homelovefamily | [life is a road and I wanna keep going]

[life is a road and I wanna keep going]

Katyusha is at her door.

Anya is confused when she opens her door, heart skipping a beat at the sight of the furred beastly queen of a cat. Pushkin has been whimpering, scratching at the door and couldn’t be coaxed away from it. No treats or promised walks as soon as she’d finished hemming the skirt she’d recently purchased secondhand could dissuade him. Finally she had given in, opening the door to show her dog that there was nothing there. The cat sitting there on the doorstep as if she owns it quickly proves her wrong.

Scooping up the feline, she gives her a scratch. “Did you escape Dima again? He ought to get his screen fixed,” she murmurs to the cat. Looking down at Pushkin, she bends down to give him a little scratch as well. Then she steps inside to scoop up her purse and keys. “I’ll be right back. I just have to take Katyusha home.”

Hastily Anya sets off to do just that, moving as fast as she can without running and with a large amount of cat in her arm. When she gets to Dmitry’s building she finds that his name is no longer on the buzzer or the mailbox. Confused she negotiates her way inside and up the lift to his down. Readjusting the cat in her arms, she knocks on the door, wondering if he’s inside before trying the handle. It gives easily and when it opens, Anya feels her heart stop.

Dmitry’s gone. The emptiness in the apartment isn’t that of someone who has just stepped out, gone to work and will be back. No, this emptiness feels heavier. It’s a weight she knows too well. Throat tightening, she takes a few cautious steps into the apartment, just enough to confirm her suspicions. He really is gone. Katyusha mews and nuzzles under her chin.

The idea of lingering turns her stomach. The apartment feels like a tomb. Making her way outside and down to the street, she hails a cab, no worrying about the expense for once. As the car winds its way back across the city to her apartment, Anya calls Gleb leaving a message for him to please come over as soon as he can. Her voice sounds hollow and oddly cracked.

Without quite processing it, she pays the driver and makes her way back inside her apartment. Pushkin is waiting eagerly on an armchair, wagging his tail as she sets the cat down. Absently she makes food and water for both animals, settling down on her couch to wait. She doesn’t know what to do or how to feel. She just knows that she can’t be fully alone, that she has to tell Gleb. That she wants him here.

When the knock at the door finally comes, Anya has her knees tucked half under her, one bent so she can rest her chin on it as she flips through a book but can’t fully manage to read the words.

“Come in,” she calls knowing already who it is. Her heart needs to see his face. She needs reminding that Gleb is still here.

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Something is wrong.

Gleb doesn't know what it is, hasn't even been told as much, but as soon as he hears Anya's message, he knows. It's obvious enough in the sound of her voice, tremulous and dull, and in what she says, asking him to get there as soon as he can. He does, of course, dropping everything he's doing so he can make his way to Anya's building. Though it wouldn't have been too much trouble to call her back and try to find out what might be going on that way, it doesn't seem worth it. If she wants him there, he would go regardless. If it were something too dire, she would have called again, or told him as much in the message she left.

There is, at least, some measure of reassurance in that, but it isn't enough to calm his nerves entirely as he stands at her door and knocks. Letting himself in when he hears her voice from inside, he crosses instinctively to where she's sitting on the couch. "Anya," he says, her name a heavy exhale. "Are you alright? Did something happen?"

Unfolding herself and getting up from the couch, Anya feels like she is moving through water. Every motion requires more effort. Nothing seems to be getting through. Not the words on the page or the radio she’s left on, playing some song that sounds so many others here. She doesn’t even know how long she has been waiting for Gleb. Minutes? Hours? Definitely not days. It feels like time has stopped and a confusing emptiness has taken its place.

Somehow she makes it the two steps without knocking into anything, wrapping her arms around him and holding on for dear life, grateful that Gleb has already done the heavy work of making it most of the way to her. She knew he would come. Feeling guilty for forcing him to leave whatever he was doing, for interrupting his day will come later. But for now he is warm and solid against her. He’s still here. She isn’t alone. She can get through this.

“Dmitry’s gone,” she murmurs into the fabric of his chest, breathing him in and out. Responding to her owner’s name, Katyusha flicks her tail, rustling the blinds from her perch in the window sill. “I needed to know you’re all right.”

Of all the things she could have said, everything that might have prompted the message she left him a little while ago now, Gleb isn't expecting this. Perhaps it's because they've spoken so rarely of Dmitry, the subject far from a comfortable one even before the afternoon they all three got stuck in an elevator together. Or maybe it's just that there's something jarring about hearing her speak another man's name while pressed this close to him. There's no mistaking how rattled she must be, between the way she sounded in her message and the look on her face and how tightly she holds onto him. The last ought to be reassuring, given the circumstances. But while he can't logically hold her being upset against her, it's not something he's entirely sure what to do with. She wanted him here because Dmitry is gone. He knows full well that she can't have been with anyone else this past while — wouldn't expect that sort of duplicitousness from her even if it were possible — but it's an uncomfortable thing to consider.

Selfishly, he can't be sorry that Dmitry has returned to whatever would have awaited him when he left Paris, having never shaken the suspicion that he wouldn't give up so easily. He nearly lost Anya once because of Dmitry's interference; there's no way that her being in a relationship would have been enough to deter him. For Anya's sake, it's a bit murkier. He would never wish this sort of loss on her, but neither does he want to see her grieve someone else with whom she's in love. She chose him two months ago, but who's to say what else might have happened if Dmitry were still here?

"I am," he says quietly, trying to force any instinctive tension out of his voice and posture as he wraps his arms around her. "I'm here." He doesn't know what to say beyond that, hating the steadily encroaching sense of uncertainty. Instead, he just brushes a soft kiss against her hair.

None of this fair. It isn't fair for this city to just take someone away or back or whatever had happened. It isn't fair that this place brings people from all over, even when they're annoying and hurt her and she loves them despite herself. Her feelings towards Dmitry had been a complex puzzle, a messy knot of emotions that she had been trying to sort through. His avoidance of her had both helped and hurt the problem, putting feelings in perspective. How could she trust someone who claimed he loved her and then ran away? Ever since the fourth of July things had been a little better and a little worse.

Now there is just this. His cat at her doorway and no sign of him. He wasn't just avoiding her; he was gone.

It isn't fair to involve Gleb in her confusion and heartbreak, but Anya doesn't want to be alone right now. There are others to call, but the one person who can make her feel better is Gleb, his arms around her, solid and sure. She knows it must hurt him, to see the pain this other man had caused. That it might worry him.

Selfishness has seized hold of her. She isn't ready to let go of him or turn him away, instead she's seizing it and calling him to her. Holding tight to him she inhales the scent of him deeply. "You are. Oh Gleb, I don't know what to do. I just needed you."

Letting her hold him close, Gleb feels his jaw tense, lets it happen, knowing that's the one thing he can do that won't be noticeable under the circumstances. He doesn't want to push her away, even with the sick sort of feeling that's settled in his gut; he doesn't want to parrot her own words back at her with what it sounds like they mean. She needed him here because Dmitry is gone. A small, traitorous part of him — ironic, probably, when he's been a traitor for months now, when the most traitorous thing he's done is loving her in the first place — can't help but think back to the day she came to tell him about Dmitry's confession, when she couldn't answer if anything would have happened between them if Dmitry had been there first. He'd felt like nothing so much as a replacement. Now, though he knows she hasn't been with anyone else since they started sleeping together, that feeling has returned, making him wonder about what the nature of any of this might be.

Perhaps the worst part is, no matter how bitter he might be, he knows he would be that for her if it were the only way to be with her. He's lost so much of his dignity already, it doesn't seem any worse to knowingly be her second choice, if it came to that. Beyond that, though, everything is an odd mess that he can't seem to sort out. He'd like to be grateful that Dmitry is gone, his last of very few encounters with the other man memorably unpleasant, but he can't, not when Anya is this upset, not when he has to see her this upset over the loss of someone else.

Were it just a friend, perhaps, or anyone he didn't know she had such complicated history with, or even anyone whom he hadn't seen act the way Dmitry did that afternoon they were all in the elevator, it wouldn't matter. He can't very well expect to be the most important or the only person in her life. It's the man specifically who makes it all murkier, not least when Gleb doesn't feel as if he can say a thing about it.

"You have me," he says, quiet and a little hoarse, keeping his voice low the only way to ensure that it stays steady and without emotion. "You always have me." She called and he dropped everything and came running, and it was all because of another man. He wants to understand, wants not to be angry with her when she's lost someone whom she cared about, but it's a difficult thing to repress. Or maybe he's just angry at himself for giving himself to her so fully when he always knew she had feelings for someone else. "I'm not going anywhere."

All of her feelings are so complicated, so hard to explain. Everything has gone noisy and then very quiet at all once. Her upset has left her feeling disjointed, needy in a way that she isn't used to. The years have made her stand on her own, made her a singular person when she spent so much of her years part of a larger set. Having that snatched away, forced to be independent has put a shell on her. She thought she had stopped needing people beyond the basics, even if she never stopped wanting them.

This is different. This is proof that there are holes in her armor.

Gleb is also proof. He crept into her heart, became more than a man giving speeches in Nevsky Prospekt, more than man who shared a significant moment in her past and differing ideology. Love has made her greedy, made her want to hold on and never let go. She'd call him even if Dmitry hadn't vanished after so many awkward months. She'd hear him call to her a thousand miles away.

"I know. I just —" she shakes her head against his chest before lifting her gaze to look at him. "I'm not used to losing things unexpectedly. Dmitry was my friend and this place sent him back and I wasn't expecting it. I don't know if I could survive the loss of you. I was so afraid."

Of course she would survive it, Gleb thinks. It's bitter and uncharitable, but it's hard to be anything other than that where her friendship with Dmitry is concerned. He doesn't even know most of the specifics of it, only that the other man's arrival changed and nearly ruined everything between him and Anya, despite how mad she seemed to be at him and the other conman who accompanied her to Paris the night he arrived here himself. Somehow, in hardly any time at all, they went from that, and Dmitry asking him not to tell Anya of his presence in the city, to Anya coming to tell him that Dmitry had just professed his love to her. It wasn't exactly the act of a friend. Neither was what he said in the elevator, or the way he apparently stayed away after, or as far as he knows, what Dmitry said when he did finally turn back up again. (He hasn't asked for details; he doesn't think he could stomach them.) Maybe he can't understand the connection between the two of them, but nothing that he knows of having happened here gives him any clue as to what the appeal there might be.

Even that might not matter quite so much if not for the doubt he can't wholly shake, either, the sense of being a second pick of some kind. She chose him, yes, weeks ago. She did so in Dmitry's absence. Would that choice, the one that she'd previously said she wouldn't make, have been different if Dmitry had seen her first? Would any of this have ever happened at all had Dmitry not arrived months after he did?

Try as he might to ignore it, he can't silence all of those thoughts at once, not when he has to see her so upset over someone who never seemed to show her very much regard at all. There is, of course, no way to choose whether or not to care for a person. Gleb learned that the hard way when he had orders that would have required him to kill a woman he already couldn't get out of his head. It hurts even so.

"It's something we all have to get used to around here, I think," he says with a frown, unsure how to address any of the rest of what she's said. "People leaving."

Dmitry vanishing under such strained circumstances has left Anya feeling slightly guilty. She had told him that she had made a choice, that he had forced her hand. She doesn't regret choosing Gleb. In fact, she is certain that she would have chosen him under less dramatic circumstances. It had been her choice all along, her heart urging her in a direction she hadn't been certain of until that night of continuous nightmares, of gunfire and flames. When she had woken up that morning she had known, had felt it deep within her. Following that feeling had led right to his door, to a kiss that had been building for months, hidden by years.

Anya doesn't know if she believes in fate. She does believe that there is a higher power, that something pushes her in each direction. Both men had been a part of her life years before she had known their names, albeit in two very different ways. Now Gleb is a more permanent part of her life, a part that has both everything to do with who she was and nothing at the same time.

He never lied to her. They hurt each other, but he never lied. He never pushed for something she didn't want. The same cannot be said for Dmitry. Part of her wonders if she wished him away, banished him back to Paris, to whatever life was in front of him. That her distrust of him, the fact that he never really seemed to want to be her friend has shoved him through a door.

All she can hope is that it isn't to some violent fate.

"I know," she agrees with a sad little nod. "But I don't want to get used to it. I've spent years being forced to deal with a loss I couldn't name. I don't want to think of it happening again. Or be blamed for it."

On some level, Gleb knows that that's all the more reason why he shouldn't voice his own probably irrational thoughts on the matter. What Anya has lost isn't more than plenty of other people have lost as well, and yet that can't possibly diminish the weight of it, especially now that she does remember what happened that night. Of course, he fails to see how losing Dmitry under such calmer circumstances could possibly compare to that, but it isn't his right to say so. He hardly knew the other man, after all, even if he knew just enough to dislike him immensely. None of them asked for the situation in which they wound up here, some strange, stilted triangle that would never have come to pass anywhere else, but that doesn't make it alright for Dmitry to have acted the way he did about it.

Gleb reminds himself, not for the first and almost certainly not for the last time, that he doesn't really know what Anya and Dmitry's history is, but he can't see how the details of that really matter. It doesn't change what happened here. It wouldn't bring him back, either, and guilty as he might feel for it, Gleb is glad — or relieved, more accurately — that that's the case. From what he's seen and heard, from Dmitry going to Anya just to profess his love to her, to that awful afternoon in the elevator, to the last time they spoke, it seems unlikely that Dmitry would ever have stopped trying to win her over and push him out of the picture.

He stepped back the first time because it was what made the most sense. Anya is the one who stopped him from doing so again. He doesn't really think she would wish to take that back — not with the way the past month has gone — but that doesn't make it any easier to be on the receiving end of her grief for someone else now, summoned here because she needed him in another's absence. A chill runs through him; he suppresses it as best he can.

"No one's going to blame you for it," he says, brow furrowing slightly. It's the easiest, most detached thing to comment on. "Why would they? It happens here."

Spending years in relative isolation, barely exchanging names with anyone else let alone more information has had an odd effect on Anya. She's better than she was, but she spent so much time encasing herself in a shell, only ever exchanging the barest of pleasantries with those she saw regularly that she lost touch with how to do it. Vlad and Dmitry were different. They knew her, seemed to know who she really was and believe it. It might have been nothing more than an elaborate con, a long-haul game that turned out to be true, but the effect was the same. She started to let people in again. No matter what happened, no matter how many hurt feelings, they were people that she cared about.

How can she even begin to explain that to Gleb? That Dmitry and Gleb exist in different realms to her. Dmitry was a possibility built on a fantasy, on a shared memory of a sunny day nearly twenty years ago. That she loved the prickly parts of him just as she was frustrated and confused by them. He had lied to her, lied about her, avoided her. Her love for Gleb has a different shape, comes from a different place. He makes her heartbeat quicken, her blood burn with warmth, not rage.

Perhaps what she is grieving for most of all is the loss of her friend. The loss of yet another tie to Russia. "I know it does. That people come and go without reason. It doesn't make any sense after everything that happened, but he was another part of Russia that is gone," she bites her lip, wringing her hand absently before stilling herself. "It feels like I banished him with my anger."

The words make him feel a little ill. Gleb can't fault her for being upset for having lost someone she cares about, of course, even if he never saw any qualities in Dmitry for that to be earned, can't tell what might have been left for her to miss. Neither can he shake his discomfort, though, or the sense that he shouldn't be here for this, shouldn't have to. He didn't come to her apartment today to watch her grieve for a man who never seemed to treat her as a person, who certainly never let her make her own decisions, and who belatedly tried to win her affections even when she'd made another choice. The more she says, the worse the feeling gets, until they may as well be back where they started, with Anya at his door, telling him that Dmitry professed his love to her. That she didn't know if anything would ever have happened between them if Dmitry had been there sooner, making him effectively a replacement again.

"If that were truly the case," he says slowly, "if your anger could have managed that, then wishing he weren't gone would also mean wishing you'd chosen him." He doesn't outright ask if that's the case, but the air feels charged and heavy and tense, and the question may as well be hanging between them. He wants, more than anything, to turn and leave, to come back when this isn't so present. That he doesn't feels like a testament to how much she's weakened his heart, that he would stay here shouldering her grief when to do so is agonizing for him.

"And that you'd ignored the reasons he gave you to be angry."

One possibility that Anya won't let creep into her mind is what would she would be like if Gleb had been the one to leave and Dmitry had remained. The thought had crept in earlier, tightened her chest like a vice grip, making it hard to breathe as her heart started to stutter. The pain and guilt from losing Dmitry was one thing, a different sort of hurt, but losing Gleb.

Losing Gleb would shatter her.

She doesn't want to be broken again. Not like this, not in this or any way.

Her eyes widen as she shakes her head, reaching out to knot her fingers in the front of his shirt. "No, Gleb," her words are emphatic. "I don't wish that for a moment. He wouldn't listen to me, refused to hear what I said, put words in my mouth, made me a liar. It feels like I banished him, but if he had stayed and you had left? I wouldn't have picked him. I would have wished to follow you."

At least she would have had something to go back to. The thought occurs to him unbidden, and Gleb closes his mouth to prevent the words from leaving it. There's enough here already, everything tense and fraught, without bringing so specific a reminder of that into the fold. He doubts there would ever have been any comfortable way through this, anyway. Everything became so askew after Dmitry's arrival, first in his own head, and then in their actual relationship, that it's no wonder Dmitry's disappearance has had a similar result. Part of him wants to be relieved that the other man is gone, having never been convinced that he would stop pursuing Anya; part of him feels bitterly guilty for that, knowing Anya shouldn't have had to lose someone she cared about.

From where he's standing, though, Dmitry never much acted like he cared about her. Gleb doesn't know what happened when they traveled to Paris and before then, but he knows what happened here, and not once was he made anything other than uncomfortable by it. Had Anya wanted to be with him, he would have accepted that — had been doing so until that afternoon in the elevator when she said that she wasn't with either of them — but it would always have stung a little. That didn't happen, though. And it feels wrong to let the fact that Dmitry is no longer here do any more damage than his presence already wrought.

"I didn't," he says quietly, his voice as steady as he can make it. "I'm still here." He doesn't know how to say the rest, that it's hard to watch her grieve for someone else, someone who treated her the way Dmitry did, harder still to have her say that she needs him in Dmitry's absence. It's true, but he suspects it would come out wrong. "But your words were ones that he needed to be told. Your anger was for a reason. Would not saying it at all have been better? Keeping him here only if it meant letting him treat you that way?"

It feels a little cruel to explain this all to Gleb, to even be talking to him about how Dmitry's disappearance bothers her. It's a betrayal of sorts, a reminder of how the sweet, light feeling of their relationship fell about after Dmitry's ill-timed declaration. How long the road has been to get back to where they are now. Both men are so different and she made her choice, is comfortable in it. There is nothing to be ashamed of.

But she thinks of Gleb's face in the lift that day. Hurt etched there like she had scorched the earth and all because of her. This is might just bring that pain back, sour some of the goodness once more.

She doesn't want that at all. Won't let it happen. All of her stubbornness will be devoted to keeping that in check.

"You are," she agrees with a nod and relieved sigh. "You are still here."

She says it to reassure herself. That this isn't some dream and when she wakes up she will be utterly alone. "I know. I'm still angry at him and I don't regret telling him the truth even if he refused to listen. I've never been one to hold back my words and I wasn't going to start now." Her shoulders slump slightly as she pauses. "I'm so confused. I hated how he was acting, but it was another connection to Russia that is gone."

Gleb takes a breath, tries to keep his expression schooled, to act as if it doesn't hurt just to hear him talking like this. He knows, of course, that she must be right, and of course he doesn't want her to have lost a friend. It's just hard to imagine, with the way all the pieces have fallen, what good that connection might still be. As far as he knows, Dmitry made very clear where he stood with Anya, that he wasn't interested in a relationship with her that wasn't romantic and wouldn't stop persisting to try to get one. It's hard to imagine salvaging much of anything after that.

He should be glad, probably, that Dmitry is gone for that very reason. Chances are, the other man would never have let them be. The way Anya seems to feel about it, it's hard not to wonder if that persistence might well have succeeded at some point, though he knows that isn't wholly fair and would never say as much out loud. After everything, though, it's hard to hold such bitter thoughts at bay, especially having been summoned here under circumstances such as these.

"I won't pretend to know what you two shared after you met," he says, as much of a concession as he can make. "But I also can't pretend to know why someone who treated the way you did seems like such a loss now."

The moment that she had boarded that final train in St. Petersburg, she had started her farewell to Russia. Gnawing on her lower lip, Anya tries to reel this mess of feelings back in, tries to sort through them even as she just wants to let them explode. A stiff upper lip isn't exactly Russian, but neither is bemoaning this fate. Things already were so different with Dmitry, since she had pushed him away, told him that the position he had put her in wasn't fair. That loving someone shouldn't be an ultimatum.

She doesn't know the way that she loved Dmitry, just knows that she did, just as she was frustrated by him. It wasn't the same way that she loves Gleb. So much confusion over something that should be easy, something that she hadn't given much notice to before. What she wouldn't give for one of her sisters to guide her.

As if sensing that something isn't quite right, Pushkin comes and brushes against her shins. The feel of his fur makes her crack a faint smile despite herself. "I shouldn't be burdening you like this," she admits, looking up at Gleb and reaching out to touch his cheek. "I'm not good at losing things, that's really it. I haven't had something to lose in a long time and this caught me by surprise. Thank you, for coming when I asked."

Though he thinks she's probably right about that, Gleb doesn't have it in him to agree with her outright. No matter how difficult it may be for him, he would rather she feel like she can ask than not, anyway. Whatever discomfort he feels, it would probably be worse if she were keeping this to herself and he were unaware of it. They've had trouble enough already, some of the wounds inflicted by the three-person drama they found themselves in not ones that are likely to heal very quickly. He trusts her, and he doesn't resent her for anything, but especially with that third party gone now, there's no way to change what happened or the situations they wound up in. All they can do is try to make the best of it now.

Anyway, Dmitry is gone. It wouldn't seem right for him to be able to come between them even in his absence.

"I will always come when you ask, Anya," he says with a wry little curve of his mouth. He's not always sure that that's a good thing, but he does know that he wouldn't change it even if he could, which he can't. "And I am sorry you had to lose someone you care about, even if I am not sorry he's gone."

Not once did Anya think that Gleb would feel the same loss that she does. Things had been strained between herself and Dmitry, with the man not listening to her, ignoring her, frustrating her even more than he had back in Paris, in Russia before that. They at least knew each other. Gleb and Dmirty were always on different sides of the line, different parts of Anya's life. They had no shared past relationship. Everything had been tossed aside, every chance however small dashed away.

She appreciates that Gleb is giving her condolences, that he's here beside her as she muddles through this complicated loss. She couldn't bear to lose him again, not when she's only just gotten him back.

Carefully, she leans up to softly kiss his mouth. "Thank you," she says quietly. "And I'll come if you call. Please know that."

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[life is a road and I wanna keep going]

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