Aleksandr Voinov

“Tiger and mountain lion. Fuck you. Fuck you for getting me out. You should have shot me. But you didn't have the guts to do it. Too weak. You just didn't care enough. You waited two years, and then you fucking stopped caring and tore out my fucking heart. Come on. Promises, Dan. Keep them. Cut it out. If you're a man.”

“Vadim felt Dan’s breath against his chest, shifted his legs to allow him to lie close, and pushed a fold of the blanket back to make sure Dan was fully covered. Dan. Always him. Always, and again and again.”

“More weapons hidden on his body than hallelujah-singing angels, dangling from a Christmas tree.”

“When you're like this, Vadim, I want to own you, and taste you, burrow all the way into your body until I feel so much it fucking hurts and your scent clings to every pore. I want to hurt you, tear you apart, fuck you until you plead and scream and bleed, and all that, because I can never get enough of you.”

“It's really rather simple.' Dan took the refilled glass, 'I love Vadim.”

“Once upon a time, Dan had hated that body, smashed it, kicked it, beat it into a bleeding pulp, but now he wanted to crawl into it, or kill it and maim it, to possess it, eat, tear, destroy it and never leave it again.”

“Once you know what you want, you can make the rest happen”

“You'd be quite sane and well-adjusted if your family had happened to somebody else”

“Holy shit, you’re the most accomplished stalker I’ve ever met.”“It’s not stalking if you like it.”

“Your father's impressive.''He's a scary motherfucker, but we get along well.”

“You seem to be the one for firsts,” his breath caught, “and lasts and always.”

“Wife, to him, was someone who stood for stability, forcoming home, for dealing with all the shit he wasn’t able to deal with. For providing a real life and not this insanity.”

“I don’t want to talk.” Dan’s neck muscles tensed resisting Vadim’s hand.He didn’t know the words and he didn’t want to search for them. “I just want to feel.” But no, that wasn’t it. “I want to feel human.”

“You broke me up there in the mountains. You cracked something in my head, I don’t know. I have never been obsessed with another person before or after. You just drilled your way in and since then, I’ve been yours. You got to a place that I didn’t know existed ... and all that has changed me, taken the stuff away I thought was true about me. In some weird, weird way, started something that turned me into more than a goodlooking bastard.”

“There’s no glory in this whole shit. No war is ever glorious. Heroes are usually dead. Besides, they rarely turn into heroes because they are super-humans, but because of circumstances.Heroes rarely think. Heroes just act. So, all this is, is a stage for glory, small, personal and up to each one of us.”

“Ask me again when you're inside me, and I might even whisper the truth.”

“You’re as close to a fucking home as I get.”

“If I touched you, that’d be it.” Dan shook his head, “Damn, how the fuck am I going to make you understand?” Pleading, almost. “You are everything, don’t you get it? You are the Afghan mountains, the damned red dust, the endless sky. You were my home, and more often than not, also my reason. You are unlike all the others, unlike anyone I shag, because when I touch you, it’s not just a touch, it’s eleven years of heaven and hell.”

“Unplayed sound is like unspoken words.”

“Not...good." Stefano pressed his lips together."Okay. Don't speak I'll touch you, okay?""You do," Stefano answered. You do touch me.”

“You made me human. I stand by that. You made me into somebody I would have wanted to become, if I'd ever thought about what I wanted to be that wasn't about a record or power or a rank or some...delusion I was chasing. If all that was gone and stripped away, the man I am, I am because of what you did, what you made me feel all those years.”

“You really do love him, don’t you?” she said quietly.Vadim blinked, then looked to the side, without seeing colours and patterns, but it helped him find words. Speaking about love without cliché, without borrowing somebody else’s well-worn words that were too comfortable. "Dan changed me in ways that stripped away the man I wanted to be, and the man I was made to be, and the man I was expected to be. He skinned me alive, and left only…..somebody who….” He breathed but barely. “…can live and die now, like a human being, not an automation, not somebody else’s creation. Dan took my fear of death. I can’t die now. I know I’m immortal.”“Immortal?” she said quietly, sitting still. “Your soul? Your being?”“I don’t believe there’s anything like a soul. But I believe most people are asleep. They aren’t even aware what they are, or that they are alive. And we are all scared to die, so when it happens we scream for our mothers and clutch our guts because we’re scared. I’m not. I’m not afraid of death. The only thing I’m afraid of is losing Dan.” But if that happens, he thought, Dan might just keep the promise and kill him on the way out.”

“Stroke the fire, prod the tiger. Hate me. Hate me like you did that night. Let’s start at the beginning, and end it right here, annihilate everything.Annihilate me.”

“You're my home. I will find you.”

“You….” just you, always you. My russian Cu**, my enemy, my comrade, my prisoner, my gaoler and my life. Words unthinking. “Love……you.”

“Blood, pain and an all-surpassing lust for one man settled so deeply into his bones, the need had become part of him. Bottomless, like the touch he craved. Vadim.”

“He’d do anything, absolutely everything for this man, suck him, kill, kill himself, run away, be something else, anything else, everything just blurred, darkness, a place inside that only held him and Dan. Nobody else, nothing else, no time, no place, no affiliations, no past, no future.”

“I love you more than I can say, than I can even think and what you give me takes my breath away, but breathing is overrated when I can kiss you.”

“Vadim swallowed, felt his throat too tight to move, then, still staring at the bottle, smelling the desert and Dan, and himself, his hand reached to his side, opened the holster of the pistol. Took out the mag, took the bullet from the chamber, clicked the mag in place again, rolled the bullet between his fingers.He looked at Dan, sideways, saw the man stare at him, all eyes, dark eyes, and the way the pale desert moon made his face a place of shadows.He reached for Dan’s hand, opened the fingers and placed the bullet into the palm. “This is the bullet you’ll use to kill me if I walk away again.” Because if I walk away again, I’ll be in so much pain I’m better off dead anyway.”

“Some men want to win a gold medal, some want a family, some want to be rich, some want to be free, some want to kill other men, and some men want to do the right thing. Me, I only want you.”

“Sometimes history is just an excuse for incompetence at getting along with each other.”

“Let me live. Keep me alive. Both sentences so close in English, but very different meaning.”

“Lion has his claws already sharpened and is ready to go.”

“This way, at least, we get to meet and kill interesting people.”

“Did you order it to kidnap me? Or was that its own idea?” Sergei stepped closer, fighting the urge to punch the man and then check that he was all right. None of those responses made any sense.”

“The general will be joining us, shortly.”[..] A Revision officer dropping the brother in front of a rank was the most threatening thing Sergei had heard in a long time. He stared at Nikishin, tried to read his features, but that was entirely impossible. Never before had Nikishin appeared more the arm of the law.”

“Sergei remembered well how unsettled Nikishin had been by the arm and leg that day. Then, it had made him sneer inwardly, but it was difficult to maintain that derision since he began to like the man. Trust him even. And that could be dangerous enough, laws being what they were, Nikishin being who he was. Never mind that any normal individual would be revolted by Sergei’s current physical state, and justifiably so. Cyborg patchwork over mangled flesh. The pinnacle of attractive. He’d always been different, a freak. Now it was just visible. Impossible to hide.”

“I like men with weaknesses, his father had said. I can buy them. Men without weaknesses I have to kill.”

“What sins I commit, I commit them in the open.”

“He told it as he saw it. His way of lying was to remain silent.”

“If you'd lie with scorpions, you need a taste for poison.”

“In the end, this armor is my skin. If it is damaged, I am damaged.”

“Train as if you had to bring the horse down, not the rider. Fight bulls, not men, and men won’t best you.”

“Me, i'm going to write ass-kicking trans* characters. I think I might end up writing not a single thing that is "pure" by some people's standards. Just because, and because I can.”

“Falling in love with you isn’t easy. Most people waver between loving you and killing you, and you’re usually lucky they come out at the loving you side.”

“The very thing that makes him a great killer makes him very much unsuitable for anything else.”

“All paradises have gates,” Falchi said. “You’d wonder why God made Paradise with an exit if he didn’t anticipate having to use it eventually.”

“What about the scar … in my face.” He managed to force out, couldn’tfind the words, no better nor easier way to ask and even plead. Do you want me.Do you honestly still want me?Please, want me.”

“To love you is to love water that either parches the throat by its absence or drowns me with its anger!”

“The leopard is a cruel lover. His tenderness breaks the gazelle’s heart.”