Proshchay, Roza.

The mornings that followed Colossus were always strange. The PRIME roster scattered across airports and highways like the remnants of a storm, but the Red Army never left quietly. Their departures were military in discipline, ritual in cadence, and heavy with the sense that the world shifted when they did. Perhaps it was the way that the United States exhaled with relief that they were finally leaving its soil?

On the far end of the private runway, a Russian State jet waited, engines breathing slow curls of vapor into the cold December air. The ground crew kept their distance. Even here, even in America, the Red Army carried its own gravity.

They ascended the stairs slowly, with duffel bags slung over their shoulders or bags in their hands. Many were wounded and hobbled from the events of Colossus, just a few days ago. At the top of the stairs, Alexei Ruslan stood with his coat collar up around his neck while he watched each member, an individual with their own histories and stories, file onto the jet.

Below, Ivan Stanislav strode across the concrete like an iron locomotive. His scarlet uniform glowed in the morning light, while his medals swayed with an inertia only he could create. His breath fogged the damp air. His shoulders ached from the war he had waged against Jared Sykes and the weight of the world that he carried upon them. But these were familiar companions.

The Motherland demanded constant devotion. A celebration awaited aboard the Svet Fanyi in Arkhangelsk. Victories needed to be broadcast throughout Mother Russia. Losses had to be rewritten into victories. Enemies required international damnation.

It never stopped. A frozen port awaited them. A nation, where only two of their number were natives, held its breath with expectation. There’d be another triumph parade. Soviet and Russian banners were already printed. Cameramen were already briefed. Scripts were already written, modified, and rewritten.

The Red Army always moved forward.

Always.

Until someone did not.

Rose.

She had been walking behind the group, quiet as always, standing just one step apart from the Red Army formation the way she always had done. A soldier pressed into service. A woman who had both survived and fallen to Ivan.

Her steps faltered, slowed… and then stopped.

The others on the jet didn’t notice, or pretended not to. They filed into the plane one after another, until only Alexei remained at the top, awaiting Stanislav and Rose.

Ivan reached the foot of the stairs, and something in the air shifted. The hairs on his neck lifted. He looked up at Alexei, who was looking beyond him. Then, Stanislav turned.

Rose stood several yards back, motionless in the gray morning, the wind tugging at her coat. Off in the periphery, lost in the movement of baggage carts and airport staff, a small girl stood with a caretaker. Adeline. Rose clenched her fists and stood stock still. Even at the distance in front of Adeline, she looked like a mother shielding her child from a world that had teeth.

Stanislav glanced up at Ruslan again, who stared daggers from on high. Ivan turned and took one step toward Rose. Then another. Not a charge. Not a threat. Just an inexorable movement of a man who hadn’t stopped in sixty-four years.

The cold wind moved. The engines hummed. The Georgia air held its breath. Ivan stopped a few paces from Rose and that is where the moment truly began.

He spoke plainly. “You stopped.”

“I’m not going,” the words were soft, yet confident. She began to turn.

His words boomed over the revving engines, but were swallowed beyond the two of them. He reached out and grabbed her forearm. “What do you mean you are not going?”

She spun around, daggers in her eyes. She stared deep into the eyes of her one-time enemy turned… well, words couldn’t accurately capture whatever this was.

“Where is she?” her tone turned to steel.

He let go of her. He didn’t recoil physically, but his hand snapped back as if it might be bitten. He tilted his head to the side. “Who?”

“Sabrina Carpenter,” she deadpanned. Obviously, Ivan had not the slightest clue who that was and his disdain for America grew even deeper.

“Arina.” Her voice sliced through his thoughts and everything felt colder between the two of them.

His expression faltered. Even beneath his beard, she could see the emotion shift across his Russian features. “I… I do not know. She resigned. She left and I let her.”

“You let her leave? Then explain this.” Rose reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. “Explain what she has to do then. Explain to me your final conversation with her and what mission you sent her on now because you’re too scared to get your hands dirty. Because you need her to be more like you for some sick reason.”

His eyes stared at the paper, curiously, tracking it as it blew in the wind, held firmly in Rose’s steely fingers. He shook his head. “This… I did not…”

His brow furrowed. “I did not send her anywhere. There is no mission.” His gaze flicked from the paper, past Rose, as if Arina might somehow be standing beyond her shoulder.

But she wasn’t.

His jaw tightened as the hinges bulged beneath his beard. “Rose, I valued her because she was not like me. Because she could build a future I cannot.”

The jet growled angrily behind him.

A beat hung in the air between them. “It’s impressive how much you believe your own bullshit as it comes out of your mouth. That propaganda brain-washing they do to you, do they start that at a young age? Are there classes you have to take so often to re-apply it?” Her eyes narrowed. “You broke her. I fucking told you and you ignored me, and you broke her.”

She stepped toward the Bear. “So no, I won’t go get on your fucking jet and go back to Russia. Because I told you on that walking disaster of a boat that I couldn’t leave because I couldn’t trust you. I was right on that, but with her gone, now I don’t have to put up with this bullshit any longer. And don’t pretend for one second you want me around.”

Alexei’s voice rang out over the jet from beyond Ivan’s broad shoulders.

“HEY?! WE LEAVING?!”

Ivan flinched as he looked over his shoulder and sent a sonic boom in Alexei's direction.

“QUIET!”

The words echoed off the tarmac and Alexei winced. Ivan turned back to Rose and snarled, looming over her.

“What do you care anyway? She was assigned to you. She worked with you. She listened to you. I assigned her to you because she was the best fucking thing in this Red Army, with the most love in her heart, and I wanted you to have someone who could help you.”

He gestured toward the paper, and did his best to allow his boiling rage to hide the pain.

“You show me a piece of paper like it proves something? That it makes me a villain in a story you already decided to tell?”

His eyes narrowed and scanned her face, before flicking around the tarmac.

“You think this is clever. Doing this here. In public. In front of my people.” His voice dropped. “In front of your daughter?” Suspicion coiled tighter. “Who put you up to this?” he demanded. “Troy? Someone else? Or just you all along?”

He shook his head, frustrated and almost incredulous. “You would never believe it now,” he said, “but I did care for you. When your father died and no one else noticed. When the world laughed and moved on. When they didn’t believe in you. When they saw the scowl and decided it was easier to believe nothing beat beneath the chest.”

His jaw clenched.

“How dare you now do it to me.”

She scoffed. “How dare I do it now? And what, let you take me back to Russia so I’m never freed? No, Ivan. You did this to yourself. You pushed and you prodded. You broke her to the point where she left. No one has to put me up to this -- and you know how little sway you have over me, so why you would think someone else has any sway over me is hilarious to me -- because I saw it firsthand. If she were important to you, you would turn the world over in those massive hands of yours and find her.”

Her jaw set. “It’s clear you never cared for her beyond what she could do for you. Let’s not pretend I’m any different or anyone else who stepped foot onto your jet. We’re disposable to you, and she is proof of that.”

Her words stung and he nearly flinched, struggling and scrambling to reckon with them. To take the assumptions and the falsities, mingled with the truths that laid within, and make sense of them.

“You want to know what she said to me? She said I used her. That I put her in danger for my war. That she was tired of being my soldier. That she wanted her own life.” His jaw clenched, the beard barely concealing the muscle working beneath.

“I tried to get her to stay. To let me fix it. I was wrong. But she still walked into the rain and I never saw her again.” His voice dropped to something dangerous and broken. “Do not tell me I do not care. Do not tell me I did not want to fight. She asked me to let her go. What should I do? Drag her back? Lock her in? Prove her right about everything she accused me of?”

His eyes moved to the letter. “I do not understand why. Why she did all of this. Did she write something to you? Something she did not tell me?”

Rose shook her head. “You made her feel safe and then abused that. What she wrote me is none of your concern, save this. You would do well to get your house in order.” Beat. “Now, are we done here? Or do you want to drag me by my hair and throw me on that jet?”

He stared at her, hard, for several moments, and narrowed his eyes. “Go on. Walk away. Build your life. Raise Adeline. But I will never forget this betrayal, Rose. You chose to believe, in this instance, that I am a monster and when I showed a wound, you twisted the knife.”

He looked beyond Rose at little Adeline, for a long moment. His expression shifted to one of sadness, before clouding with Russian steel once more. “Build a life worthy of your little girl. And do not ever cross my path again.”

“Pleasure doing business with you,” she muttered as she turned on her heels and walked away, not even sparing a look over her shoulder as her steps drew her closer to her daughter and a life away from… all of this.

Ivan watched Rose’s figure grow smaller as she walked toward Adeline. He watched the mother scoop her up, pressing her face into Adeline’s hair. Mother and daughter. Whole and separate from him.

The wind tugged at the cold, metallic medals on his breast. They clinked with emptiness. The engine behind hummed its patient, mechanical song. Ivan didn’t turn around. He didn’t acknowledge Alexei’s silhouette at the top of the stairs, or the battered faces staring through the jet’s windows.

Rose disappeared into a waiting car. The door closed, and she was gone.

Measured, deliberate footsteps came upon him from behind. Alexei stopped next to Ivan, following his gaze to the empty tarmac where Rose had stood.

A long silence.

“What was that?” Ruslan’s voice was quiet. Careful.

Ivan’s jaw worked beneath his beard. When he spoke, his voice was flat. Drained.

“She… resigned.”

Ruslan went still. “She… what?”

“She chose to leave.”

Ruslan’s expression darkened. His eyes tracked the direction Rose’s car had gone, and something dangerous flickered across his features.

“No one just leaves The Red Army, Ivan.” He turned fully to his comrade. “No one does this. Not like this. Not in front of everyone else. Not after everything we…” He stopped himself and recalibrated on the spot. “I will take care of this. One phone call. She won’t make it to the state line.”

Ivan exhaled.

“No.”

“Ivan…”

“I said no, Alyosha.” His voice boomed across the tarmac. Then, it went quieter. Heavier. “Let her go, Alexei.”

Ruslan stared at him, incredulous. “She just humiliated you. In front of your people. She…”

“She made her choice.” Ivan’s voice was hollow. “And I made mine. Respect it.”

The wind filled the space between them.

Alexei studied Ivan’s face. The exhaustion, the defeat, despite victory against Sykes. The something-broken that hadn’t been there a week ago. His anger dimmed, replaced by something closer to concern. He’d known him all his life. Watched him weather losses that would have destroyed lesser men. This was different.

“Arina,” Alexei said carefully, “and now Rose. Ivan, are you…”

“I am fine.”

“You are not fine.”

Ivan turned toward the jet. All the faces in the windows moved anywhere but outward. “We have a plane to catch. A frozen port awaits.” His voice was a storm, slowly putting itself back together. Slowly building strength, poised on newfound destruction. “The Motherland demands devotion, Alexei. It does not care if I am fine.”

He began climbing the stairs.

Alexei didn’t move immediately. He looked back once more at the empty tarmac, at the place where Rose had stood, where this quiet devastation had occurred while he’d been too far away to hear it.

When he turned back, Ivan was already at the top of the stairs, silhouetted against the jet’s interior lights.

Alexei Ruslan followed.