my promises, but you kept them for me. For that, I thank you."

"Never thank me for what I did to you," Chang ground out, but he wind must have stolen his words because her face did not lose that sad smile, which made him feel like climbing over the banister and plunging twenty-five fucking stories to the pavement below.

She went on. "You have indulged me for long enough. I will take my leave now."

"Balalaika, stop," he said much too loudly, losing infinite cool points and not caring in the least.

Through the binoculars, he saw her resignation of a smile fall away at last.

"Carrying a flame for some dead guy is just about the stupidest thing I've ever heard," he said, "but I'm not really in a place to criticize. I'm always going to carry this thing for you."

In the distance, Balalaika raised the cigar to her lips and sucked down the smoke. "You really are a romantic," she said.

"If that were true, I would have picked up the phone for you last year," Chang said bitterly.

"Let's not dance with the bear now, Chang. We each made our choices long ago. I do not entertain regrets." She took another drag from her cigar. "I believe that we are through now, yes? I have somewhere to be."

Chang swallowed a book's worth of meaningless words that he wanted to tell her. The weight of everything unsaid sank into the blackness in his chest.

"Of course, Balalaika. Don't have too much fun on your trip. There are plenty of nice cities that I would like the chance to visit one day. It'd be a shame if one of them burned."

"Hmm," she said around her cigar.

And then Chang watched her pull the cell phone from her ear and snap it closed, but she did not go right away. For the span of a moment, she stayed there, her chin lifted and eyes raised, and gazed back at him while Chang kept his watch of her through the binoculars.

The noisy city measured the distance between them in grime and guns and humid air.

The moment passed.

Chang saw Balalaika drop her eyes and turn away.

As she walked toward it, the door to the roof opened. Boris appeared, huge and stoic.

"Kapitan, we are ready," he said and held the door for her.

"Thank you, Sergeant," she said. "I am finished here."

Balalaika flicked the last of her cigar over the lip of the rooftop and tucked the cell phone into her jacket. Even though layers of fabric, she could feel it hot against her skin. In time, it would fade to a comfortable temperature, indistinguishable from her own.

She had meant what she said to him. She had no regrets, but she would not return. Remembering was enough. After all, she only knew how to live with ghosts.

The cool of the building enveloped her as she stepped inside, back to where her duties lay.

A/N: And that's the end. Thanks for reading and reviewing. I know that Chang and Balalaika aren't the most popular pairing in the BL world, but I hope that I've done something to share the love of these characters, as individuals and together, with this story. Besides leaving a review, the best thing you can do for me is write for these characters, too. Also, would someone PLEASE make some hot Chang/Balalaika art and share with me?

More extensive blah blah about my writing process and this story here: unkeptsecret(dot)insanejournal(dot)com/12471(dot)html