[oh your hands can heal, your hands can bruise]

[homelovefamily]

It's been over a week since Anya has seen Gleb. Pushkin has seen him though, evidence of Gleb's quiet coming and going from her apartment when she's not been there is able to be found if one really looks for it. And she has looked for it. She searched for notes, for some sort of sign that he wants to see her, even a little. That hope quickly faded as the days passed. Things in the elevator had been left too broken, too heavy. She doesn't blame him for avoiding her, but she doesn't want it to on for forever.

This past weekend had been illuminating, the bright colors, the variety of human relationships and people all on display. That had been freedom, that had been hope. Anya had felt twinges of awkwardness as she had inquired as to the various meanings of different colored flags. To say that what she had learned had been illuminating would be gravely misrepresenting it.

It had offered her hope.

A possibility, albeit a faint one, glimmered just in sight, and hopefully not out of reach. A flexibility that she had not previously known.

However none of that mattered if he wouldn't even look at her. She had to speak to him, had to explain what she had said that day, what she felt. If he wasn't going to come to her, then she was going to come to him. So on Monday she had started hanging out in the lobby of his apartment building, loitering there in her free time on the hope to see him. By Tuesday she'd come to sit in a chair there, taking the elevator a few times on the hope that she would encounter him. Today she's done away with any of that pretense and is waiting outside his door, loudly conversing with his neighbors as they pass by.

She knows he can hear her.

Eventually she comes to stand against the door, pressing her ear against it as she knocks. "Gleb, please come out," she pleads with him through the door. "I'm not leaving until you let me explain."

Comments

[butstill]

Of all the responses she could have had, Gleb thinks this is the most unexpected one possible; of everything that's taken him by surprise in the last few minutes, nothing has as much as what she's saying now. As he told her in the elevator, he hadn't thought there was a choice left. Finding out that he was wrong about her being with Dmitry didn't actually change that. The rest of what she had to say seemed to make that clear enough. Even knowing now that he was wrong in some of what he thought she meant that day, he wouldn't have imagined that it would come to this, unable to do anything for a moment but look at her in stunned confusion. She's as beautiful as he's ever seen her. She's hurt, and that's at least somewhat on him, though he thought he was doing what was best for everyone, himself included. There's no way to take that back now. The only thing to do is go forward. It's just a matter of figuring out how.

Since the last time she was here, telling him both that she loved him and that she loved someone else too, he's believed that he would never stand a chance with her. Before that, he was just waiting for something to go wrong. He never had much of a chance to be with her, not really, not without the presence of someone else looming overhead. That first week and a half seems almost surreal now in how good it felt, regardless of what prompted his confession. He should be pleased now, or relieved, or something of the sort, but mostly he's confused, still waiting for the but that ought to follow her words.

"I didn't mean to hurt you, either," he says, what seems like the most important thing to get out of the way. Whatever does or doesn't happen now, he hopes she knows that. He'd just been hurting, too, and still can't quite determine what went wrong or how they got here from there. "And I... I want to be with you. I do. But I can't ask that of you." It hurts just to say, the words feeling like they've been ripped out of him, but he knows it's necessary. He doesn't think for a second that she would lie to him about this, but he can't see how it's possibly that simple, either, and he wouldn't forgive himself if he trapped her in a situation that wasn't what she was looking for you. "I know you love him, too. And I know there's every chance that nothing would ever have happened if he'd been here before I was, or before I told you that I loved you. I just want you to be happy, Anya. More than anything." This time, he reaches for her, his hand smoothing gently over her hair. "Would you be, making that choice? Truly?"

He won't issue an ultimatum. She's said she doesn't want to be the spoils of a war, and he won't make her that. Whatever she wants to give him, he would take, and willingly, but he doesn't want to be the second choice, the person she'll settle for, if it means she'll only miss what she doesn't get to have. That, he thinks, ought to be fair enough.

[homelovefamily]

Now confusion, mixed with a stubborn flare of anger, comes into her thoughts. His words are saying one thing, his actions another. He had tried to keep her on the otherside of a door, had turned away from her, but still he is holding her hand, running another over her hair. He is so tender, but so uncertain. Anya keeps hearing him say that he won't make a choice, that he doesn't want to ask that she be with him, but it doesn't quite fit.

"Yes, of course I would be happy." Astonishment is plain on her face as she shakes her head slightly in confusion. Dmitry isn't in the room with them. She didn't wait outside his door. Even knowing that certain expansive concepts of relationships are possible here, she doesn't know if Dmitry would even want that sort of thing. He said that he just wanted her alone without making any sort of attempt to woo her.

But what Dmitry might or might not want isn't relevant now. It is just Gleb, the man in front of her, holding her hand.

Bearing her shoulders back, she has a hint of a smile on her face as she looks up at him. "Gleb, no one has ever been able to make me do something in my entire life that I didn't want. That hasn't changed. Why won't you let us be happy?"

She doesn't mention the fact that there have been exceptions to this rule, but all of them involved men holding guns to her back. They don't need that right now.

[butstill]

"That's not—" Gleb starts, a quick, half-desperate rebuttal, though he cuts himself off before he can say anything he can't take back. The last thing he needs is to make this somehow worse than it already is, with so much uncertainty in the air between them. True as it might be, no good will come from telling her that they were never happy, that they never had an opportunity to be. Maybe they came close, in the time between Dmitry arriving and her coming to tell him that Dmitry was in love with her, but it wasn't what it might have been under other circumstances, what it should have been. If only in his own head, there was always that doubt, that worry.

Then it seemed like he'd been right to wonder if Dmitry's arrival would cause them problems, and it's hard not to let that color his memories of the rest of it now, to think himself a fool for the moments when he convinced himself that there was nothing wrong. He never expected they would wind up where they are now; he never had any reason to. Knowing that is one thing, though, and trying to articulate it is another entirely. How is he supposed to tell her that it's hard to believe that she could want to be with him, just him, when what she said before seemed to suggest otherwise?

"I just want to be sure," he says, lifting their interlaced fingers so he can brush a kiss against her knuckles. "I don't want you to... to choose this and regret not being with someone else instead. I don't want to be with you and wonder if you'd be happier that way. I believe you, I do. But we wouldn't be happy with all of this still overhead. We already never had a chance for that. And I don't want to do this only to lose you all over again."

[homelovefamily]

"Can you ever be entirely certain?" Anya wonders as she watches him brush his fingers against her knuckles, feeling that familiar flip flop of her stomach. Standing by what she says is easy. Nothing is entirely certain, not even the rise and setting of the sun. There are always twists, especially here in Darrow where reason is so easily subverted. It is a city that does not play by anyone's rules.

"Nothing in life is a guarantee." It is fair to point out. Every moment of her life is a gift, one that she isn't about to question. By all rights she should have died in that cellar in Ekaterinburg. His father shouldn't have saved her. He should have forever remained a boy she saw on the otherside of the wall. None of that is true. They live different lives now.

Shaking her head, she reaches up to brush away the furrow in his brow, smoothing away the wrinkles there. "But I choose this. I chose this when I came to wait for you to open your door and not go after Dmitry." Pausing, she frowns, wondering if this is something she should share at all. In the end she decides it is worth it. "I haven't seen him since the elevator."

It isn't that she cares any less about Dmitry. It is more that she doesn't know what to do with him. How to ever get him to see that she can love them both equally. That no one is a mistress. That she isn't a possession or a battle to be won. "I want us to have our chance. We should take it back."

[butstill]

"Close to certain, then," Gleb murmurs, glancing up at her almost questioningly. "As certain as we can be." She's right. Nothing is guaranteed. His being here at all is borrowed time, and he's always been acutely aware of how easily and without warning that could run out. Maybe that's all the more reason to make the most of it, to take her at her word. They would never have had this chance anywhere else, after all. She would have been the lost Grand Duchess, found; he would have gone home to a firing squad. He's never really prized his own happiness, always focused more on the cause and his contributions to it than his personal life, but maybe they should get to have that, if they can. Anya should, without question. He thinks he just never really expected that to involve him, the span of time between his telling her he loved her and Dmitry arriving all but negligible.

Maybe he should tell her that, but he doesn't know how to find the words for it. There's so much that he would say if only he knew how. For the moment, though, at least now that they're inching towards something less painful, it seems like something that can be momentarily set aside rather than fumbled through. They've already gotten to the heart of it, anyway, he thinks — that they never had a real chance to be happy. Perhaps she's right, though, and they can now. He wants so badly for that to be the case, so much that it feels impossible, that his chest aches with it. It would be easy to say that they might not have been meant to have that and they ought to accept it, but she's here, they both are, and that has to count for something.

That she came here first does, too. Gleb wouldn't have expected that, though it isn't as if she's said anything that would give him a reason to believe otherwise. It's because of what happened before, he thinks, with her coming here to tell him what Dmitry told her. He doesn't want to harp on that — doesn't want to tell her that it's unexpectedly relieving to hear that he wasn't just her second choice — but he's quietly relieved, or reassured, maybe, to hear that's the case.

"I'm sorry I made you wait," he says. "I just didn't think I could see you, after..." After the elevator, after everything she said that afternoon, after trying to sleep and getting to watch her die again instead. That is even less worth mentioning now than any of the rest of it. "But of course I want that. I've always wanted that. I never wanted to lose that chance in the first place."

[homelovefamily]

"As certain as we can be," Anya repeats with a nod, accepting that as enough of a compromise. It isn't an absolute, not the way that he implied before. The world is beyond absolutes, made up of far too many colors to just be black and white. She is affirming that absolutely sure is still so guarantee. Waiting for perfection is an invitation for misery. They have both had more than enough of that. Her life is a gift, a precious thing that she was given at the expense of who she was for so many years. She still is not entirely certain what her role in the world is. This city has given her a firm place to find her bearings. No one expects her to claim a throne that she isn't sure she wants.

All she wanted was a family. Someone to belong to. All the way from Russia to Paris she found that, placed her love and trust in two conmen, caring for Dmitry and Vlad in very different ways. Now she knows what kind of love she felt for Dmitry then, the kind she feels for him now and what kind she feels for Gleb. There are still so many questions, so many ways that this can go wrong again. She isn't even entirely certain that it has been righted.

Trying is all that she can do. She wants that chance to be happy. She wants both men to be happy, for their happiness to be in some part because of her. Gleb believing in happiness is so important to her. Her love for him is a bright red flame. Falling in love is a slow process for her. She has only done it once before, never fully grasped how that man had mattered to her until it was too late. With Gleb she has nearly done the same thing, realizing how strong she cares for him as he died in her arms and then later when time became their enemy. She wishes that she had told him that she loved him for the first time without such a driving force, without the fear that she was going to lose him for forever hanging over her. Her fears had been all but confirmed for the past few weeks.

An opportunity is in front of her, an opening that he has given her. Anya is her mother's daughter, her father's daughter. She won't let it go again.

His apology brings a faint smile to her face as she looks up at him. "I understand," she nods as she steps closer to him, reaching up to brush a wayward lock of black hair back from his face. "You opened the door now. That's what really matters. I didn't want to be in the place where you'd think that I was throwing that chance away or that it was being snatched from me — from us." Her smile brightens just a touch. "I do love you."

[butstill]

Even now, it's hard not to wait for the other shoe to drop, for her declarations of love to be followed by a reason they can't be together. Gleb trusts her, of course, can't imagine why she would lie about something like this, but he's spent the past week and a half — the past month — believing that was exactly the place they were in. The last time she was here, she told him she loved him, but it wasn't a statement that existed in isolation. None of this really does, either. She's here, making a choice, but the reasons she has one to make in the first place haven't just gone away. What happens, he wonders, if Dmitry shows up at her door again, trying to get her back? What would happen if the two of them had seen each other first? It doesn't seem like a line of thought worth continuing with, but it's impossible to shut out completely, too, some doubts too deeply embedded to be disregarded at a moment's notice.

She said in the elevator that she couldn't choose between them. He wants to ask her now what's changed, how she's wound up here, but foolish as it feels, he doesn't think he's brave enough for that. She's here, standing so close, touching him like she did the night he died in her arms and the morning after when she came to his door and kissed him, and he can't find the strength to push her away. It wouldn't seem fair to do so. Even if he's seen her less than honest before, that was another time and another place, and he can hardly blame her for trying to protect herself. He has no reason now to think that she would be saying any of this if it weren't true. There would be nothing to gain, and he's never known Anya to be that sort of deceptive.

"I thought that chance was long gone," he admits, his arms settling gently around her waist. Though he doesn't pull her closer, still too uncertain for that, it's enough, for the moment, to have her solid and real and alive in front of him, nothing at all like the last time he held her. That final kiss, rough and desperate like they both had something to prove, has stayed with him these past weeks; he wants so badly to kiss her again now, but he's not sure if they're there, if he should. Whatever this is now, it isn't what it was before. Too much has changed just to pick up where they left off. Perhaps that's a good thing. Either way, it's a second chance that he's not sure he deserves, though in all fairness, he felt the same about the first one. She could have wanted nothing to do with him after he told her about Paris, and he wouldn't have been able to blame her in the slightest for that. Instead, she's here, when she could easily have been with someone else instead. While he might not know what to make of that, he does know better than to take it for granted. "I didn't even know you loved me, until..."

Trailing off, he shrugs. She'll know what he means. He didn't know she loved him until that wasn't enough, until it was too late for him to respond as he should have. "I love you terribly, Anya."

[homelovefamily]

Anya is sick of looking for reasons why not. There are many of them, a list as long as her arm, but she doesn't want to read it any longer. She doesn't want to think of reasons no and instead focus on the yes. If every love waited for everything to be just right, then no one would be with who they loved. Certainly not her and Gleb, not her parents, not her great grandparents. A princess and a revolutionary were never meant to fall in love, but they have. Neither of them fully chose the lives they were born to leave, but rather their parents did. They can pick where they go from here.

The elevator comes drifting back into her mind, her insistence that she couldn't choose between them. A pointless assertion given that she feels that she has chosen or perhaps has had her choice made for her. She didn't want to make them fight for her, didn't want to go to the victor of some battle of egos. But Dmitry's words had shaken her, like he had thrown down a gauntlet. He hasn't even come to her door to apologize or explain. She doesn't want to always be the one chasing after him to right wrongs they both have made or made worse.

Letting herself be pulled closer to him, she rest her arm on his shoulder, hand on the back of his neck as she looks up at his face. There is something reassuring about his arm around her waist, grounding her in a way that she didn't know she had missed until it was gone. "I never did. I'm very stubborn," she points out the obvious, not mentioning that she had worried her hope and optimism had been misplaced.

Nodding she knows what he means exactly and it hurts her heart. "It was never too late." Her voice is barely above a whisper. They are so close that a kiss would be an easy thing to have, to reach up and press her lips to his and wipe away the brutal sadness of the last kiss they had shared. But as much as she wants that, Anya isn't certain if she can have it. It might be too soon, things still so fragile. "I know. And I'm here."

[butstill]

She's here. It still feels unearned, like a gift meant to go to a different recipient, like a mistake has been made somewhere that he doesn't particularly want to correct but probably ought to. He wants to ask why she's here, why him, but he doesn't dare disturb whatever this fragile, tenuous peace is. She's too close for him to push her away, her hand against the back of his neck sending a shiver down his spine. Besides, she's right; she is stubborn, and if she's made up her mind, he has no business trying to unmake it for her. She asked him moments ago why he wouldn't let them be happy. Gleb can't say for sure if they ever will be, if this chance will lead where he wants it to, or if they'll be able to regain what they had so briefly and then lost, but he doesn't want to be what stands in their way.

The odds of their being here at all seem so slim, so unlikely, and he suspects that if they lose their chance this time, there won't be any getting it back. Too many odds have been defied. They're both alive when they weren't meant to be. He thinks they might as well make the most of that, and if this is what that entails, it's worth holding onto with both hands. When he walked away from her in Paris, he had no choice, or rather, they had both already made one, and there was only one direction to go from there. When he sent her away the last time he was here, he believed she'd already made up her mind to be with someone else, or at least that those feelings would have interfered with what was between the two of them. Now, it's just them, and she must know what this means to him. She's never seemed to be intentionally cruel. If anything, her kindness — an uncommon soft word of gratitude between strangers — was part of what he found so entrancing about her from the start. Lying about this would accomplish nothing but making an already complicated situation even more so. He can't imagine that she would.

Just looking at her makes something in his chest ache. Absently, Gleb wonders how apparent that must be as he nods, swallowing hard as he looks down at her. "You're here," he echoes, his own voice as quiet as hers. "Anya, I want..." He can't quite say it. The distance between them is so slight now, though, that he thinks it must speak for itself. Kissing her would be the easiest thing in the world, and yet he still doesn't know if he's supposed to, if that's a possibility again.

[homelovefamily]

His echo of her words brings her smile to the surface once more, a sense of rightness settling into place. She is here and she wants to be here. All she wanted was for him to open the door and let her explain, to break through the dark cloud that has hovered over them since the elevator. Since he became a ghost in her own life against her wishes. She never wanted to lose him. She didn't know he mattered to her so much until she nearly did. The heart is a strange thing, love stranger still. It is easy to say that such confusion and hardship is God's will, trails to make someone earn their reward.

Anya isn't as certain of that as others in her family might once have been. There has been so much suffering in her life, so much fear and loss and pain that she has to believe in the possibility of good or else she will never manage to survive. And this, this is a good thing. But it isn't a reward for either of them, Gleb isn't her prize and she isn't his. She cannot explain it, doesn't know where it falls. But she believes that love and overcoming obstacles and heartbreak is enough.

She wonders briefly about Dmitry, about the obstacle his own words and actions have constructed. Then she just steps passed that thought, brushing it aside for another time. There is no doubt over her standing here, Gleb's arm around her, his hand in hers, the closeness of her bodies. She knows what she wants. She can tell from the way that Gleb's swallows, the look in his eyes that maybe, she's allowed to have it.

"You may," she breathes permission before lifting herself onto the balls of her feet enough to brush a kiss to his lips, showing him that it is all right to want that, that she wants it too.

[butstill]

It's a strange thing, how someone who started such a brutal war within him could make him feel so at peace. She exhales a quiet permission, though, not needing to hear the rest of what he wanted to say, and presses up on her toes to kiss him, and everything suddenly feels right, like pieces slotting back into place. Perhaps it's dangerous, too, but most of the ways in which that's the case are left behind them, fragments of another life that don't need to matter here. At least that's what he's been telling himself, a justification for acting on the feelings he was never supposed to be able to. The most he ever did before was hold her hand, a lingering good-bye before he left her to be with her family, to go to his death. They're both alive now — the painful hammering of his heart in his chest speaks to that, and the ghost of her breath against his lips — and the past doesn't have to matter to anyone but them. They could be anyone. She could have any life she wanted. Somehow, seemingly miraculously, she's here with him.

He always knew better than to take that for granted, stunned by the mere possibility of being with her in the first place, but that's even truer now for having lost her, no matter how briefly. At her consent, he nods, one arm still around her waist and his other hand finding the curve of her jaw as he leans in to kiss her. It's nothing like before. Though he's been haunted by the memory of the last kiss they shared, rough and desperate and something with which it would have been too easy to get carried away, both of them acting like they had something to prove — and though he might well have enjoyed such a kiss under any other circumstances — this time, when his mouth finds hers, it's soft and gentle, as if he's doing so for the first time, learning the way she feels, savoring the opportunity to do so at all. She's so lovely that it hurts just to look at her, but he doesn't have to look now, his hand sliding further back and into her hair as he slowly, carefully, deepens the kiss, not wanting to pull away until he absolutely has to.

Once, he never gave much thought to romance or relationships, carrying with him the vague assumption that he might well marry and have a family one day, but too focused on his work to give it any real consideration. It was just a simple fact then, nothing that he really felt. He never expected that loving someone would feel like this, sickly sweet and agonizing and far more intoxicating than any drink he's ever had, all-consuming. He's far too sensible to give in to the notion of his life revolving around someone else. At the same time, he's known since Paris that a part of him belongs to her, surrendered unwillingly on the cold streets of Leningrad, violently ripped away without any sort of warning and leaving him a lost, broken mess. He would still have been hers even if they'd never spoken again here, if she spent the rest of her life living happily with someone else. He wouldn't have it any other way.

[homelovefamily]

A soft sigh escapes her as his hand touches her cheek. A precious thing that she had assumed to be lost has now been found. Warmth floods her body, frothy and light, making her feel a bit like she could be lifted right off the ground if it weren't for his arms around her, his mouth on hers. It isn't the passionate, rushed embrace of their last kiss. Anya isn't chasing after something that she is desperate not to lose. She isn't looking to hold onto something that is already gone. This is a softer, gentler kiss. Nothing like this had happened before they arrived in Darrow, nothing remotely close to it. It never really occurred to her.

Now that she knows this feeling, knows Gleb beyond a uniform and a boy on the other side of a fence during a dark time, she doesn't want to forget it. There is no rush in this. No hasty cataloging of his touch, of her mouth on his as she opens it slightly for him, cards her hand in his hair, feels his stubble against her skin. Time breathes in this kiss, soft and certain, assuring of others that will be next.

Her parents always assured her that she would have love. They let her sisters have their romances even as the walls closed in around them. Love is a light, a guiding force. It undid them all in the end. After the darkness cut her off from her past, there was just that promise of love, of family, of belonging that kept her warm as she trekked across Russia. It wasn't romantic. It was a place to rest her head. That is what Gleb is. Something scary and safe and unknown all at once. A person who will let her rest at last.

[butstill]

It's easier than it likely should be to kiss her like this. In a way, that's always been the case, but Gleb is more acutely aware of it now. That first morning she turned up on his doorstep after he made a confession that he hadn't known she would remember, he'd been so caught up in the unexpectedness of it and the chance to act on what he'd kept so long buried that he hadn't needed to give it much thought, acting then on an impulse that he wouldn't have even known he had. This is different — still anchored, perhaps, in the same sort of desperate longing that he's carried with him for so long where she's concerned, but a quieter form of it now, neither sharp and sudden and fueled by some living nightmare nor with the simplicity that followed, when he didn't know he was going to lose her. There's a weight to this, a significance, but a certainty, too. It doesn't need to happen all at once. She's chosen this, and he may not know why, but he won't question it.

Even if he wanted to, he doubts he could. Her arms around him are like an anchor; her fingers burn where she touches him, as if to mark him as hers the way he knows he is. He feels cut open and bled dry and healed all at once, and all because of her. One person shouldn't have so much power. There's an irony in the fact that she does now, that he's given it to her like this, that he would do so over and over rather than try to cut himself off from her. If that were ever an option, he would have been able to do so a long time ago. He's well past that point now.

He doesn't know how long he stays there, lost in her and a kiss that's both soft and intent. Certainly it can't be very long, but in those moments, the rest of the world is shut out and nothing else matters, and it might as well be a lifetime. If this was all he ever got from her, he could be content with that. Already it's more than he expected, both at the start and after thinking he'd lost her for good. Instead, for a moment, a part of him wants nothing more than to draw back just enough to ask her to stay, improper and startling a thought as that is. It might even seem worth acting on if not for the part of him that still doesn't quite know where they stand. This is a beginning, not a continuation. They can't just ignore the last few weeks. He knows she wouldn't lie to him about something like this, but a part of him still can't help but wonder what might happen when Dmitry enters the picture again, and that in itself would keep him from rushing forward, no matter how right it might feel in the moment.

That much, he buries, dismissing it as out of place and inexplicable. He shivers a little as, finally, he draws in a deep breath. "I choose this, too," he says, perhaps belatedly, perhaps needlessly. He chose her in Paris, even if Anya standing before him now didn't experience that herself; he chose her on a relived night in Yekaterinburg, over and over until he died in her arms. It seems unlikely that anything would prompt him to want to make a different choice now. "I always will."

[homelovefamily]

It should require more for them to be stitched back together. Love is enough, she believes that to be true, especially when coupled with trust and faith. When Anya had come to stand in his lobby on her birthday, she hadn't expected it to take three days to get him to open the door, to let her in, to start to say what they both needed to say.

In stories, the hero is saved by the heroine's kiss. This isn't the same, but the revival feels right. They are both awake after a nightmare, only this time no one died in the night.

What happens next is a mystery, but she knows that she wouldn't have to carry on alone. Won't have to mourn something that barely had a chance to exist. They are getting their chance back. Perhaps it isn't quite in the same shape as before, but she wants to believe that they are better for it. She doesn't know what will happen if or when Dmitry speaks to her again. That thought feels a little sour in her mouth as it has been over a week and she hasn't seen him either. Work is an excuse that only goes so far. She cannot be the one who begs him to find her for forever. Her pride is too much for that.

Breathing deep to steady her heartbeat, to cool her blood after such a kiss, she nods as she smiles up at him. "I know. Please never doubt that I know and care," she assures him as she affectionately rakes her nails against the base of his skull. Laughing softly she shakes her head. "I didn't think getting you to talk to me again would end like this."

[butstill]

Gleb exhales, slowly and just a little unsteadily, at the way she touches him, his chin ducking so he can rest his forehead against hers. She's as beautiful as she's ever been, and this still feels a little surreal, like if he moves away, something might break and the two of them might be left in the position he'd thought they were in. It was strange enough the first time, when she showed up at his door after some bizarre relived night from their past, but in a way, it made sense, too. He hadn't ever expected that she would return his feelings, but there'd been no seemingly concrete proof that she didn't, only a few moments into which he tried not to read something more. Now they've been apart for weeks, and this last one in particular has been agonizing, filled with things he was sure were true that she's now negated. No matter how much he believes her, trusts her, it's hard to shake that. For her, though, to have even a chance of being with her again, it's worth it to try. He would be a fool not to, and genuinely so this time, not just assuming as much based on a few misinterpreted statements.

"Neither did I," he says quietly, the words coming out on what's nearly a laugh of his own, just a bit shy of one. "I think this is the last thing I would have expected." He doesn't know precisely what he thought would have happened instead; he hadn't gotten as far as considering that, too intent on staying away from her to try to give some wounds a chance to heal. He's beyond grateful now for her persistence, enough to put on hold any lingering questions he might have. With the tangled, messy state everything was left in when he last checked, he doesn't want to ruin this peace by asking what this means for her feelings for Dmitry.

He kisses her temple, her cheek, the corner of her mouth. "I'm glad you came."

[homelovefamily]

Her eyes flutter shut, her entire body stilling, breathing slowing as she feels his kiss on her temple, her cheek, and finally the corner of her mouth. She doesn't want to move, doesn't want to jinx it. For this moment it feels as if the world is spinning around them. They are the fixed point, an axis. Moving might shattered the fact that coming here wasn't a mistake. That three days had been worth the wait and the questioning stares from him neighbors.

She has no idea what she will do with Dmitry, what is to be done about that pain and confusion. But one burden has lessened for her. Breathing has becoming easier once more.

"I just wanted you to look at me again." Opening her eyes, it is her turn to look. To memorize the expression his face, still smiling as she does. "I'm glad that I came. I wish we didn't have to do this to start with."

But wishing won't take it all back, won't wipe memories away. She doesn't know if she truly wishes to banish them, just wishes that they had never felt this pain at all.

[butstill]

"So do I," Gleb says, nodding solemnly when he lifts his head to look at her again, absently brushing a strand of hair away from her face. The words come unbidden, but he supposes there's no sense in pretending they aren't true. Of course he wishes they hadn't had to do this at all. That afternoon, the last time they spoke, was excruciating. There's no turning such things back, but if he could, he would, if only because he knows now that he's spent all this time believing things that weren't true, that what she said wasn't what he thought it meant. Before, it was painful but necessary, a sharp jolt back to reality after he let himself get so caught up in the impossible fantasy of loving her. That doesn't seem so impossible anymore. They've had so much heartache just to apparently find their way back to each other, and he isn't sure what the point was.

He'd do it all again, though, without hesitation, if it meant winding up here with her. There are so many things he should say or ask, and he knows they can't just act as if nothing has happened, as if there weren't a rift between them for so many weeks. Picking up where they left off wouldn't do any good, when where they left off was her telling him that she loved someone else. She's here now, no matter what her reasons for that may be. He won't take that for granted.

"But you're here now."