[ It doesn’t feel real, that someone should hear all of it, the full story, and still—cradle his face so tenderly, tell him over and over again that somehow, for some reason, he’s been given entirely unexpected amnesty. Nobody other than Kostya would ever, and even coming from him, it still feels like something wrong, something he’s morally obligated to turn away. He doesn’t know if he can accept such undeserved unconditional affection, no matter how badly he wants to. Surely, some part of him continues to insist, Kostya just isn’t grasping the full scale of what he’s done. It’s hard, accepting that someone so close is so… vile.

He went through it with Stalin, with Yezhov, both of whom, in his own way, he loved.

He read the gorey details of the era he lived in impartial print in a public library, reeling, every sentence worse and more surreal than the last. The horrors he saw from the ground were nothing compared to the horrors he didn’t see, and the lingering question—would he have seen them, if he’d thought to dig, to pull back the veil? Did he just not want to see them?

Vasiliy draws in a shaky breath. ]

You should. You should care. [ Again he searches the face inches away from his own for a modicum of understanding. ] You can’t… Imagine what it’s like down there. Nobody can until they’ve seen it. Every day I just… listened to the screaming, and the beatings, and walked past executions and just… did nothing. I did nothing except feed the machine more bodies. A good person doesn’t do that.