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As Mika sat on the stoop of the Gonzalez front porch, he watched cars with mismatching sections of paint and one to two cars without rims pass the house and members of the Serpents acknowledged Mika with a nod with a somewhat content expression on his face. He was out there for the past thirty minutes, just ten more than when Natalia Belmonte left.

And for those thirty minutes, he had been staring almost aimlessly, deep in thought, deep in a stasis that seemed to be only enhanced every time he found himself drifting into his own mind.

Mika wasn’t the type to let himself think about the past too much. It wasn’t as though he was immune to it, but regrets rarely played a factor into who Mika was. One might say he was like Dominic Torretto in that way as he truly embodied the philosophy of living life from point A to point b. One might say this was due to the nature of the Southside life and the life that Mikhail Zima had known as long as he could remember.

Mika stood up and took a few steps away from the stoop he spent the past half hour sitting on. As he got up, his ass felt numb from being mostly still for so long, so he had to walk it off. He pushed the gate that surrounded the front yard and it made a creaking noise when he pushed it open. He walked towards the left and heard it naturally crash against the latch. The echo it made grew fainter the further Mika was from the house.

He went only to the corner and just stood there, hands in his pockets. In one pocket, he felt his keys and moved them around to pass the immediate time; in the other was his phone. After a few moments, he pulled his phone out. Seeing the time only reminded him of where everyone probably was right now.

And that made Honey Badger slightly ticked off.

Why care about the past like that? Mika thought it was stupid. Mika thought that being so caught up in whatever secrets may or may come out was idiotic. Knowing what people hid wouldn’t bring back the dead and it wouldn’t remove the guilt some felt for that damn shooting. And it sure as hell wouldn’t bring back Kai’s brother nor anyone else who suffered.

Yeah, Mika was now in a bad mood.

[color=635687]“Goddamn it all!”[/color] He cursed and made his way back to the house, though he wouldn't go back inside. 

As he hopped into his Tacoma and it roared down the street, Mika blared whatever was on his preferred rock station. He blared it so loud that the custom bass-heavy speakers vibrated in and out of his truck. He took chances with the lights; speeding past yellow to red lights, green lights to yellow, and so on and so forth. In doing so, he not only made it out of Fear Grota territory without anyone actually knowing that Big Rey Gonzalez’s adopted son had done what nobody dared to with Heisenberg, Mika took the chance because it was the quickest way to get to the Northside.

Honey Badger really didn’t care.

In the back of his mind he was counting his blessings. The fact remained that it could have gone terribly horrid for him. Even if he had his 9mm in his glove box and a rifle in his trunk (covered up by a blanket of course), it was still a risk some might call not worth the reward.

Mika drove down Main Street at a controlled speed, no longer needing the urgent speeding one might find on abandoned backroads by street racers. Or from one adrenaline junkie who favored risk over controlled substances. As he did so, the late night that blessed Edenridge’s marketplace with minimal citizen presence made it apparent that the stench that fear and paranoia brought from that cursed shooting and its anniversary.

Perhaps that wasn’t the majority opinion, but it was Mika’s interpretation of it, stemming from his own personal feelings about the tragedy.

God, how he hated weakness in the people he shared this town with.

That selective disgust carried Mika into a blind drive down main and only would come to a stop when he pulled in front of the old stomping ground. He had parked across the street and mulled over just exactly what he should do. There was an undoubtedly large presence of people he knew, including Natalia. Just about everyone he knew was in there and he contemplated going inside. He contemplated indulging in this wild goose chase of trying to find out the culprit behind the letters.

But the longer he sat there in his truck, looking at the parking lot and centering his gaze at the main gymnasium, the less it became about wanting to know what happened and more about he became justified in his opinion that everyone was still trapped in the past. Nothing good came from being involved in the events of the past. 

Cementing his resolve, though he wouldn’t drive off immediately, Mika would look at his phone. Scrolling through a few apps, Mika contracted his resolve and found himself on a page. And he saw a geotagged location. 

How surreal it was. He rarely went on Instagram and thus his activity was practically nonexistent post-high school, so of course, those he followed and those who followed him remained the same. It allowed him to occasionally check up on people that might not be on good terms with.And because of this, there was one person he wronged that, no matter how hard he tried, Mika just couldn’t forget about her.

[color=635687]“Boston Logan International Airport,”[/color] he muttered.

That wasn’t very far from where he was. 

As he spent a couple of minutes contemplating, something that Mika has been doing frequently in recent weeks, his mind was made up when he started up his truck. 

How contradictory was it of him to shame those who clung to the ghost of Charlie Decker, yet Mika is doing the very same with someone he claimed not to care about. He always wondered what could’ve happened if he didn’t choose the coward’s way out? He could even hear their voice when he decided to not return their feelings.

Or rather, when he lied to their face.

He still didn’t know if he would return them, but in the year that’s passed, Mika’s changed...somewhat. He still has those demons that like to come to the surface sometimes. It’s a constant struggle, but he’s better than he was a year ago. 

As he continued to drive down the I-90, those thoughts kept persisting, so Mika blocked them out to the sounds of Machine Head. This is the End proved to be an almost biblical soundtrack for what was undoubtedly a mistake in the making, but he didn’t care. Mika knew what he was doing even if everything in him that from a year ago was telling him to turn back.

He took the nearest exit that led him down a road. He took a left and circled around the terminals. There were four and, honestly, Mika was having an internal struggle about whether or not he should do this. It wasn’t so late that he couldn’t go back home and forget any of this happened. It wasn't as though anyone of importance saw him. And by circling around, which at this point he’s done so twice, he was wasting gas. If anything was going to make his decision, it would have to be something so glaringly obvious that he couldn’t just ignore it.

Glancing at his phone and coming to a stop across the way from Terminal C, Mika just waited. 

[color=635687][i]I shouldn’t be here,[/i][/color] he thought as he didn’t budge. 

In an evening where Mikhail had spent the majority of it mulling over how everyone he knew was still stuck in the past, here he was waiting for a sign from his. He needed to know that he was doing the right thing.

Soon, he learned God had impeccable timing. 

Coming through the entrance, hands interlocked, there he saw Caitlin Cleary. She was as sexy as he remembered. But she wasn’t alone. As he gripped the leather covering of his steering wheel, Mika gritted his jealous teeth when he saw who she was with. IT didn’t matter to him that she was happy. 

[color=635687]“Niles Sinclair…”[/color] Mika cursed his name into oblivion, curses that his father taught him. He cursed it with green envy as they kissed, the grip on his steering wheel getting so tight that parts of the covering ripped.

Mika would follow them wherever they went. Tonight would not be a celebration for anyone.[/indent][/indent][/color]