[Setting: Abandoned Warehouse, Outskirts of Damascus – 26 December 2030, Pre-dawn]
[POV: Bilal Idris]
The floor was colder than it should have been. Not just concrete-cold, something deeper. The chill of endings. My ribs pressed against the slick surface, blood seeping through my coat, warm against the chill. Mine, most likely. It no longer mattered. Every breath dragged knives through my side, and even silence felt too loud.
The fight had already ended. That much was clear. My hands were scraped, knuckles bloodied, but it hadn’t been enough. I had fought, blindly, desperately, and I had lost. Not just this skirmish. The long one. The war beneath the war.
Pain bloomed across my chest. My shoulder throbbed from where it had slammed against the floor. Dust stuck to the sweat on my face, mingling with the sharp taste of iron in my mouth. Somewhere nearby, boots shifted in the dirt, slow and steady. No rush. No threat. Only presence.
Ali didn’t need to announce himself. The rhythm of his steps had always been his own: measured, grounded. The kind of man who moved with purpose, not anger. He stepped into the cone of lantern light, his shadow stretching across the stained floor. His coat was dusted with frost. His breath misted faintly in the air. And his eyes, steady, dark, found mine without hesitation.
He knelt beside me, easing down into the silence like someone who had waited too long for the noise to stop. He didn’t draw a weapon. He didn’t speak — only looked.
I tried to rise, but the pain pinned me. Ribs screamed. My body protested with a weight far heavier than bruises. I was empty. Hollow, not merely tired. He saw it. I didn’t need to tell him. He had watched the spark die long before tonight.
“You had a fire once,” he said, voice low. “Now you’re ash.”
The words landed harder than any blow. I’d taken punches to the jaw, elbows to the ribs. I'd bled beside this man once: for prayer, for justice, for some kind of dream we told ourselves would outlive us. But now I couldn’t even tell which parts of that had ever been real.
I wanted to answer. To explain. But what was left to say?
“I didn’t mean to—” My voice cracked. The sentence hung between us. Weightless. I was tired of trying to sound convincing, even to myself.
“Stop,” he said. One word. Quiet. Firm. The same word Aisha had whispered, once, before she stopped asking altogether.
Bilal, you’re tearing us apart. Come back before it’s too late.
When had it become too late? When I first gave Qasim a name? When I convinced myself silence was safer than dissent? Or was it when I stopped asking what Aisha saw in me at all?
“I watched you hold the line when others ran,” Ali murmured. His voice wasn’t angry now. He sounded worn. “And now look at you. Shaking. Like the cowards we used to drag out of the alleyways.”
I didn’t argue. What was there to say? Every excuse had already spoiled in my mouth, turned stale from overuse. I’d told myself the story so many times I could barely remember where the truth had been buried.
Outside, metal shifted. Faint footsteps in the gravel. The others weren’t far now. Qasim’s men, maybe. Or worse. But inside this space, the world narrowed to two men and the choices that had brought them here.
I closed my eyes, just for a second. And there she was.
Aisha. Her hands, red from cold water, sleeves rolled to the elbows. The night I left, she had stood in the kitchen, quiet but not small, her voice trembling only once.
“You’re burning yourself out,” she had said, green thread tight between her fingers. “What’s left for us when there’s nothing left of you?”
Now her voice returned, remembered, not imagined. Buried, but never silenced. Bilal, come home. Stop this. For them.
But what home was left?
I opened my eyes. Ali had shifted closer. His knee pressed lightly against my ribs, not with cruelty but enough to keep me from trying again. I wasn’t a threat anymore. Just a man bleeding into the dust of his own ruin.
“You chose this,” he said.
Three words. Flat. Final.
I should have argued. Should have told him about the children. About the names Qasim demanded. About how silence started to feel like mercy. But even I didn’t believe those excuses anymore. I’d repeated them so often they’d soured in my throat.
You chose this.
I tasted blood along my lip and let it be. There was nothing dramatic left to offer. “Then finish it,” I said, not because I wanted to die, but because I didn’t know what else to do with the weight of everything I’d become. His hand trembled, not from hesitation, but with restraint. Killing me would’ve been easier than holding back.
Somewhere beyond the walls, a scream rose, distant, half, swallowed by steel and stone. Then it vanished into silence. Neither of us reacted. We had long passed the point where death startled us.
We were the last two men in a war that no longer remembered why it began. Everything we fought for had been drowned in compromises and broken promises. Yet still, we stood, one above the other, both waiting for something that felt too late to ask for.
His jaw tightened. The blade in his hand hung low, not pressed forward, not drawn back. Waiting.
Outside, shouts pierced the night like distant thunder, each cry carrying the weight of approaching judgment. Ali didn’t move. Neither did I. We stood inside the hollowed ribs of what used to be faith, waiting for something older than mercy.
“We were supposed to die for something,” he said. “Not just survive everything.”
The blade dropped a little more. It wasn’t a threat anymore, just a memory in his grip. A thing we both carried.
“There’s still time, Bilal. But not much.”
The warehouse door creaked. Boots. At least four. Fast. Intentional. Not hesitation; approach. Ali’s gaze flicked toward the sound, then up at the camera overhead. He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to.
I didn’t follow his gaze. I didn’t need to. I already knew who was coming.