Work Text:
Roman Ivanov’s father was a drunk. Not a mean drunk. Not a violent drunk. He was a funny, happy drunk who became more affectionate the deeper he got into a bottle. He sang badly. He kissed people on both cheeks. He cried at films nobody else considered emotional and told strangers they had beautiful souls if they stood still long enough to be accused of one.
He was still a drunk.
This distinction mattered to Roman, though not always in ways that helped him. Other children had fathers who frightened them. Roman’s father did not frighten him. Not usually. He disappointed him. He embarrassed him. He failed to arrive when he said he would arrive and arrived very loudly when everyone had stopped expecting him. He made promises with absolute sincerity and kept them with considerably less consistency. He loved his son earnestly, extravagantly, and unreliably, which was one of the more damaging combinations available to a child because it made disappointment feel like bad timing instead of evidence.
Roman loved him anyway.
This was the first problem.
The second problem was genetics.
The bottle itself was not Roman’s inheritance. Not specifically. Roman’s vice of choice would come later, and it would not be his father’s. Cocaine first, because cocaine liked young men who believed they were fast enough to outrun consequences. Pills whenever pills were available, which was often enough to become a habit in its own right. Heroin later, after the glamour had started peeling off and Roman had mistaken ruin for relief. If it could be smoked, swallowed, snorted, or shot into a vein, Roman would eventually find a way to make a persuasive argument for trying it.
But that was later.
As a child in post-Soviet Moscow, Roman had the additional misfortune of being afflicted with undiagnosed and therefore untreated ADHD, which meant he arrived in the world with appetite, speed, terrible brakes, and a brain that regularly mistook impulse for opportunity. This was not an ideal combination. Give that brain charm, reliable love delivered by an unreliable man, and a city teaching every child that adults were mostly improvising, and what you got was not a villain. You got Roman.
This was not an excuse.
It was a weather report.
Roman was not cruel. He was not cold. He was not built like Grigori or Andrei Rozanov, who could make a room smaller just by entering it. Roman made rooms bigger. Louder. Less careful. He could convince people that a terrible idea was probably fine if they did it quickly enough and laughed while doing it. He had an average face made interesting by motion, a grin with no respect for risk assessment, and a body that seemed permanently two seconds ahead of wherever the rest of him had agreed to be.
Teachers hated him and then forgave him.
This happened often enough that Roman began to think forgiveness was part of the natural order.
At school, he was not the best student. This is a polite way of saying his notebooks looked like crime scenes and his homework existed more often as theory than object. He could learn quickly when interested and appeared to suffer physical pain when bored, which was unfortunate because school believed boredom was character-building. He tapped pencils. He drew guitars in the margins. He interrupted because the thought had arrived now and waiting felt like trying to hold smoke in his teeth. He made people laugh. He made teachers sigh. He made friends easily and kept them badly, not because he did not care, but because caring and remembering to show up were, for Roman, two separate administrative departments with poor internal communication.
Music helped.
Not fixed. Helped.
The guitar gave his hands something to do that made sense. Rhythm gave the noise in his head a place to stand. Songs had beginnings, middles, endings, and a structure that did not mind being repeated until his body learned what his brain kept dropping. He was not disciplined in the noble sense. He was disciplined only when the discipline gave him something back immediately. Guitar did. School did not. This made his priorities very clear and his future very avoidable to anyone paying attention.
His father bought him his first guitar.
That was the problem with Roman’s father. Even at his worst, he was sometimes the person who handed Roman the thing that saved him for a while.
The guitar was not new. It was not expensive. It had been bought from a man his father knew from somewhere, which could have meant work, a bar, a cousin, or a story Roman never fully trusted. His father brought it home late, drunk enough to be delighted with himself, and placed it in Roman’s hands like he had delivered treasure from a war.
“For you,” he said. “My son will be famous.”
Roman was nine.
The guitar was slightly too large for him, badly strung, and the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
His mother stood in the doorway with the look she wore when she was deciding whether anger was worth the energy. It often was not. Roman’s father kissed the top of Roman’s head, missed slightly, kissed his ear instead, laughed, and announced that artists required instruments, then knocked over a chair on his way to the kitchen.
Roman slept with the guitar beside his bed.
In the morning, his father did not remember half of what he had said, but the guitar was still there.
That was another lesson Roman learned badly. A promise could be unreliable and still leave behind something real. A mess could contain a gift. A person could fail you and still have given you the thing that changed your life.
He learned quickly because he wanted to. He learned chords from older boys, from borrowed books, from watching hands more carefully than he watched faces. Lead guitar suited him. It gave him somewhere to put speed, flash, impulse, and bad judgment without asking any of them to behave. He liked the parts that cut through. The parts that made people look up. The parts that felt like jumping before anyone had checked where the ground was.
This was power, and Roman liked power best when it felt like fun.
Ilya Rozanov noticed him in Year 8.
Everyone noticed Ilya, so being noticed back felt like the social equivalent of being struck by attractive lightning. Ilya was beautiful in a way that made teachers soften their voices and boys sharpen theirs. He sang like the world owed him a better life and he intended to collect. Roman liked him immediately because Ilya made ordinary things feel staged in the best possible way. Standing in a hallway. Smoking where he was not supposed to. Looking bored. Looking amused. Looking like the protagonist of a story Roman wanted to be in before anyone explained the plot.
Anton came with him.
Anton was less fun on principle. Long blond hair, blue eyes, pretty in a severe way he seemed determined to make everyone regret noticing. Anton already played like he had opinions about tuning that could survive a court challenge. He looked at Roman and did not smile.
“You play?” Ilya asked.
Roman grinned. “Better than I study.”
“That is not difficult,” said Anton.
Roman liked him too, though this was obviously going to be more work.
They played together because that was what boys with instruments did when school had become intolerable and adulthood was still too far away to be useful. Ilya sang. Anton held the songs together. Roman gave them teeth and momentum.
At first it was just the three of them in borrowed rooms and corners they were not supposed to occupy. Then Sveta arrived and made everyone better by refusing to tolerate sloppiness as a lifestyle. Then Vadim joined last because they needed a bassist and sometimes necessity has a terrible sense of humour.
Roman loved the band from the start.
Not solemnly. Roman did very little solemnly unless he was trying to get out of trouble. He loved it with his whole fast, hungry, badly regulated self. He loved the volume. He loved the rehearsals. He loved the sense that the room could become something else if they hit the right thing hard enough. He loved Ilya’s voice, Anton’s irritation, Sveta’s precision, even Vadim’s usefulness before Vadim ruined that by continuing to have a personality.
The band gave Roman structure without making him feel controlled. This was the magic. School tried to contain him and failed. His mother tried to correct him and exhausted herself. His father tried to love him and missed half the appointments. The band did something different. It gave him a place where impulse could become momentum if he timed it correctly. It rewarded energy. It turned restlessness into rhythm. It made his worst instincts look, for a while, like style.
This was not false.
It was simply incomplete.
Roman was good. Not in the neat, patient way Anton and Sveta were good, all structure and exactness and quiet strategic ambition. Roman was good like a thrown match was good, bright at once, risky at once, useful or disastrous depending on what it landed near. Ilya liked that. Of course he did. Ilya had spent his childhood surviving rooms where the air itself seemed to punish softness. Roman made air behave differently. Anton distrusted this on principle, which did not stop him from admitting Roman made them sound better. Sveta watched him with the calm suspicion of someone who had already identified several future problems and was deciding whether any of them were worth preventing.
The answer, tragically, was probably no.
Some people can only be warned after they have already touched the stove.
Roman touched many stoves.
Small ones first. Skipping school. Staying out too late. Kissing the wrong person. Borrowing money and forgetting repayment as a concept. Saying yes before he knew the question. Climbing fences. Riding in cars with boys who drove like physics was negotiable. Drinking too young and liking too much the way alcohol made his brain stop grabbing at every passing thought. Smoking because someone handed him a cigarette and he liked having something to do with his hands. Lying badly, then better. Apologizing beautifully, which was a skill and also a problem.
He was not trying to become untrustworthy.
He was trying to keep moving.
There is a difference, though the results can look similar from the outside.
By the time Kozzy joined, Roman had already become the kind of person who could make a fifteen-year-old feel welcome by clapping too much. This was one of his better qualities. Roman did not ration approval. If something pleased him, everyone knew. Good jokes, bad jokes, someone surviving the stairs without falling, technical competence from a boy with a bass case and the terrified composure of a person determined not to disgrace himself. Roman clapped because joy moved through him faster than dignity could stop it.
He liked Kozzy immediately.
Kozzy was useful, which mattered. Kozzy was also funny in a way he did not yet know how to use properly, which Roman considered a public service waiting to happen. More importantly, Kozzy watched the room before entering it. Roman understood this less as a concept than as an instinct. The kid was calculating. Not coldly. Practically. He had chosen bass because every band needed one and nobody sane volunteered. Roman found this hilarious and admirable. Most people wanted to be special. Kozzy wanted to be necessary, which was much smarter and much stranger.
Anton respected him first. Ilya adopted him first. Sveta approved of him first. Roman made him laugh first.
These distinctions mattered in a band, even if nobody had the language for it yet.
For a while, it worked.
This is the painful part. Roman did not destroy everything at the beginning. He was not a warning label everyone ignored out of sentimentality. He was their friend. He was their lead guitarist. He made them better. He made them laugh. He made terrible hotel rooms feel less dead. He could pull Ilya out of a mood, make Anton invent three new swear words, and get Sveta to make the face that was not technically a smile but spiritually close enough to count as a national holiday. He was generous with attention, quick with affection, and capable of making ordinary misery feel briefly like a story everyone would enjoy telling later.
Then Rozanov became Rozanov.
Not all at once, because nothing ruins people that cleanly. First there were better gigs, then more gigs, then a demo, then people who knew people, then paperwork, then promises. Then vans, interviews, borders, rooms with no sleep in them, and the first early proof that the thing they had built might become larger than the people who built it.
If Rozanov had not become Rozanov, Roman Ivanov might have had half a chance.
Not a guarantee. Roman was Roman, and no version of his life was ever going to be free of bad ideas. Ordinary life could not have made him someone else. But ordinary life might have given him friction. Routine. Consequences that arrived on time. People who expected him home before morning. A job he could be fired from without an international team of lawyers being involved. A landlord who cared about rent more than myth. Mornings that looked enough like other mornings to make yesterday’s choices visible.
Tour gave him the opposite.
Tour put Roman in a world where sex, drugs, and rock and roll were not warnings. They were the standard. Worse, it happened when he was young enough to think that standard was cool. There was always someone awake. Always someone offering. Always someone who wanted to be near the band badly enough to confuse access with affection. Always another city where yesterday’s bad idea had not followed him yet. Always a room where being reckless looked like belonging.
For a boy with terrible brakes and a genetic loaded gun where appetite should have been, success was not rescue.
It was acceleration.
Cocaine came first because cocaine made sense to Roman in the worst possible way. It made him faster. Brighter. More himself, or what he thought was himself when he did not yet understand that drugs are excellent liars at the beginning of the relationship. It turned volume up on qualities people already rewarded him for. Energy. Charm. Nerve. The ability to keep going after everyone reasonable should have stopped.
At first, it looked like tour.
This was part of the problem.
Everyone was tired. Everyone was wired. Everyone drank too much sometimes, slept too little too often, and made choices that would have concerned more stable people. Roman's bad nights did not yet stand out from the general chaos. They hid inside the general stupidity of young men in motion. He could still play. Often he played brilliantly. He could still laugh. He could still apologize. He could still make the room tilt forward.
That made it easier to miss.
Or not miss, exactly. Anton did not miss it. Anton missed very little and trusted even less. Sveta noticed too, because Sveta’s tolerance for self-deception had always been lower than everyone else’s. Rose noticed because Rose noticed systems, and Roman had become a system that kept producing bad numbers: missed meals, missing money, wrong pupils, false cheer, vanishing at the exact point someone needed him. Kozzy noticed once he was old enough to understand what he was noticing. Ilya noticed in the way Ilya noticed things he did not yet know how to save.
They all knew something was wrong.
Knowing something is wrong is not the same as being able to stop it.
This is one of adulthood’s ruder lessons, and they all learned it too young.
Roman did not want to be saved then. Saved from what? He was in a band. They were young. People wanted them. The shows were getting bigger. The nights were getting longer. The bad choices had not finished presenting their invoices. He thought he was living the thing everyone had promised rock and roll would be. He thought the danger was part of the costume.
He was wrong, obviously.
The costume was part of the danger.
There were still good years. That matters too. Roman’s story cannot be told as a straight line down without lying about how attractive the drop could look from inside it. He had nights when he was brilliant. Months when he seemed almost fine. Tours where the worry receded enough that people could pretend it had been stress, immaturity, a phase, a city, the wrong people, bad timing. He wrote parts that made songs lock into place. He made fans feel personally chosen from thirty feet away. He made journalists laugh. He made Ilya better on stage because Ilya liked having something unpredictable near him, something alive enough to push against.
And Roman was alive.
That was the cruel thing. He was so alive that it became easy to mistake his self-destruction for evidence of life.
The pills filled gaps. Up when he needed up. Down when he needed down. Sleep when sleep would not come. No sleep when sleep threatened to take him too early. Something for nerves. Something for pain. Something for the mood. Something because somebody had it and Roman was constitutionally weak in the face of offered novelty. By then, his body had become a venue that never fully closed.
Heroin came later.
By the time heroin entered the story, the people who loved him were already tired in the permanent way. Not tired of him, though sometimes they were that too and hated themselves for it. Tired from watching. Tired from hoping. Tired from the cycle of fear, anger, relief, apology, improvement, collapse. Tired from the special cruelty of loving someone who could be honest for one hour and lying again by dinner.
Roman was not less charming when he was lying, which was deeply inconvenient.
He could look ruined and still make a nurse smile. He could apologize with tears in his eyes and mean every word until the next need rose up and ate the meaning. He could swear he was done and believe it. He could tell you he loved you and be telling the truth. He could steal from you later and still love you. Addiction was not hypocrisy. It was appetite with executive control of the building.
That didn’t make the harm any smaller.
Anton understood this first, or at least said it first in a way that made everyone else angry because truth often arrives with terrible bedside manner.
“You don’t make his choices for him.”
Kozzy hated that because it was accurate and useless in equal measure.
Ilya hated it because Ilya had built half his life on the belief that enough will could move immovable things. He had sung his way out of Grigori’s apartment. He had turned a school band into an international force. He had made whole crowds follow the movement of his hand. He did not enjoy discovering that charisma, love, money, rage, guilt, and command presence were all equally useless against Roman’s next decision.
Sveta hated it most quietly, which usually meant most deeply.
Roman loved them.
This is the part people outside the story liked to forget once the damage became easier to name than the person. Roman loved his friends. Loved Ilya with the wild, bright loyalty of someone who had been allowed near the sun and never fully got over it. Loved Anton because Anton did not flatter him and somehow kept staying. Loved Sveta because she saw through him and did not pretend seeing through him made him simple. Loved Kozzy because He loved Kozzy because Kozzy had arrived as a kid and become necessary so gradually that by the time anyone noticed, the band no longer worked without him.
He loved them, but he still made their lives worse.
Both things were true. Anyone who cannot hold both has no business telling stories about addicts or the people who keep answering the phone.
Roman’s origin, if it can be called that, was not the first line or the first show or the first time he tried something he should not have touched. It was a thousand smaller permissions. A father whose love arrived drunk and laughing. A brain built for speed without brakes. A world that rewarded charm before it checked the cost. A band that turned his restlessness into music. A tour life that mistook danger for authenticity and gave him every possible opportunity to confuse destruction with belonging.
He wasn’t doomed.
Doom is too neat and lets too many people off the hook, including Roman.
But he was vulnerable in exactly the ways the world around him was prepared to exploit. He was funny. He was warm. He was talented. He was impulsive. He was hungry. He had been taught, by blood and by life, that wanting something badly enough could feel like permission.
For a while, it made him magic.
Then it made him late.
Then it made him unreliable.
Then it made him frightening.
Then it made him gone even when he was still in the room.
Before all that, before the headlines nobody wanted and the phone calls everyone feared, before the interventions that did not take and the promises that did not hold, before Roman Ivanov became a story people lowered their voices to tell, he was a boy with a guitar his drunk father had brought home like a treasure.
He was nine years old. The guitar was too big. His father was singing badly in the kitchen. His mother was pretending not to cry or laugh or both. Roman put his fingers on the strings and made a sound that was ugly, bright, and entirely his.
He grinned.
That was the first warning.
It was also the first truly good thing in his life.