homelovefamily | [But with this gift there comes liability]

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dmitry

[But with this gift there comes liability]

When the knock comes at the door, Anya doesn't expect it.

She has the day off of work and no real plans to speak of. There are chores to do, errands to run, a Pushkin to look after. But other than that, she hasn't settled on anything deliberate though she supposes all of those add up to plans enough. There is a lot of going on in her life. Spring has sprung in earnest, threatening summer. It had been winter in her life for far too long. Anya had only just gotten a taste of a Parisian spring when she arrived here in full autumn.

The world is full of possibility. It holds so much light.

She is puttering about her kitchen, putting together tea for herself, trying to decide if she is hungry enough to eat now or after she goes to the market. It would probably be better to do that now so that she does not end up giving into some sort of frivolous culinary temptation. Besides there are leftovers from when she ate dinner with Gleb in the fridge that she should consume before they go off.

Her mind get caught on Gleb and she smiles to herself at the thought of him. It isn't what she expected. It certainly isn't something she planned for. There is no word for what they are to each other and she has no idea where it will go. But she cares about him. Loves him even. Which makes Dmitry even more of an ache in her heart. She loves him too, but he seems to be avoiding her, irked by her existence in this city even if she has forgiven him.

It's annoying and she wishes she knew why. He didn't take the money. She's forgiven him for pulling him into the con with Vlad and not telling her. What more could be an issue?

This is where her mind is when she hears the knock. Immediately she stops drumming her fingers on the counter and makes to the door, confused as to who it could be. That confusion evaporates as soon she opens the door.

"Dmitry? What are you doing here? Is everything all right?"

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Ever since the café with Anya sitting so close, saying kinder things to him than he deserved, Dmitry's barely been able to look at her without his throat closing on every single emotion he doesn't know how to articulate. It's not like him to run away from things but everything with Anya is so tangled and the more he observes of Gleb, he can't help but think...

Well.

He can't avoid her forever. Anya made that abundantly clear on his first morning in the city. So he rushes himself to Ocean View Apartments and decides to nip this in the bud, to make sure it gets said. Maybe then she'll understand why he keeps his distance.

Except now that she's looking at him, Dmitry doesn't quite know what to say. "Anya...I..." he starts.

Without hesitation, Anya reaches out and pulls him into her apartment, her insistent hand wrapped around his wrist. Something is distressing him, she can tell that much plain as day. Leaving him to fret in the outside walkway would be an unnecessary cruelty.

"Dima, what's the matter?" her words are soft, concern stitched across her face as she shuts the door behind them. Pushkin for his part lifts his head up from the patch of sunlight he is sprawled out on, still more asleep than not. Unmoved to immediately go greet him, the little dog stretches out once more.

"Come, I was just making tea. Did something happen?"

She grabs his wrist and Dmitry starts to pull back but can't quite make it. After making himself as scarce as he can get away with, her hand around his (almost) feels like a miracle.

"No," he says. "Nothing's wrong." Liar. But he's not hurt, not bleeding. He's just...in love with someone out of his reach. She always was. That much had seemed so much easier to say when he'd been on his way to the apartment instead of standing in front of her. "But I can't keep seeing you and seeing you because it's driving me crazy. Because..."

He's built up steam now, no going back. "Because I don't want to be in love with someone I can't be with."

A shock runs through her, hot heat making her jerk slightly like a puppet on strings. Without warning her heart seems to shattered, like sshards of ice or glass being smashed against a stone floor. When Dmitry had shown up at her door, clearly distraught Anya's mind had been whirring on so many disasters that it had been hard to pick one.

But this — this is not what she had in mind.

Instinctively she takes a step towards him and then stops herself, the motion awkward. How has her life so quickly changed? For months, years even, she's lived with only the hope that someone out there loved her. Now she knows that two men, very different, very real, and very much here love her. It is more than she could hope for.

Then why does it feel like her heart is breaking?

She loves Gleb, she knows that she does, but she loves Dmitry too. That realizations knocks her a bit off her feet, sudden and sure. It is a useless love.

"Oh Dima, I love you too," she says just as an anger starts to swell within her, righteous frustration at both him and the universe. How dare the world do this to her. How dare something so good suddenly be turned against her. Frowning, angry tears spring to her eyes, her next words coming out sharper than she means. "But how dare you just say that to me. How long have you known?"

Several emotions charge across Anya's face, her expression changing too quickly for Dmitry to place one before it shifts away again. He expects something like confusion or even indifference, but instead she looks both furious and about to cry. Fury he can handle but crying?

He should be thrilled when she says she loves him too but instead his chest seizes with something almost like panic. He hadn't expected that to be her answer, especially not after how he's seen Gleb looking at her. How she's looked back.

Her question is sharp and unforgiving and Dmitry's first instinct is to try and save himself with a lie, to pretend it's only just happened and there's time to walk back his feelings. Except that, just as when she'd asked if he'd taken the money, Dmitry can't find it in himself to lie.

"Paris," he says, finally. "I've known it since that night when..." When he'd realized? When he'd known he would never be good enough for a Grand Duchess? "When you remembered me."

Emotions war within her, the battle playing out on her features. Anya has always been a decent actress when she wants to be. That was the irony in the entire mess. Dmitry and Vlad had gone seeking a girl to play pretend and found the real thing in a girl who had in her childhood spent hours playing at other people. All of those skills, the schooling of her expression, the changing of one feeling for another. Those have all fled.

Inhaling sharply, Anya closes her eyes, squeezing the tears from them as she tries to steal herself. She wants to be happy. She was happy, is still happy. Dmitry loves her, is in love with her. It was something that she hadn't realized she might have wanted until it was too late. By then it didn't matter. He wasn't here and a different love had crept in, just as unexpected.

Taking a deep breath, she attempts to swallow the lump in her throat. It doesn't work.

"I wanted you to kiss me that night," she says after a long moment, shaking her head slightly before opening her eyes to look at him. In a crowd of thousands, he had found her again. It is almost like a story, except it isn't at all. The players are acting out of turn. "And when you didn't, I thought I'd misunderstood. That I had had it all wrong. But now..."

She shakes her head, not certain what to do. She wants to kiss him and slap him all at once, but cannot do either. "I wish you had kissed me. Then I would have known, then I would know what to do now."

"I wanted to kiss you too," he admits. "But it wasn't a game anymore. You really were a Grand Duchess and I was no one." Princesses don't marry nobodies. They certainly don't kiss them. Maybe they're equal in the eyes of Russia but he knows better and so does she. Anya is miles above him. Even without the crown and titles, she's above him.

"The other day, at the café, I saw you standing with Gleb." And he'd wished all over again that he'd kissed her in Paris, let her know before he lost her. Anya has someone else now and he's behind the curve in so many ways and who's to blame but himself?

Some conman he is, Dmitry thinks ruefully. There'd been a moment where he'd stood to win everything he ever wanted and now he's lost it all. The one who got scammed is him.

He loves her but he's known since that night that there's no fighting for her. Not when station and now Gleb stand between them.

There is no need for Anya to ask why he didn't kiss her that night. She knows the answer before he says it. That was the first night where it was real, so bright and vivid. A memory that she hadn't realized had been there was unearthed. A boy from a parade long before, standing as a man in front of her. A man who infuriated her as much as she adored him and didn't want to admit that part. Grand Duchesses don't get kissed by no named men. Grand Duchesses barely get kissed at all.

He hadn't been a no-name man. He'd been Dmitry and at the ballet she had wanted to him to kiss her, despite the crowd, despite the circumstances. They would have just been two well-dressed people in for a show.

Does none of that matter now? Or does it all mean too much?

"No, it wasn't a game." It is still not, even if she is just Anya here. When he mentions Gleb, a tear rolls down her cheek. Oh Gleb, who loves her too. Who doesn't deserve any of this even as he knows none of it.

Another tear falls as she takes a step closer, brushing it away with the back of her hand. "He's my...he loves me," she explains, not knowing how else to explain it. How to explain what they have. "And I might love him too. He was a boy across the street when we were in Yekaterinburg. There's so much I should tell you."

There is so much to the story, so much that should be explained. How she relived that night again and again. How none of it makes sense. Her hand is unsteady as she reaches out and places a hand on Dmitry's chest. It is the most that she has touched him. She just stays there, fighting temptation as she looks up at him, reaching up her other hand to touch his cheek.

"Oh Dima."

She might love him too. Dmitry's seen the way she looks at him. At the café it had been quick and fleeting but he'd seen it and he'd known exactly what that look meant because he'd once wanted her to look at him like that too. And now those looks go to Gleb, a man who already had precious little care for Dmitry before this all began.

Anya places a hand on his chest and he knows she must feel the way it beats harder. It was already pounding as he convinced himself to come here, to confess and get it over with. He's not sure what response he'd expected and somehow this still isn't it. The hand on his cheek makes him close his eyes and, for a moment, he pretends.

"I knew in the hotel room that I never had a chance," he says, is trying to convince himself. It all seems so much less clear when she's holding his face, looking at him so gently and so sadly. It's a dangerous game but he puts his hands on her shoulders, so ready to slide them around her and pull her close in an embrace he knows he won't get.

"You don't have to tell me." He's not sure if he wants to know, truthfully. It's enough to confirm that she's chosen Gleb.

A storm of her own making is beginning to swirl within her. The quickening of her heartbeat as she impossibly hopes that he will kiss her, the fear that he will and she won't be able to stop herself from kissing him back. The knowledge that doing so would break Gleb's heart and that is the very last thing she wants to do.

It might be too late. She might already be well on her way to doing so. This is a path that she never dreamt of, one that she has found herself on without knowing that she was moving. Perhaps she was fated for this, set on this path the moment the Bolsheviks sent her to Ekaterinburg all those years ago. Maybe it was earlier, that day at the parade when she was only eight.

Anya doesn't know what to make of fate. She doesn't know what to do with destiny or the will of God. If this is part of some greater plan, then she prays for more insight. For safety.

For less guilt at being glad to be held in his arms, even for a little while. "You always had a chance. Even when I hated you, I didn't really. The opposite of love isn't hate, it is indifference and you make me too crazy for that," she teases, trying and failing to break the tension. But she does not pull away from him. "I know, but I want to tell you. I lived that night in that cellar again and again, each time failing to escape it. Gleb was there as well and we were only children." A pause as she swallows hard. "He died in my arms." Shaking her head slightly, she looks up at Dmitry's face, searching for answers that aren't there. "I wonder if you had been here, if this place would have brought you to that night as well."

She tries to make a joke and Dmitry tries to smile. It doesn't work any better than her joke. The worst part is that he almost wishes he could drive her into a temper. Anya when she's angry is all fire and precision; she finds the source of her ire and yells it down. Anya like this, nervous in his arms, close and also miles away, feels wrong. It's as off-center as the first time Vlad made them waltz, Dmitry with no rhythm and Anya trying to push him around. He doesn't know what to do, how to comfort her when a not insignificant part of himself also feels a little broken.

When she talks about the cellar and Yekaterinburg, Dmitry almost wants to cover her ears, her eyes, as if he can block out the fear and trauma for her. Of course it doesn't work like that. He wonders if she has nightmares and remembers that time, again, in Paris. He could have held her then, really held her. Now it's too late and there's Gleb.

"I meant what I said," he says. "The first day you saw me." If he'd had any power over the situation, Dmitry would have done everything, anything to try and stop Anya from facing that execution. It's a streak of altruism that he thought he'd killed off somewhere during a rough childhood but which has grown stronger since he met Anya. Selfishly though, he can't help but compare memories and know that a little boy bowing is nowhere near as meaningful as another boy taking a bullet.

"You have him now. I..." It feels too much like a lie to say he won't get in the way, not when it burns inside of him every time he looks at her. The only thing to say is the truth, the wish that he's kindled since Paris. "I want you to be happy."

Anya is shaking gently. A faint tremor runs through her body, unwanted, at the recollection of that night lived so many times. The echoes of screams are clearer now when she hears them, the nightmares still coming, but she push them aside during her waking hours. Speaking of it is never easy.

"I believe you. I believed you then and I believe you now," she answers. There is no firing squad in either of their futures, but the promise still exists.

Dmitry is right. She does have Gleb now. But for how long? They both have their pride, both have their senses of order and rightness. Anya knows that she has to tell him about Dmitry, about his confession of love. It would be crueler to withhold that information from him, to hide it and pretend that it doesn't mean anything to her. She is so sick of secrets. This isn't another one that needs to be kept.

But the question lingers in her mind: how long will Gleb stay after she tells him. She loves him just as she loves Dmitry. Will telling him so be enough to compel him? And does she want someone who simply stays out of a sense of duty?

"I do have him," she nods almost mechanically leaving the for now off the sentence. "I want you to be happy too."

Seized by a soft impulse, she leans up on the balls of her feet, the height difference maddening as she presses a gentle kiss on his lips. When she pulls away, a tear has slid down her cheek. "Please, Dima, that's all I want is for you to be happy."

The kiss is so light Dmitry could almost convince himself he imagined it, except that Anya is so close to him and he can see the tears in her eye. He raises a hand and wipes them away as gently as he's able, the touch as restrained and gossamer as the kiss. His other arm slides around her and he indulges in that moment. In Anya's training to become the Grand Duchess that she always was, he's played the role of servant, courtier, and dance partner already. Why not, for a moment, pretend he can also be a lover?

"I don't know what to do," How can he be happy when she's out of his reach? And how can he be happy, he wonders, if he tries to force her to choose and to choose him. The thought occurs to him at the same moment that there's no making Anya do anything. Not with that temper and that will. He almost smiles.

"I'm happy that you're safe. That you know who you are." In the end, hadn't that mattered so much more than the money? Still does. He made a stupid choice, but he thinks it was the right one.

A sigh escapes her, a soft, breathy thing at the feeling of his fingers against her cheek. This isn't how she imagined she would kiss him. It's barely a kiss at all, instead a memory of one that never was. A farewell. Like they are playing a game again, but it isn't a game. It never was. They are never quite the people that they want to be.

"Neither do I." There was a time when she wanted him, where her choice was easy. In a crowd of thousands, Anya would know that boy who bowed, her Dima. Here she would find him again, did find him again. But so much has changed. She remembers more clearly who she is. She's built a life here.

There is also Gleb. Sweet, solid Gleb, with his odd sense of humor and his willingness to die for her. A boy on the other side of a wall. She smiles at him, a bittersweet expression. "I am so happy you are here. If it were different, but there's Gleb," she says with a small shake her head. "I love him and it's so new. I just want you to be happy, Dima. I do. And I don't know what to do." And I wish it was with me.

It's not the kind of kiss he wants to give her. If things were different, if he'd just arrived here a little sooner, maybe he'd be able to kiss her that way. Maybe he'd be able to hold her tight and kiss her until they're both breathless, pretend that he could sweep her off her feet. But it's too late. He's six months too late and never even realized.

"There's Gleb," he agrees. "And he loves you." He loves her so much that it's impossible not to see and Dmitry knows that when he looks at Anya, it's the same way.

"There's Gleb and he loves me," she repeats with a sad nod, wondering how awful it makes her that she wishes he was able to sweep her up in a passionate embrace. Even thinking that feels like a betrayal, an odd notion when months ago, back in Paris that is all she wanted. She wanted Dmitry, equal parts infuriating and charming, to sweep her up and kiss her. Spin her in a circle and make her laugh, leaving her breathless.

Now this is all they have. The possibility of what could have been. Being held close by him for a moment longer than is proper.

With a nod, she gingerly lets go of him, stepping a way to put some distance between them. "And I love him."

That's it then, isn't it? He's arrived too late. It would hurt less if he could begrudge Anya not waiting but she'd had no way of knowing he'd ever come and if someone looked at her the way Gleb had, he doesn't think he'd have stood much of a chance either.

Dmitry takes a step back too, reluctantly letting go of her hand.

"I guess this is the part where I promise not to get in the way, then. Isn't it?"

"Perhaps it is. I really don't know."

And she doesn't. Anya has no idea where she is meant to go from here, where Dmitry is meant to go. Is there a road where they can travel together? Is there any option at all? She knows she loves him, but it is a complicated thing. Her heart has found another that she loves as well. Gleb who deserves to know. Who deserves a chance.

"I don't want to lose you again, but I think I already have." Reaching up she brushes away her half-shed tears. "I just want you to be happy."

And she wants him to be happy with her. But she cannot have them both.

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[But with this gift there comes liability]

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