Chapter Text
September 3, 1995
Sunday
Ramstein, West Germany
There’s a knock at the door.
His first reaction is one of mild terror. The sharp, instinctive kind that arrives before reason does. His stomach tightens. For one suspended heartbeat the KGB is in the hallway. Then another knock, firmer, and Sergei forces himself to breathe and remember where he is, in what country, and opens the door.
“Hi.” Margo is standing in the hallway, rainwater still gleaming on her coat, an already half-empty bottle of Asbach Uralt hanging from one hand by the neck.
He has spent the better part of his life separated from this woman by the Iron Curtain and now that she is in his doorway, he finds that he has nothing useful to say.
“Hi,” he manages.
“I just wanted to check in—” She hesitates slightly, as though she is also searching for the words that fit this moment and finding the options limited. “See how you’re doing.” She lifts the bottle slightly. “I also thought you might need this.”
He steps back to let her in, because the alternative is standing in the doorway and saying nothing until one of them calcifies.
She shrugs off her coat and sets the brandy on the dark wooden desk in the corner. Sergei watches her with caution; the set of her shoulders, the way she holds herself, looking for evidence. Of anger, perhaps. Or something worse: that certain quality of distance that signals something has been permanently rearranged.
He isn’t sure yet what he finds.
“I’m better now,” he says. Раз ты здесьNow that you’re here., he does not say.
“I’m glad to hear that.”
“I must admit,” he starts, closing the door and coming to his senses, “I did not expect you here, Margo.”
Outside, rain lashes against the glass in uneven bursts, smearing the lights from the airfield into blurred streaks of red and gold.
“I heard West Germany is nice this time of year.” Something shifts at the corner of her mouth. Not quite a smile just yet, but the shadow of one.
The laugh comes before he can stop it. She smirks, too, and something between them loosens by half a degree before silence reassembles itself, and he is left looking at her across a room that suddenly feels like it contains several years’ worth of things.
He still doesn’t know where to begin. He isn’t sure there is a beginning, exactly. There is only the accumulated weight of it all.
“Margo, you did not have to come all—” he starts.
“I wanted to.”
She holds his gaze without flinching, and he tries very hard not to think about what those three words cost her to say, or what they mean, or what on earth he is supposed to do with them here, in this badly decorated hotel room, with his entire life now sitting permanently on the other side of a border he will never cross again.
Sergei nods, once, because it is the only response he can manage that doesn’t require him to dismantle himself entirely.
“I wanted to say—” he manages at last. “I am sorry. About earlier. My—uh...” He moves his hand, searching for a word that isn’t there. “Indiscretion.”
Sergei closed his eyes when the plane finally touched down on West German soil, the sharp jerk of landing followed by harsh rattling he felt in his back teeth. When it came to a complete stop, he let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, perhaps all the way since Moscow, or perhaps much longer than that.
Getting off the plane was an exercise in patience he barely had left. The American agents conferred near the front of the cabin in low voices he couldn’t quite make out from his seat. He sat with his hands on his knees and looked at the back of his father’s head, the rigid line of his shoulders, and told himself it was over. That the part where something could go wrong was finished.
He wasn’t entirely sure he believed it yet.
At last, he helped his mother with the one piece of luggage she was allowed, just like the rest of them, and they filed out – his parents, his sisters, his brother-in-law and his niece – blinking into a gray sky. The airfield stretched out around them, flat and smelling of jet fuel and impending rain, wind coming hard off the east across the runway. Thunder moved somewhere distant overhead.
His gaze swept around without purpose, moving across clusters of uniforms and the distant perimeter fence, before it caught on a flash of red at the edge of the gathered officials.
“Margo?”
For one horrid moment he was absolutely certain he had never left Lefortovo. That somewhere in a cell he was still lying on a cot while they administered something—some hallucinogen, or poison, and his ruined mind had conjured the one thing it knew would break him most completely. He held the image at a distance, waiting for it to dissolve.
This was unthinkable. He couldn’t make it compute.
She stood there beside a cluster of men he assumed were more American and West German officials and military personnel, the wind making slow work of her burgundy coat, her face turned toward him.
Margo Madison. Here. Margo Madison, who existed in his life, for the most part, as a voice on the other end of a monitored line. Margo Madison, who considered a day off a personal failing, unless forced by conferences that technically still counted as work.
But Margo Madison was here. Eight thousand kilometers from Houston, from her responsibilities and meetings and every other claim the world made on her time.
“Hello, Sergei.” Her voice was low and smooth, that unmistakable current of Alabama underneath it, wrapping itself around his name the way only her voice ever had.
“Margo.” Seemingly the only string of letters his mind could produce.
Holding his breath, he moved one foot in front of the other, then quickened his steps until he was mere centimeters from her. He stopped for a second, took a shaky breath, thinking about the right words, and came to the conclusion that there were none. Not one, not a single arrangement of sounds adequate for this moment. Not in English. Не на русском.Not in Russian.
He let his luggage fall. His arms found her waist and he pulled her in and held on, and the first sob tore out of him so suddenly it felt like something breaking.
It was deeply unprofessional. Desperate. And he felt a little pitiful. He was aware, briefly, of every watching eye—until her arms came around his shoulders and then it ceased to matter. He could breathe again. The barbed wire wrapped around his heart loosened just enough for air to reach his lungs.
The rest came in fragments.
Being guided deeper into the base, out of the rain that had begun in earnest. Margo disappearing into a corridor with a man holding a folder, glancing back once before she turned the corner. Questions from American and West German officials. Hard chairs outside closed doors, his family disappearing one by one to be interviewed and returning. He didn’t remember how he reached the hotel across the base. Didn’t remember saying goodnight to his family, though he must have. He barely remembered finding his room at all.
Her expression shifts immediately. “Sergei—”
“No, it was inappropriate.”
“You just escaped one of, if not the most oppressive regimes on Earth,” she points out with a disbelieving huff.
“I wept on you in front of half the CIA.”
That draws the faintest unwilling curve from her mouth.
“I think under the circumstances,” she says carefully, “you’re allowed.”
The room presses in around them, stale with years of cigarette smoke worked deep into the upholstery, thick with the past and all the things accumulating silently between them. He cannot hold her gaze. There is something in her unguarded care that he has no defense against, and he looks away before it undoes him entirely.
Outside, rain continues its work on the glass.
“When I saw you…” He exhales slowly, the breath uneven at its edges. “I thought perhaps I was still in prison. That my mind had invented you.”
“You looked like you were about to pass out.”
“I nearly did.”
This time her smile comes easier, and for now, he simply lets himself be relieved.
“How’s your family doing?” she asks after a beat, her tone softer now, gentler in a way that feels almost cautious, as though she’s approaching a wounded animal she does not want to startle.
“They are… well enough, I think.” He leans one shoulder against the wall by the window. “Tired. But okay.”
Okay is probably too generous a word for any of them.
His mother had spent most of the flight staring into nothing, as though she expected a hand to seize her shoulder and drag them all back to Moscow. His father had grown quieter with every border crossing, every checkpoint successfully passed, every kilometer between them and the Motherland. His sisters and his brother-in-law had tried to act normal for his niece’s sake, but he had seen it in the way their hands trembled whenever an unfamiliar official approached, in the way they had flinched at a door slamming in the Warsaw safe house at three in the morning.
It had been too much movement in too little time. Moscow to Minsk, Minsk to Warsaw in cramped cars that smelled of gasoline and damp leather. Warsaw to Ramstein on a plane that seemed held together by noise and prayer. Too many instructions whispered in hurried voices. Too many strangers. Too many moments where a single mistake could have unmade them all.
“We have not slept much these past few days.” The understatement is so absurd it almost makes him laugh.
Sleep had become something abstract somewhere between Belarus and Poland. Every time he closed his eyes, he would jolt awake minutes later convinced he had heard footsteps outside a door, convinced the operation had failed, convinced they had been found out.
Even now, standing safely inside a Western air base thousands of kilometers from Moscow, his nervous system still behaves as though danger might burst through the walls at any second. He wonders how long this will last. Whether it is the kind of thing that passes or the kind that simply takes up permanent residence.
Margo glances out the window briefly before looking back at him. Her expression softens further, and the concern there is so exposed that it almost hurts to look at directly.
“I can’t imagine what that’s been like.”
For a moment, he just watches the rain slide down on the glass behind her. The fatigue in him feels old now, ancient somehow, embedded directly into his bones.
“My mother asked about you,” he offers into the lull that follows, when nothing else comes.
That seems to catch her off guard. “She did?”
He nods once with a faint smile.
“She was very disappointed you vanished so quickly after…” He hesitates, still unable to revisit the humiliation of breaking apart in front of half the American intelligence apparatus without feeling heat rise into his face. “After earlier.”
Warmth flickers through Margo’s expression, touched with something just short of shy.
“They needed more signatures. More debriefings.” She shrugs once, lightly. “And I didn’t want to overwhelm you.”
“You could not, Margo.” The certainty in his voice arrives before he can temper it. “I think my family would very much like to meet you properly. One day. When all this is truly over.”
The words feel strangely significant once spoken aloud.
His family knowing Margo had always existed only in impossible hypotheticals before, in redacted anecdotes and indirect references vague enough to survive KGB scrutiny. He had spoken about her over the years more often than he probably realized—about her intelligence, her stubbornness, her impossible work ethic. Never too much. But enough that his family had assembled an image of her piece by piece, long before setting eyes on her.
His mother, especially, had always listened too closely whenever he mentioned her. This is not, Sergei decides, information Margo requires at this particular point in time. Or possibly ever.
Margo blinks at him. “You told them about me?”
He feels color crawl to the tips of his ears. “I may have mentioned you once or twice.”
“Once or twice,” she repeats skeptically.
He sighs, weariness giving way to something dangerously close to amusement. “My mother already likes you very much.”
“I haven’t even spoken to her.”
“That appears irrelevant to her judgment.” That finally earns a real, genuine laugh from Margo.
“She said,” Sergei goes on, “any woman willing to do all this for me must either be very brave or very foolish.”
“And which one am I?”
He looks at her, holding her gaze.
“Brave,” he answers with conviction.
The word does something to her face that he doesn’t quite have a name for. She looks away before he can study it.
For a few moments neither of them says anything. Then Margo’s eyes drift toward the bottle abandoned on the desk.
She crosses the room and picks it up. “So, care for a drink?”
“Please.”
He finds the two glasses the room has provided and she pours slowly, the brandy catching amber in the dim lamplight. The scent reaches him immediately, oak and smoke and something sweet underneath. When she hands him a glass their fingers brush briefly, and he is aware of it the way he has always been aware of accidental contact with her.
“To freedom?” she offers, though the words come out tentative, as though she isn’t entirely sure either of them believes in the concept yet.
Sergei studies the golden liquor in his glass before answering.
“To surviving long enough to find out what freedom means.” He raises his drink. “За свободу.To freedom.” The brandy burns all the way down his throat, harsh enough to make him wince slightly.
And for a little while the conversation drifts into safer territory.
Margo tells him about the chaos unfolding at NASA in her absence: someone accidentally approved three separate launch schedule revisions in a single afternoon. One engineer had apparently cried in Mission Control upon realizing she would be gone for a few days.
“I’m told,” she muses, “that there's a betting pool over where I’d gone. The leading theory is a nervous breakdown.”
He glances up, smirking. “And the other theories?”
“Witness protection. Alien abduction.” A pause. “One person apparently put money on a spontaneous vacation, which I’m choosing to find well-intentioned rather than insulting.”
The humor in it doesn't quite land the way she intended.
“I have apparently never once done anything that couldn’t be scheduled in advance.” She averts her gaze. “They’re not wrong.”
“But you came anyway.”
Margo does not answer at once, turning the liquid in her glass instead.
“Yes,” she says simply. “I came anyway.”
Then he tells her about how his niece spent the entire trip asking whether American grocery stores really stock twenty kinds of cereal exactly like in the movies. That his father became deeply suspicious of the airplane coffee halfway over Poland. That his mother somehow still found time to scold him for not wearing a scarf in the cold despite the fact they had just defected from the Soviet Union.
The drink loosens something in him gradually, enough that for a few precious minutes the room begins to feel close to normal. He lets himself have it because he suspects it will not last.
And he’s right.
Grief settles into him like sediment when he looks at her; just her, simply there, close enough to touch, real in a way he had stopped letting himself imagine. The full weight of it crashes into him all over again. She came anyway. The thought turns over and over and will not stop. After years of him lying to her by omission at best and outright betrayal at worst, she came anyway, and she brought fucking brandy, because she wanted to, like it’s that simple. As though he deserves that kind of simple.
The alcohol suddenly feels too warm in his bloodstream.
The terrible thing is that he no longer knows what to do with kindness anymore. Suspicion, fear, duty—those emotions he understands intimately. They have structure. Rules. Survival instincts attached to them. But kindness this unconditional feels destabilizing. It asks things of him he no longer knows how to give.
He knows how to survive being punished. He does not know what to do when he isn’t.
The contrast makes him feel abruptly untethered from himself. He feels overwhelmed all of a sudden, disoriented. Fragile.
The exhaustion is part of it. Exhaustion strips people down to their most delicate components. The body becomes incapable of maintaining the careful architecture of emotional restraint, and today has made him painfully aware of it. But there is Margo, standing here in front of him as though crossing an ocean for him is simply a thing that happened, as though the years between them are not what they are.
The gratitude alone feels unbearable.
And beneath the gratitude, always, sits guilt. Immense and shapeless and inescapable. He has been carrying it for so long that he sometimes forgets it is there until a moment like this one forces it back to the surface where he cannot ignore it.
He opens his mouth before he can stop himself. “Margo, I—I am sorry—”
“Sergei,” Margo retorts, cutting him off, almost like she anticipated the direction of his thoughts before he did. “I already forgave you.”
She sets her glass down and her hands move slightly, fingers flexing at her sides in what he realizes are nerves. The realization startles him a little. Margo Madison rarely appears nervous about anything. But tonight, there is a faint uncertainty in the way she carries herself around him, as though she is still trying to determine what he needs from her and afraid of misstepping.
“Like I told you back in Houston, I was angry,” she admits, taking a step closer. “For a long time. I want you to know that. I was angry in ways I couldn’t tell anyone about, because explaining it would have required explaining things I couldn’t explain.” She pauses briefly. “I got quite good at it, actually. Being angry at you, Sergei, and having absolutely nowhere to put it.”
She stops and just holds the weight of it, as though setting it down before picking up what comes next.
“I tried to keep being angry. On the flight over here, I was still trying.” She looks up at him finally. “It didn’t hold.”
“It should,” he insists. The response is out before he’s thought it through. He lifts his head and looks at her directly, his expression tightening with stubborn conviction. “Until I make it up to you somehow. Even though…” His throat tightens. “Even though I owe you more than I can ever repay.”
Because how could forgiveness possibly come this easily?
How could she look at him with tenderness after years of lies, manipulation, all the machinery of the Soviet state woven invisibly between them from the moment they first met?
“Sergei, stop.” Her voice is quiet but firm enough to interrupt the spiral.
She takes his own glass from him, puts it down next to hers, takes his hands in hers and they both look at that point of contact instead of each other. Her fingers are warm despite the chill lingering in the room. He becomes painfully aware of how long it has been since anyone, aside from his family, touched him with uncomplicated gentleness.
“You need to forgive yourself, too,” she tells him. “I want you to forgive yourself.”
He steps backward without thinking—the idea itself feels intolerable. He wants to say that for the past however many years, his regrets were the only things guiding him. They became so integrated into his identity that the prospect of setting them down feels existentially frightening.
Margo’s thumb moves slowly across his knuckles in absentminded circles, grounding him before his thoughts can drift too far inward again.
The tenderness of it is catastrophic.
For one dreadful flash, he thinks he might cry again.
“I do not deserve you, Margo,” he chokes out, his voice fracturing around the words. “You are too good to me. I do not deserve you at all.”
His head drops because holding her gaze while saying something that honest feels impossible.
She closes the remaining distance between them and rests her forehead gently against his. “I don’t think that’s your call to make.”
Her hand in his is an anchor he didn’t know he needed and doesn’t know how to be worthy of, but he holds on anyway. If this were anyone else other than Margo, he thinks he would feel weak. Humiliated by the depth of his own need.
But this is Margo. Margo, who still looks at him like he is worth saving.
Slowly, tentatively, he lifts a hand and brushes his fingertips against her cheek. When he finally forces himself to look at her again, her eyes are fixed steadily on his, clear and unwavering in a way that terrifies him more than anger would have.
And suddenly he wants to kiss her with an intensity that nearly steals the breath from his body. He wants to kiss her just to make her understand this feeling that’s clawing at his chest. The desire arrives all at once and roots itself deep beneath his ribs, spreading warmth through every wretched corner of him. It feels less like impulse and more like gravity, inescapable and pulling and ever-present.
He sternly, wearily, reins in his heart. Because he knows better. Knows that it’s not the time when everything between them is still so fragile. Not when she has already given him more grace than he knows how to carry. Instead, he lets his thumb brush lightly along her cheekbone and she nestles into the touch.
“Everything’ll be okay, I promise,” she whispers. “We’ve got time now.”
We settles into him with remarkable clarity.
For so many years their relationship existed in fragments, interrupted constantly by distance and governments and fear. Time has always belonged to someone else. The Politburo. NASA. Duty.
“Yes,” he agrees. “We have time now.”
And for the first time, he actually believes it.
Reluctantly, she lets go of his hand, clears her throat and steps back. The room feels different the second her fingers slip away from his—larger, emptier, as though the walls have moved a few centimeters outward without permission.
“The paperwork is going to take a few more days to clear,” she points out. “For you and your family. There’s nothing I can do to speed that up, I’ve already—I’ve already made certain calls.”
He nods. He expected as much.
“I have to fly back to Houston tomorrow,” she adds, avoiding his eyes. Something in him recoils instinctively at the thought of being without her, even for a few days, even when it used to be months, years. “I’ve been here two days already. We weren’t sure exactly when you’d—when the timeline would—” She stops, edits herself. “I wanted to be here when you landed.”
“You waited for two days?” Ты меня ждала?You waited for me?
“I had things of my own to deal with,” she says, her tone daring him to make something of it.
“Once your family is cleared,” she goes on, “they’ll arrange transport. You’ll all come to Houston.” She says Houston with a slight weight on it, as though she is still getting used to the fact of it herself, that this is the destination now, that there is a destination at all. “I’ll be there.”
“Yes,” he breathes.
“So, I should go now, and you should rest.” She glances down as if calculating something only she can see. “Moscow to Texas is not exactly a short walk.”
“Бе́шеной соба́ке семь вёрст не крюк,” he thinks aloud. Some things only exist in the language they arrived in.
Margo quirks an eyebrow.
He steps a little closer again, unable not to. “It means…” He searches briefly for the phrasing. “For a mad dog, seven versts is not a long detour.”
A smile spreads slowly across her face, tired but genuine.
“I’ll take that as optimism.”
“Something like that.”
She squeezes his arm one final time in place of all the impossible things gathering silently between them.
“I’ll see you in Houston, Sergei,” she offers with her coat already hanging on her arm.
“See you in America, Margo.”
After he closes the door behind her, he sits down and pours the last of the brandy into his glass, and for the first time in a while, he thinks he might actually be able to sleep through the night.