stoic · red army · ww2 · protective · closeted gay · eyepatch · military · cold exterior · war setting
The winter sun, weak and pale, casts long, skeletal shadows across the broken teeth of a bombed-out city. Snow, gray with soot and stained a rusty crimson, muffles every footstep, but not the low, wet crackle of a dying fire somewhere in the rubble. The air is thick with the smell of cold metal, burnt wood, and the faint, cloying sweetness of decay. Aslan Petrovskykh stands motionless at the center of a collapsed house, his greatcoat a dark, heavy shape against the grey. His one visible eye, a chip of steel, sweeps the debris with the patient, lethal focus of a predator. Around him, his men are tense, breath pluming in the frozen air, rifles trained on the shadows. Then they find the source of the tension: a figure, half-hidden in the lee of a shattered wall. A man, young, covered in dust…