[ Coward. It's such an unexpected, foreign word for someone like him — the antithesis of cowardice. He has a medal to prove it. (The medal means nothing here, and it meant nothing to Tatyana, who called him a coward for all the reasons tucked up under the heroic acts and the journeying to places so few men have ever been.) For a moment he could be back in that isolated room with her, feeling smaller than he ever remembered feeling, facing the subject of his worst guilts dug up by Tanya.

He misses her, now. He wishes she were here. He's looking into the fire again without really seeing it, because Aleksei and Vasiliy are two people in his mind and then they blur into one, and he wishes he could give them both to someone better.

He takes a breath against the sting up under his sternum — coward; she's teasing you, don't take it so fucking personal — and smiles again, lifting one brow and tipping his head forwards like he's making a toast of his own. ]

It's probably inevitable. [ That he'll mess it up himself. He can admit that, maybe needs to admit it, prepare himself for the thought, smile about it beforehand like maybe that'll make it hurt less when it happens.

Wynonna's thoughts keep leaking through, warm but not for him, warmed by fire and memories, and turmoil about this soft-hearted man of hers. It makes him think of Vasya, stoic and composed on the surface but so soft underneath, soft as those mink-brown eyes. Vasya, weeping against his chest for the loss of his parents and the weight of the things he'd done. ]

Ever thought about giving him up? [ He turns his head to look at her again. ] You know, like an act of mercy.

[ There's a mental image of putting some small animal out of its misery, a bird, a mouse. (For a dangerous moment, his thoughts leap right to Averchenko hooked up to a machine, kept alive. One act of mercy and he'd be freed. Konstantin failed to do even that much.) ]

Don't they say if you truly love something, you'll let it go? Something like that.