RESEARCH ( barry berkman.. ) ✔

o34. it looked like the end..

If Barry got a penny for each time he got tied up to a chair by Chechens, he was pretty sure he'd make quite the collection. The knots were always sturdy and the ropes were always leaving scratches, but somehow, this time felt a lot less like the others and a lot more like the war. Perhaps it was the blur in which he woke up after being knocked out, or Batir's voice echoing his head, the cemented fury or the bubbling guilt, flashing images of another death that was on him. He had wished for Hank to pay for what he did, but secretly he had also hoped Batir to just send him back home, not execute him in front of them; there was very little difference between the two options.

A good soldier could accept and live with a necessary sacrifice while a good person would let it torment them that they could not prevent it. Barry was neither of those things. He was just furious. He just remembered Addie.

They hit her hard in order to knock her out. One man covered her head with a bag before picking her up. Going into retrospective, Barry recalled the drop of blood trailing down and falling off her chin onto that man's shirt, staining his side, just above his waistline. Barry's eyes now opened into an armed glare. She didn't even want to be there, Adelaide was only present because he insisted to solve the bomb issue before anyone else got hurt, ignoring what she had noticed wrong way before him. He underestimated their enemy in the process and everyone who mattered to him did get hurt.

"Awake?" Batir bent down to glance at Barry's face. He was still smoking from that cigar, almost over and definitely feeling himself. Getting numb was required, because at the first light of the sunrise, he had descended Hank into the ground himself. They held a quiet funeral, with every Chechen who has been brought to this state, meaning that if Barry woke up any minute earlier, he would have been in an empty place, inviting him to escape.

Instead, he was now surrounded, more or less, by Batir's presence, in his dirt covered sneakers, and his trusty bodyguards, two in number, the same he had seen back at the diner, holding their M92's with special pride, over their crotches where their hands folded.

"Good," Batir laughed. It was a fake laugh, a hard try to seem like the events did not startle or trouble him and that the price he had to pay in family blood was hardly disturbing. In fact, he peed himself a little and vomited his guts out, while their brand new prisoners were out of it. Wearing now a cascade of perfume, he grinned at Barry's lifting gaze, "Now we can finally talk."

The fact that he wasn't dead yet seemed like a stretch to the scenario. Some part of this "game change" did not yet fit into the gaps of the puzzle, but there were far greater priorities of this imperfect soldier and perfect killer than sitting around, as he was forced to, and chatting out the confusion.

"If you touched a-"

Batir sighed and the bodyguard to his left threw in front of Barry, on the ground, a piece of something, fished from his pants' pocket, that immediately cut off his speech. With shock in his veins, he stared down at a tied lock of hair he recognized without fail.

"I knew you'd be saying something like that," Batir boasted himself up, puffing his chest, "so I went ahead and prepared to show you just how serious I am."

The chair to which Barry was tied squeaked at the force of his sudden fight against the restraints, pushing and pulling and moving even an inch closer to the Chechens. "You're a fucking dead man!"

"From you," Batir sighed, "I always seem to hear all bark and no bite. You've gone too soft."

"Oh, yeah? Tell that to Goran," Barry snapped, no emotion whatsoever on his face. His breathing was erratic, but he stopped moving. "That's right, he's fucking dead. So don't fuck with me."