Chapter Text
It’s been over a year since she slept in this bed. Very little has changed in Aleksander’s apartment; still, the piles of books placed haphazardly all over the place, still, the pieces of art on the wall that suggest more sadness and rage than seems strictly appropriate for guests and strangers to witness. Baghra treats the home as a place for safety and retreat from a cruel, unfair world, and Alina has mostly done the same in her private spaces. She likes bright, airy colours and lots of blankets. Aleksander, meanwhile, treats his flat like his demons follow him everywhere, and he can only keep them at bay by creating so much chaos that he is impossible to find.
He’s definitely impossible to find at the moment. Alina peeks into each room, head ringing from her hangover, half-hoping and half-dreading that she’ll find Aleksander reading something incomprehensible about the pursuit of utopia or doing a crossword with a theme on houseboats or any number of the boring-old-man things that she used to tease him about. Instead, she only finds an empty sofa with a pillow and a blanket draped over it. He clearly didn’t share the bed with her last night.
The brief distraction doesn’t make her forget that her stomach is unsettled. She wants plain food, but unlike the rest of the house, she finds that the kitchen cupboards are empty. No eggs, no bread. Alina presses her forehead to the cool surface of the fridge door and wills her tears to stay away without success; is she just meant to leave, now, with half-memories of embarrassing herself last night? Can she avoid seeing him until the wedding?
She’s still there when the front door clicks, creaks, swings shut again. The tread of Aleksander’s footsteps would be recognisable to her even at the end of the world, and they check on the bedroom first. “Alina?” Then the bathroom, and with more urgency: “Alina? Where are you?”
“In here,” she calls back, voice shaking just a little.
He stomps in, two bags of groceries in hand. “I thought— god, I thought you’d left for a second. Don’t scare me like that.”
“I thought you’d left,” she mumbles.
“Only to get some basics, I haven’t kept any food here for a while. I left a note.”
“I didn’t see it.”
With a snort, he starts unloading everything efficiently. “Shouldn’t surprise me. We’re always talking at cross-purposes nowadays. I recommend you go take a shower— it should help.” He glances back at her, and something that he sees makes his whole expression soften into not-quite a smile. Reaching out, he smooths her hair back from her face, presses a kiss to her forehead. “I’ll bring you some paracetamol and water. And make you tea and toast. Oat milk and no sugar for the tea, butter and jam for the toast— I remember.”
She could cry all over again. Alina wobbles out of the kitchen, relief seeping like cool mist over sunburnt skin. It’s the sadder, more pathetic twin truth that she’s been running from for as long as she’s been running from them: she is so, so desperately ready to be taken care of by someone who has seen her every bruise and ache since the day she was born.
She stands longer than she needs to under the shower, letting the hot water drum against the tender base of her skull. When she clambers out, she sees one of Aleksander’s giant black bathrobes is hanging on the back of the door; without hesitating, she tucks herself into it and presses her face against the sleeve, breathing his scent in deeply.
The robe is ludicrously long on her, sleeves flopping over hands. She stands in front of the steamed-over mirror, just able to make out the wavy shape of her own silhouette. If she could see her own face, she’d need to face up to everything and begin bargaining. Make plans for how she’s going to walk out, apologise to Aleksander for her lapse in judgement, and leave. Be on her best behaviour until the wedding. Maybe delete his number again, just to save them both from any further temptations.
But she can’t, so instead she swigs and spits a little mouthwash, towel-dries her hair, and heads back to the bedroom.
Aleksander is perched on the edge of his bed, elbows on his knees. Next to him, on a tray, sits her promised tea and toast. “Feeling better?”
“Getting there. Thank you for this,” she says, picking up the toast, putting the tray in her lap to catch crumbs. The layer of jam is thick and sweet and sticky on her fingers.
“Will you be able to keep it down?”
She pops the paracetamol in her mouth, swigs it down with her tea, winces at how hot it still is. “I’ll be fine.”
“Oh, to be 21 again.” He stands and repositions her slightly, and she tips her head back obediently when he gestures. The bristle brush that he strokes through her wet and knotty hair feels like a ghostly echo of an action once so familiar that it was second-nature. “I’d need a full day’s recovery from your adventure last night.”
Are you jealous, old man? It sits on her tongue, the response that would feel right and good. But once upon a time, that would lead to an indignant retort and a struggle that inevitably ended with him between her legs, determined to show off how much energy he still had. So instead, she finishes her toast, awkwardly stares at the ceiling. “I’m sorry about last night.”
“I’m glad you called me when you were in trouble.”
“Still. I won’t let it happen again.”
The brush strokes have moved from the tangled ends, almost to her scalp. She could purr at the steady pressure. “Which part? Getting in trouble, or calling me?”
“Both.”
It stills his hand. The silence fills the room until she turns around to look up at him. His expression is strange, shuttered, a foreign thing that she can’t read. It makes her uneasy. All of the unreadable parts of him should be connected to Luda, not here, when they are alone and breathing in shared memories.
When his hand restarts, he tugs against her hair a little too hard for it to be comfortable. “Is that the plan, then? Walk out of here, back to where we were yesterday?”
“It’s what we should do.”
“Should,” he muses, “need to. Must. Do you remember, Alina, the last proper conversation we had before you ended things, in this very room?”
There were so many tears in that conversation. That’s mostly what she remembers, the choking, drowning feeling of her grief. “It was the right thing to do.”
“I didn’t care about that. But you seemed so certain, I remember that. And I remember thinking: look at how much pain I am bringing this person I love more than anything. My Alinochka, hurting, and because of me. And then you stopped speaking to me. Blocked my number. Avoided my visits to Mama.”
There are no tangles left to brush, now, her hair as smooth as silk, but Alina still doesn’t want him to stop. It’s lulling, and she needs it to contrast the ache in her heart. “I was trying to do the right thing.”
“And was it? The right thing? Because in the weeks, the months that followed, one thing sustained me. I believed you would be happier without me, and without the guilt hanging over you.”
She hadn’t been happy. Farthest thing from it. She’d drifted through the days in a fog, but the memory of that day— the day that Mama almost, almost caught them, missed them by seconds, and the knowledge of everything that would have followed if she had found out— had kept her from folding and reaching out for Aleksander the way she wanted to.
“And you know, I thought, I’ve got to make a life for myself. I’m not meant to be alone, Alinochka. And I thought… If I find someone else, make it formal and good and right, I can at last have my sister back. I can have something of you back, even if it’s just a smile across the table and a birthday card once a year.”
“We can do that,” Alina croaks, desperately trying to put conviction behind her words, even as her stomach cramps at the picture he paints. “I can do that, I promise—”
“Liar.” He strokes his knuckles down the curve of her cheek, along the fragile bones of her neck. Ignores her soft little gasp when he braces his fingers around her throat. Not squeezing, not yet— there’s no need, not when the way he looms is threat enough, close enough for his breath to ghost across the top of her head. “I couldn’t sleep last night. And I had time to turn it over in my head, what I had expected freedom to mean to you. And what I found instead. You,” and he tightens his grip ever so slightly, “miss me. You miss me so much that you can’t stand it.”
Alina opens her mouth to argue with him. Nothing comes out.
“And I was thinking, all night. You made a choice and I respected it, but you know what? You chose wrong. And letting you do that,” he eases his grip for long enough to sit behind her on the bed, long legs framing hers, his other arm wrapping around her waist and tucking her back against his chest, “that was my mistake.”
“This isn’t right,” Alina manages, but it’s a weak, pathetic little thing.
“You’re standing in your own way.” Aleksander lifts her hair, presses a kiss to the back of her neck. “I didn’t see that you needed someone else to make those choices for you.”
“But Mama—”
“Is this what you need, Alina? For me to be the villain, so you can play the sweet little innocent? Not complicit in the ruin of our family, in breaking Mama’s heart?”
“I…”
“Because I can do that. I would, for you.”
Her throat struggles with the words: yes, please. Please take the choice away. But what it represents— the destruction of everything wholesome and good in her life, the end of any hope for a normal future— is so monumental, so crippling, that she can’t make them form.
Instead, she scrunches her eyes shut, lifts her hands and cups the fingers circling her neck. Holds them gently, presses the softest kiss to his palm. Begs him to read her mind.
He brushes his thumb over her lips. “For anyone else, you know, I think I could be a good man. For Luda, I think I was.”
That name is the last thing she wants to hear. Alina screws up her nose, tries to lean away from him.
Around her jaw now, his fingers hold her in place, don’t let her move an inch. “I don’t think I can be a good man when it comes to you, though, Linka.” If there is any sorrow in his words, it is eclipsed by the naked triumph of his grip, the way his teeth catch on the tender skin of her jaw.
In the end, she breaks first. Twisting in his arms, she presses her mouth blindly to his— misses a little bit, tries again until she finds him— fingers wrapped like a vice in his shirt. They tumble backwards and roll until he’s on top of her, her body sinking into the mattress under his weight. The tie holding his robe falls open with the slightest pull, and his hands are everywhere, tracing her breasts, her waist, her thighs. She can’t keep track, too focused instead on the weight of his kisses, trying to keep up with each movement, trying to relearn this language.
He breaks the kiss and wraps his hand back around her neck, pins her to the bed. Stares at her— blood of her blood, brother, brother— with naked lust. “You kept this from me for a year. A fucking year.”
That doesn’t seem fair. She suffered too. “It was the right thing to do,” she insists again, though it sounds less certain than it once did.
The way his head tilts is almost thoughtful. Assessing. He has that shuttered look again, and it maybe should be frightening, but instead it makes her pulse between her legs. “Apologise,” he says simply, gentle and dangerous.
“I was trying to—”
“Apologise.”
Tears are building in her eyes. She’s not upset as much as overwhelmed. “... I’m sorry.”
A blunt finger slowly traces its way from her knee, up the tender skin of her inner thigh, right to where she knows she’s glistening wet. “I think I prefer the rewards of being the villain,” he says, sounding thoughtful. It’s a torturous touch, gentle, stroking at her over and over. His thumb pets at her clit, soft swirls, and she can feel herself dripping down onto the bathrobe under her back. “So pretty.”
She preens. Even as the tightness in her chest builds and tears threaten, she wiggles, tries to spread her legs a little wider, lift her arms over her head, arch her back. Show off.
“Hold still,” he orders, and her breathing gets shallower still as she hears the sound of his belt coming loose.
The first flicker of doubt arrives when he crawls over her still mostly dressed, tucks his arms under her knees and bends her almost completely in half, toes pointed at the ceiling. “Um, Sashulya, aren’t you going to— you know?”
He’s hard. She knows it because he reaches down and taps the head of his cock against her a few times, grinding against her, getting slick. “What, baby?”
“Stre— you know,” she says impatiently, embarrassed, trying to kick at him a bit. It’s impossible, the way that her knees are almost at her ears. “Finger me a bit? Get me ready?”
“No.” He kisses her nose, a gentle peck. “No, I don’t think I will.”
All other thoughts are obliterated by the push of his cock. She keens, high in her throat, overwhelmed by the pleasure-pain of it; the tears break free, dripping down her cheeks. It’s been so long that she’d almost forgotten how it feels, the breach of it, the wrongness and rightness all at once. It’s too much. It feels good. It feels too good.
Through it all, Aleksander watches her intently, eyes flickering over her face. When the sound from the second thrust is a soft, fluttering ah, he grins in triumph. “She can still take it, I see.”
The angle rubs so sweetly inside her. “Please,” she begs, unable to move or get any momentum from this position. “Please, please, Sasha.”
He relents, but it’s still slow— too slow to really push her to orgasm, too slow to do anything but wind her up ever-tighter. “I’m going to steal you away from here. No more running away, Alina. No more hiding behind what people might think. We’ll start over, somewhere far away, and you’re going to smile prettily and introduce yourself to people as my wife and take my fucking cock whenever I want you to.”
“But—”
“It wasn’t a question,” he grits out. “We did it your way, last time. Now we’re going to do it my way.”
Alina finds it difficult to argue with him when he starts a devastating low and steady grind with his hips, allowing for just the right kind of unrelenting pressure, her legs shaking like a leaf as heat builds in her hips. It’s all she can do to hang onto his hair and keen through gritted teeth, watching every flicker of his lashes, the blush building high on his cheekbones as he speeds up.
When she comes, it is sudden and devastating. It feels like a benediction.
And all of the tension she’s been holding for hours— weeks— months— flows out of her muscles, leaving her limp and gasping. He rearranges her body easily, wrapping her legs around his waist, and starts to chase his own pleasure in earnest, now slamming against her, the force of it just sending more pleasure rippling through her skin. She barely even flinches when he digs his teeth into the skin below her collarbone, clearly determined to bruise, to leave a conquering mark. “Missed this,” he mumbles when he draws away, and she can’t tell if the words are meant for her ears or slipping out without him realising. “Missed this, missed you, fuck, missed you so fucking much.”
She remembers what it looks like right before he comes. The twitch of his cheek, the furrow of his brow. And when he glances at her, questioning— clearly asking without words— she wraps her arms around him tightly, silently, giving permission.
As he comes in her, she dreams of a future where they can walk in the sunshine together, hold hands while they buy ice cream cones, and kiss away the mess in broad daylight.
Later, much later, after they have showered together and fucked again and eaten more toast, she straddles his lap on the sofa. The television is on but they haven’t been watching it, more wrapped up in relearning each other, exploring what has changed and what has stayed the same.
She traces his brow. “When are you going to break things off with Luda?”
“I already did.”
Alina freezes in surprise. “What?”
“This morning. I called her and told her it wouldn’t be going ahead. That I’d handle the logistics of cancelling everything, shoulder the cost, whatever.”
“But you— but—”
“You told me that you didn’t want me to get married, last night.” He opens his eyes, lazily chases her for a kiss. “I knew then that I couldn’t go through with it.”
“I was drunk!”
“But you meant it. I know you did.”
Alina tries to manage the warring feelings: guilt, relief, joy. “But maybe I should have— or shouldn’t have—”
“You’re forgetting,” he chides her gently. “It’s too late, now. The next time you try to leave me for my own good, I’m chasing you to the ends of the earth. Blocking my number and locking the door against me won’t be enough, solnishko. Never again.”
She settles against him with a grumble, hiding her blushing cheek on his shoulder. “You make it sound like a threat.”
“Good,” he says drowsily, carding his fingers through her hair. “Then we understand each other perfectly.”