The baseline was dying.

Irini rested the man's head in her lap and stroked his short dark curls as his breath rasped shallowly, bubbling as fluid filled his lungs. His pale skin was nearly the colour of bleached cotton; soon, it would turn bluish-white and livid. Dark eyes, wide with pain, were rapidly dimming.

"I am sorry." The words were gasped out in Russian, hoarse as the speaker struggled to breath. He tried to sit up, but Irini's strength, superior even to a fully fit baseline's, kept him down. He had little time left, and less to waste pretending he could rise.

"I know." She spoke in Armenian, the language of her mother, that he also understood. Once, she had hated this man with a fervent passion, but seeing him at the verge of death made it seem insignificant. This man had raised her and named her, for all that it was worth. He had made her the woman she was today.

"Forgive me?" It took death for Mikhail to beg. She knew that he feared the hell that surely waited for him.

"Yes. I will light candles to you."

It was what he had been waiting for. With a final rattling of breath, Mikhail died in a frigid room in Moscow, his head in the lap of the woman he called daughter.

When the dawn finally came, she was gone... And a candle burned in the nearest Orthodox Church.