September, 17st.
It doesn't matter where you are, in which country you're living today, what you're doing for living. There are certain things that will stay unchangeable.
For Dimitri Aleksandrov, it's one day he hates the most. September, 17st.
Four years ago, he wouldn't have anything against that date, it would be a date like any other, a day like any other. However, three years ago, on September, 17st, his world crushed down. Ruined. Shattered to pieces so small he could never collect them again and build it up again. Three years ago, Dimitri Aleksandrov lost his fiancee and his daughter. It happened three years ago, but it felt like it happened yesterday, the pain was still barely tolerable, the images of that day so vivid in his mind every time he closes his eyes. Yet there's one thing worse than that – guilt. He was guilty for their deaths, for deaths of his two girls, maybe he wasn't the one who pulled the trigger, but he loaded the gun, metaphorical gun, of course, they're tortured and killed with a knife and they used their blood to leave a message for Dimitri on the wall. He still saw the message every night in his nightmares.
Today was that day. Third anniversary. Misha was standing in the middle The Millennium Bridge, looking at the river for last five hours. When he came here he had two red roses with him, but he threw them in the water and watched how the drift carried them downstream, he watched them until he couldn't see them anymore. Until they gone too far away, the same way his fiancee and his daughter went to a place where he couldn't follow, no, he didn't want to follow, he doubted any of them would like to see him harming himself, even if that would be the only way they could be together again if something like afterlife really exists, and Dimitri hoped it exist cause it would be too painful to think they're gone forever. He wished he has a bottle with him, a bottle of whiskey, maybe, thought he wouldn't refuse a bottle of gin either, to dull his pain with alcohol, but that wasn't an option either. Nikolai Ivashkov made him promise he won't drink again, and although he lost Nikolai somewhere in Belgium, he promised, and he'll fulfill it.
Sometimes, he wondered if buying a pub was a way to torture himself for what he's done. If it was, it would be a perfect one. Throwing alcohol addict in the middle of the pub and forbidding him to touch any bottles that contained alcohol. That's the reason he didn't open The Three Broomsticks, today, he knew that if there's any day he might lose his control and take the first bottle he finds, it would be today.
And he can't let that happen.
He promised.