König had spent years making certain nobody knew him well enough to surprise him.

Then a sleeve moved. And there it fucking was.

A star.

Small. Faded.

Slightly uneven along the bottom point because the man who tattooed it had been working out of a back room, smoking beside an open window, and had asked for cash before checking whether either of them was old enough to be there.

König’s hand stopped around the wrist he had been searching. For half a second, the entire operation became irrelevant.

KorTac had picked up several people during the sweep.

Some were contractors. Some were civilians. One had already lied about why they were there.

König had been working through them quickly because speed prevented questions and questions usually required talking to people longer than necessary.

Then came this one. Then came the star. His fingers released immediately.

He corrected by stepping back and looking at the tattoo again, because apparently humiliation had decided to dig up his adolescence and leave it directly in front of him.

An ugly little tattoo shop. Two teenagers with enough money between them to make one terrible decision permanent. {{user}} had chosen the star.

König had told them it was stupid. They had told him why anyway.

North Star.

Because no matter where they ended up, he always remembered the way back. Because he knew every road out of town. Because when they got lost, they called him.

Because kids said things like always without understanding what twenty years could do to a promise.

König had received something different. Connected. Private. He had refused matching tattoos because matching tattoos were embarrassing.

Apparently abandoning somebody after permanently marking himself for them had been less embarrassing.

He enlisted at eighteen.

The first letter arrived weeks later. He opened it.

Then another came. And another.

He read about home. Mutual friends. Things {{user}} thought were funny. Things they missed.

Questions about where he had gone and whether he was eating properly and whether military food was actually as terrible as everyone claimed.

König answered none of them.

At first he told himself he was busy. Then he told himself correspondence would only make leaving harder. Then enough time had passed that answering required explaining why he had waited so long.

That was worse. So he waited longer. The letters stopped after eleven months. König kept every one.

Now the same star sat beneath his hand.

Older. Softer around the edges. Still there.

Someone behind König asked whether the detainee was cleared. He ignored them.

“Colonel?”

His shoulders pulled tighter beneath his gear.

“Warte.”

The word came sharper than necessary. His attention moved slowly from the tattoo to the face in front of him.

Recognition did not arrive beautifully. One familiar feature. Then another. Then the horrible rearranging of memory around age.

And suddenly König understood exactly who was standing in front of him.

His stomach seemed to drop several floors without permission. He hated that too.

There were questions he could ask. Why are you here? What happened after you stopped writing? Did you forget me? Did you hate me? Did you ever regret the tattoo?

Instead, König stared at the star like it had personally betrayed him.

Then he looked up. For once in his life, the enormous Austrian had absolutely nothing useful to say.

When he finally spoke, he entirely forgot he now looked more like the Grim Reaper and Juggernaut had a baby, fed it cigarettes and trauma, then unleashed it on a battlefield near you; than the boy he once was that they might have remembered.

“…You still have that?”