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Militsioner had never been good at sleeping.
It was always the worst part of the day—the surrender, the moment the world went too quiet and left him alone in a body too large to fit in. He could wear himself to exhaustion, leaning over the desolate city until his back ached or survey the roads until his eyes gave out. But the second he lay down, the nightmares would claim him.
This one was worse than usual.
He didn’t know why.
Maybe it was the residue it left behind. How the silence felt louder, emptier, than before. The dream didn’t end when he woke; most nights he couldn’t even remember the plot, only the disconnection; the moments he could reach out, and find no one there.
Militsioner had never considered himself afraid of being alone. His size made it inevitable. But tonight, the solitude felt like a hollow carved straight through his chest. Unbearable.
He sat in the icy cold waters, the wetness seeping into the seams of his pants, the fabric molding to his body. He clutched his own wrist—a wrist broad enough to span a hundred men’s shoulders.
He leaned forward, his body contorting to fit around the apartments, trying to find solace in the only place that didn’t feel like emptiness. Quietly. His cap pulled low like a visor.
...
He found the stranger where he was always hiding.
In the abandoned building.
Alone.
Militsioner had to stoop his head down to see through the window, the frame too small for his shoulders, the world inside built to a scale that wasn’t his. The sight of the stranger sleeping—vulnerable and peaceful. It was a portrait of a peace he could witness but never enter.
He stood like a shadow against the glass, a silhouette too large for the doorway, until the stranger stirred and noticed him.
“Militsioner?”
And just like that, the dam cracked.
“I had a nightmare,” he muttered, the confession scraped from his throat, “I didn’t know where else to go.”
The stranger didn’t flinch. He didn’t joke. He didn’t offer the dumb deflection—“You? A nightmare?”—that Militsioner had wanted for.
Instead, the stranger just… softened. His entire expression melted into a quiet concern. He stepped toward the window, looking up.
“You’re okay now,” he said, so gently it felt like a new kind of agony.
“You’re not alone.”
That was the problem. Militsioner didn’t want just to not be alone.
He wanted him. And the stranger to want him to be his. But how could something so small ever hope to hold him?
“I didn’t want to cry,” Militsioner said, his voice breaking like an admission of failure.
“I know,” the stranger whispered. He lifted a hand and pressed it to the glass from the inside. An invitation Militsioner couldn’t truly take.
Slowly, Militsioner lifted his own hand—wide enough to cover the entire flat of the apartment —and mirrored the touch, palm against glass, a single finger to fingertips, separated by a barrier.
...
They stayed like that—the giant in the cold, his forehead resting against the rooftop and the stranger on the other side, the stranger’s breath fogging the small patch of glass. The only intimacy physics would allow.
Militsioner closed his eyes, leaning into that faint, reflected heat. His own mind imagining his hand pressed against what they could not pass through.
“You’re always pushing yourself,” the stranger murmured, his voice muffled but near. “Even at night.”
“I could say the same to you,” Militsioner retorted weakly.
There was a pause. Then, the truth. “Honestly…I don’t like sleeping,” whispered Militsioner under his breath.
The words hung in the air.
The stranger shifted, his sigh fogging the glass. His cheek came to rest against his side of the transparent wall.
“Then don’t sleep yet,” he whispered. “Just stay here. Just for a while.”
...
Eventually, their eyes grew heavy.
Militsioner and the stranger kept foreheads nearly touching through the barrier, breaths syncing, two heartbeats frantic.
“I won’t leave,” the stranger whispered, a vow against the glass. “Even when you wake up.”
Militsioner didn’t answer.
He was already drifting off……