You step out of the arrivals hall at Sheremetyevo Airport, the chill of Moscow's autumn air slapping your face like a forgotten promise. The baggage claim carousel has spat out your suitcase—scratched and stubborn, but yours—and you've dragged it through customs with the numb efficiency of someone who's crossed too many borders.

He's leaning against a concrete pillar, a solitary figure in the haze of exhaust and jet fuel, a cigarette dangling from his lips like it's the only thing keeping him tethered to the ground. Smoke curls up from the glowing tip, twisting into the gray sky, and in his free hand, he clutches a bouquet of flowers—roses, once vibrant red, now trampled and wilted, their stems bent at cruel angles, petals bruised and scattered like confetti from a funeral.

The flowers tremble in his grip, and then, with a sudden jerk of his arm, he hurls them. They arc through the air in a pathetic tumble, stems snapping mid-flight, petals exploding like shrapnel across the pavement. A few land at the feet of a passing family, who step around them without a glance, but he doesn't notice. He doesn't care. The bouquet hits the asphalt with a soft, defeated thud, and he stomps on it—once, twice, his heel grinding the blooms into the cracks as if he could crush the memory they carry. Smoke billows from his nostrils as he exhales sharply, a curse slipping out in guttural Russian.

His rise was swift, inevitable. Spetsnaz selected him young—special forces, the elite blade of Russia's defense, where men were broken and rebuilt in the Siberian taiga or the dust-choked ranges of Dagestan. Training was a blur of frostbite and fractures: endless runs through blizzards with packs heavier than his body, knife fights in the dark where hesitation meant a scar for life, simulations of urban assaults that left psyches as battered as flesh. Ignatiy thrived in the chaos, his family's discipline turning pain into fuel. He led platoons through exercises in Chechnya's ghost towns, coordinated extractions in shadowed Syrian alleys, his voice steady over crackling radios as bullets whined past. Promotions came like clockwork—lieutenant by twenty-two, captain by twenty-six. Letters home were sparse, filled with coded pride: "The work continues. Weather is fine." His father replied with clippings from military journals, underlining passages about valor. His mother sent care packages of wool socks and preserved jams, silent apologies for the distance.

But in the stolen hours between deployments, Ignatiy found Katya. She was a flicker of warmth in the cold machine of his life—a translator he'd met at a briefing in Grozny, her laugh cutting through the briefing room's tension like sunlight on snow. Slender, with hair the color of autumn birch and eyes that held secrets she never fully shared, Katya worked for an NGO, flitting between aid convoys and cultural exchanges. "When you come back," she'd whisper during his leaves, tracing the scars on his knuckles, "promise me flowers. Real ones, not those plastic things from the PX."

He promised. Every time. And in the foxholes of Donbas or the wind-swept borders of Kazakhstan, those promises kept him human. He'd splurged at a base shop in Vladivostok, buying the bouquet on his final layover—roses for passion, lilies for purity, wrapped in crisp paper that now mocked him from the floor. The flight back was a haze of recycled air and replayed memories, his pulse quickening at the thought of her face in the crowd.

Now, here he stands, the flowers' ruin at his boots, the anger coiling in his gut like a spring-loaded trap. He'd spotted her first—Katya, laughing too brightly, her arm looped through another man's. Not a stranger, no; Ignatiy knew that face from her photos, the "colleague" she'd mentioned in passing, the one with the easy grin and no scars.

You watch as he kicks at the scattered petals now, sending a few skittering toward your feet. Poor flowers. Maybe you could take them. Or talk to him.