#andre nikto

I wanna bite Graves (/slightly less aggressive)

I wanna bite Nikto (/gently /affectionately)

Birth of Anya, Death of Nikto

Series of short ficlets, interactions between the two throughout their life.

Flower

When the mercenary meets a tiny little toddler.

Bookmark

Old memories and treasures

Trust

The trust between the little princess and a mercenary.

Jewellery The simple yet beautiful gilded flowers for the important day of life.

Fate

The fate no one can escape.

WARNING | angst-slow burn; PAIRING | nikto x fem! reader; SUMMARY | Nikto’s past crawls back to torture him a second time

You and Nikto had never been anything more than two individuals assigned to the same work.

There had been no understanding between you—at least none that could be named. No glances held a second too long. No words exchanged that were not strictly necessary. No gestures that might betray something softer, something dangerously human.

Nothing.

And perhaps it was precisely that nothing which made everything else incomprehensible.

You had stepped aside.

The corridors carried the explanation with casual indifference: you were now with TF141. A transfer. An opportunity. A logical progression. Just someone who had let go for a different path. Such things happened all the time. No one lingered on them.

And yet Nikto did.

Not outwardly. Not in any way that could be disciplined or recorded. His reports remained immaculate. His execution precise. No error. No defiance. No visible fracture. The change was subtle. Gradual. Hidden beneath his usual silence.

It surfaced during a minor operation, one so inconsequential it did not merit a codename. The kind of task men forget before the debriefing ends.

Nikto arrived late to his assigned position. Just a few seconds. Nothing official. Nothing to mark in a report. But enough to make Horangi’s eyes lift.

They were advancing when the ventilation system altered its frequency. A low, persistent hum, nothing to warrant a pause.

Nikto slowed.

Horangi saw it—the near-imperceptible tightening of his shoulders, the fractional step backward, the slight lowering of his head. His breathing slowed. Counting.

One. Two.

The air in the ducts above them seemed to thicken, to descend. The corridor narrowed—not physically, but in some internal measure only he could perceive.

He was no longer there. His mind sank into darkness. Metal mere inches from his face. The constant breath of forced air filling the confined space, stripping it of silence, stripping it of thought.

That sound had meant only one thing.

Wait.

Count your breathing.

Do not move until she looks at you.

A month.

A month of this. Thirty days in which the world had shrunk to the width of a single breath, yet stretched long enough to contain you. Your breathing, your eyes, the discipline of your stillness, the faintest twitch of your fingers—all mapped into his muscle memory. Survival measured not in ammunition or strategy, but in the precision of shared restraint. On the invisible dialogue between you two.

There had been no confession. No acknowledgment. And yet, something had formed there—something neither operational nor entirely rational. A dependence not on touch, but on presence.

“Nikto?”

The voice reached him from a distance.

He did not answer at once. Not out of defiance. His body was listening—for a shift in the air, for a breath that no longer existed.

His gaze moved left.

Empty corridor.

But in the conduit, you were always there. At the exact distance required. Never too near. Never too far.

Horangi followed his line of sight and frowned. “There’s nobody there.”

Of course there wasn’t.

Nikto moved immediately, as if waking from something he refused to name. He corrected his position, adjusted his pace. Perfect again. Measured. Controlled.

But the truth remained—unspoken, intolerable: his body still obeyed a rhythm you had taught it.

Not consciously. Not sentimentally. But somewhere beneath discipline and ideology, beneath training and trauma, there lingered the memory of survival synchronized to your gaze.

Each step, each controlled breath, was calibrated to the echo of you in his mind. Every pause, every minute hesitation, was a conversation no one else could witness. He followed your memory.

And that—more than the delay, more than the silence—was what unsettled him.

Because nothing had ever existed between you.

Nothing.

And yet the absence had left a shape.

The metal held you compressed in an unnatural posture — knees bent, spine curved, muscles forced into a shape the body was never meant to sustain. Your breath rebounded softly against the walls. Each exhale returned to you altered, carrying proof that the other was still there. Still alive. Still breathing

The red emergency light filtered through the grates in intermittent pulses, slicing the darkness into narrow bands. For a fraction of a second you would see his eyes. Then they would vanish again, swallowed whole. You were beside him.

The conduit was too narrow to allow the illusion of distance. Even silence had weight here; it pressed against you the same way the metal did.

At first, you barely looked at each other. You kept your gaze forward, toward the black mouth that led to the next grate. He kept his eyes lowered, studying invisible details in the metal, as though the surface might offer him refuge from something unnamed.

There were few words between you. There was no need.

Coordinates.

Watch rotations.

Ration counts

Low voices. Neutral tones. You spoke little. He spoke less. Orders passed in short, functional whispers.The rest was silence.

The red light fractured his face into fleeting impressions: the angle of a cheekbone, the severe line of his jaw, shadows hinting at scars without revealing them entirely. He would free his face from the mask only when he was certain you could not see — just long enough to draw a fuller breath.

In those moments, you did not look at him. You listened. There was a difference and he knew it.

One night — or what your bodies agreed to call night — the cold grew more insistent. The metal beneath you held dampness. You sat with your back against the side of the duct, knees drawn to your chest, arms wrapped around yourself to guard what little warmth remained

The draft descended along your side, steady and merciless.

Your fingers trembled. Not enough to betray you. Enough for him to notice.

Nikto saw it within seconds. He did not move at once. His gaze fell to your hands, then lifted to your face. You stared ahead stubbornly, as if by refusing to acknowledge the cold you might deny it power.

The duct creaked softly above you. The air slipped down colder.

He knew that current. He had already mapped it in his mind. He knew exactly where it struck. You.

Time passed — unmeasured, stretched thin. Your breathing shortened despite your effort to control it.

His jaw tightened.

The space permitted no innocence. To move was to come closer. And to come closer was to disturb something you had both kept untouched in silence — not out of discipline, but out of a quiet fear of how easily it might cease to be only survival.

Yet to remain still meant watching you endure it alone.

He lingered longer than necessary. Time stretched, elastic, tremulous — each second a weight pressing on the small space between you.

Then he moved.

One knee slid slowly between your folded legs, deliberate, careful — leaving you the slimmest margin to refuse, if such a thing were possible.

You didn’t.

The other knee followed, anchoring beside your hip. His hands pressed lightly against the metal at your shoulders, forming a frame around you without touching.

And then his body lowered. Slowly. As though even gravity might wound you both

He hovered above you, suspended by forearms and knees, leaving the narrowest space between your torsos — enough for breath, not enough for indifference

His back met the draft. The cold struck him, slid beneath his collar, traced his spine. He didn’t flinch.

Your breath fell into his rhythm.

Each micro-adjustment he made was measured, restrained — a fraction closer, a fraction back — as if balance depended on restraint rather than proximity.

It was your hands that troubled him most.

Folded tight against your chest, fingers stiff, pale in the dim, pulsing red. You tried to hide the tremor, a whisper of fear, a secret betrayed by nerves.

He saw it.

The trembling was faint, contained — almost dignified. Yet he felt it, as if the very air carried it straight into him.

He lowered himself slightly, enough to speak without echo.

“Show us.”

The words were low, rough-edged, but not unkind. You hesitated. Then slowly, you released your hands.

He remained still. His hand rose toward his mask — and paused. He was afraid. Not of being seen.

Of being known.

His fingers caught the fabric’s edge. He lifted it only slightly. His lips emerged in the fractured red light. They bore the story of survival. Upper lip broken on one side, missing flesh replaced by unevenly stitched skin. A thick scar cut across the natural line. The lower lip bore an old, stubborn wound.

No symmetry. Only history.

He did not meet your gaze immediately. As if he could endure your cold more easily than your gaze.

He lifted your hands toward his face.

The first breath he exhaled over your fingers was tentative. Warm. Fragile. The scar shifted subtly as he breathed, tugging imperceptibly at the healed skin.

You felt the warmth seep through your knuckles — slow, almost tender. He breathed again. Closer. Your tremor softened. You lifted your eyes. He felt it before he saw it.

With visible effort, he raised his gaze. Only briefly. As if bracing for something unspoken.

He searched your eyes — perhaps for disgust, perhaps for pity. He found neither.

Only quiet, unwavering attention. And that unsettled him more than rejection ever could. His breath faltered. The scar tightened with his inhale.

You were close enough to trace the interruption in softness, to see the tension when he exhaled. The wound had not erased him. It had only rewritten him.

He lowered the mask again with abrupt precision, as if lingering had been a mistake.

But he did not move away.

Your hands remained in his. He held them a moment longer than reason demanded.

“It will pass,” he murmured — almost to himself.

He did not specify whether he meant the cold.

Slowly, he guided your hands back to your chest. He stayed above you, intercepting the draft, sharing breath in the narrow dark.

And in that tiny, constrained space — too close for comfort, too intimate for words — something fragile began to exist between you.

Not declared. Not named.

Not even understood. But present

Like warmth seeping slowly into fingers that had almost forsaken the memory of touch.

The corridor was still heavy with gunpowder when Horangi realized something wasn’t right.

It wasn’t the dissociation. Nikto had always carried that — the brief absences, the way his mind sometimes stepped sideways. Everyone knew about the fractures. The trauma. The voices that lingered behind his silences.

No.

This was something quieter. This was belief.

The order came a second too late. Nothing catastrophic. But he failed to cover an angle that, for months, had been yours. An angle his body no longer questioned.

A reflex shaped by habit. A trust shaped by you.

“Check the flank!” Horangi’s voice cut through the corridor — sharp, loud enough to tear him from the stage that existed only in his head.

Nikto reacted on instinct. Too late to be flawless. Fast enough not to be fatal. The bullet grazed the wall. Plaster burst into the air like pale dusted snow. The threat was neutralized seconds later. Clean. Efficient. No damage done.

But something had shifted.

They advanced toward the next room. Nikto covered the right side. Or he should have.

Instead, his gaze drifted elsewhere — to a corner that required no coverage — lingering there, steady, expectant. As if waiting for someone to step into place.

That was when Horangi caught him by the tactical vest and pulled him back half a step. “What are you doing?” he asked under his breath.

Nikto looked at him. His stare was steady. Empty. As though the question had traveled a long way to reach him.

“Operational,” he replied.

The word landed flat. Devoid of life. Horangi didn’t let go. “No. You weren’t. You left the flank exposed.”

Nikto did not bristle. Did not argue. Did not stiffen. He inhaled slowly.

“The flank was covered.” There was no defensiveness in it. Only certainty.

Horangi studied him. Followed the line of his weapon, the angle of his stance, the direction of his gaze.

There was no one there.

“There was no one,” Horangi said, quieter now. “No one covering it.” The words lingered between them.

Nikto didn’t blink. But his jaw tightened beneath the mask. The missing portion of his upper lip pulled faintly against the scar as he clenched his teeth.

“It was covered,” he repeated. And this time, it wasn’t defense.

It was memory.

Horangi released him slowly. “You’re still working in pairs,” he said at last. Behind them, the team moved forward. Calm comms. Measured steps. The operation unfolding like it always did.

But here, between them, something fragile had surfaced.

“She’s not here.” The words were firm. Not cruel.

A muscle flickered in Nikto’s cheek.

His eyes shifted — not to Horangi. To the exact place you had once occupied.

The distance where you stood without needing instruction. The angle you covered before anyone asked. The silent understanding that had required no confirmation.

Automatically. As if the space still held your outline.

“You need to readjust,” Horangi continued. “Or someone’s going to get hurt.” He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t have to.

The operation continued. Nikto’s posture was precise. Weapon steady. Movements correct. Everything where it belonged.

And yet the rhythm was wrong.

Like an internal metronome calibrated to a presence that no longer existed. Like a heartbeat trying to synchronize with another that had stopped.

For the rest of the operation, he covered angles that didn’t matter. Left vulnerable the ones that had never needed to be named — because you had always taken them. Without command. Without acknowledgment.

His gaze kept searching for a point that no longer existed. A trained soldier navigating chaos had lost the single coordinate that made the chaos bearable.

Horangi understood then — this wasn’t deterioration. It was persistence. Nikto wasn’t malfunctioning.

He was still moving through a world calibrated to you. Still expecting your breath in the comms. Your shadow in his peripheral vision. Your presence in the blind spot he no longer checked.

And in a corridor wide enough for a full unit, he was still fighting as if the walls were inches from his face. As if survival still depended on the quiet certainty that you were there.

As if, somewhere in him, you still were.

Nikto remembered that day as if it had been engraved into his mind — minute by minute.

The base was too bright when you two returned. After a month in the duct, the artificial light of the corridors felt violent. White. Cruel.

You stopped at the entrance to the dormitory, fingers still dusted with fine powder that refused to disappear. You walked ahead of him, new uniform, shoulders straight. Already reabsorbed into the system.

Nikto wasn’t.

The corridor was wide. Clean. Safe.

Too much space.

A month in that conduit — bodies pressed together to survive the cold, the silence, the distant sounds that promised death. A month of breathing each other in, of feeling the other’s heartbeat as the only proof of life.

Now there were three steps between you two.

Three steps that felt like an abyss. Three steps that had never existed down there.

In the tunnel there had been no room for desire. Only for the warmth required not to die. Only for the other’s pulse as anchor.

Here there was space and space made everything real.

You stopped. Turned slowly.

He wished you didn’t.

Because when you looked at him like that — with the same eyes that in the dark had searched for his— it all came back. The way you would press closer when the cold seemed to hollow you out from the inside. The way your breathing had fallen into his rhythm without either of them speaking.

“It’s over,” you said softly. Not as relief. As fact.

Nikto went still.

The scar pulled where his upper lip was missing as he clenched his jaw. He couldn’t hold your gaze for more than a second. His blue eyes studied yours as if you were a mirage— something that might vanish if stared at too long.

You stepped toward him. “Nikto.”

He stepped back. Barely perceptible. But he did.

The corridor was silent. Too silent. If someone saw you two standing this close, unmoving, it wouldn’t be interpreted as weakness.It would be worse.

He lifted a hand but did not touch you immediately.

His fingers hovered near your cheek , suspended in the air as if asking permission without words. In the duct he had never asked. He had pulled you against him when the tremors grew violent. Covered your mouth when silence was required. Held you still when gunfire above shook dust into your lungs.

Now his hand stopped halfway.

It trembled— barely.

You saw that. And even if your pride tried to brush off his hesitation, the gesture broke you — even if only a little.

“Are you afraid?” You asked.

Yes. But not of you.

Of how deeply his soul was drawn to yours.

“If I touch you here,” he murmured, voice lower than usual, “it won’t be about survival.”

“Then what will it be about?”

The scar tightened when he inhaled. “I’m trying not to make a mistake.”

“Am I a mistake?”

That struck him. Finally, his fingers settled against your neck. Not to restrain. To verify. The way he had in the dark searching for the pulse.

He found it.

Fast.

His thumb lingered a second too long.

“In the duct…” his voice roughened, almost unfamiliar to himself, “it was necessary.”

You tilted your head. “Necessary?”

A slight nod. His gaze still fixed on the point where your pulse beat beneath his thumb. “The heat. The contact. It was… functional.”

The word hung between you two like something wrong.

“And now?”

“Now it isn’t necessary,” he said quietly.

You held your breath.

In the duct, Nikto had never hesitated. He had threaded his fingers through your hair when you trembled. He had gripped your wrist just to feel your pulse beneath his thumb. He had slept with his face pressed to the curve of your neck to make sure you were breathing — or at least, that was the excuse he gave himself.

Now he looked at you as though you were a blind spot. “Down there, it was different,” he said. His voice did not waver. That was the worst part.

“There were no feelings. Not like you think.” His jaw tightened under the mask, the scar pulling pale against his skin. “It was survival. That’s all.”

He forced himself to meet your eyes, as if eye contact could make the lie cleaner.

“The body reacts to cold. To fear. It seeks heat. Contact. A heartbeat close enough to follow.” He swallowed, but the rest came out steady. “That’s what it was. Two bodies refusing to die in the same dark.”

Each word landed with deliberate precision. Measured. Controlled.

“It wasn’t…” He stopped, corrected himself. “It wasn’t real.”

The corridor light exposed everything the conduit had hidden. The space between you felt surgical now, sterile and unforgiving.

“In the conduit,” he continued, quieter but no less firm, “I held you because you were freezing. I touched you because you were shaking. I slept against you because we needed to conserve heat.”

A beat.

“Don’t mistake instinct for sentiment.”

His hand, traitorous, had not moved from your neck. He noticed. Removed it slowly as though detaching from a wound.

“What happened down there belongs to the dark,” he said. “It doesn’t survive up here.”

And yet his pulse had betrayed him the moment he found yours.

until you gave him a son.

bit chubby, full head of jet black hair, your son lost the baby fat and eventually grew into the lanky, skinny kid you and nikto know him to be. but he has your eyes, bright and round, full of good energy. reminds him a bit like when he was a kid.

Warnings: NSFW/18+, DD:DNE, stalking/mentions of stalking, dark thoughts, murder, killing, military inaccuracies, animal abuse.

3.7k words | series masterlist

The second he stepped foot back on base, Nikto imperceptibly straightened, every inch of him prepared for duty. His fractured mind was loud today, all of him rearing to be on duty, to eliminate whoever was in his way.

Давайте выполним свой долг. Чем скорее мы закончим, тем скорее мы сможем вернуться к Y/N. (Let's do our duty. The sooner we finish, the sooner we can get back to Y/n)