Chapter Text
Till wakes up on his sofa the afternoon after the day Mizi gets married with his face puffy from crying and still half-dressed in the clothes he’d worn to the wedding. He’s not in love with Mizi like that, not anymore, but it still aches to think back on how totally radiant Mizi had been throughout the proceedings; he’d never met anyone else who looked —who was— so incredibly, convincingly happy, like she had a key to heaven on earth.
He finds his phone wedged under the cushions and out of battery. While Till waits for it to charge, he turns on the news. His coffee splashes all over the floor.
BREAKING NEWS. The chevron announces. TOP ACTOR LUKA DEAD AT AGE 33 DUE TO HOUSE FIRE.
Wait— Luka, as in Ivan’s terrifyingly famous husband? Who as an in-law was staying the night at the old estate to participate in some secretive family-wide tradition—
Till’s heart probably stops for the long tortuous minutes it takes for the chevron to keep scrolling: CEO, WIFE, CHAIRWOMAN, AND CHAIRMAN OF ALNST ENTERTAINMENT ALSO DECLARED DEAD AFTER ESTATE BURNS TO GROUND THE NIGHT OF DAUGHTER’S MARRIAGE. NEWLYWEDS IN HOSPITAL BUT IN STABLE CONDITION.
His heart starts beating again, this time hammering so fast it feels like it physically hurts. Till’s hands go up to scrub at his hair, so anxious he doesn’t even know where to focus first. Mizi — and Sua, and Ivan — house fire? Stable condition? HOSPITAL?!
“What the fuck is going on,” Till asks his empty apartment, after speeding through all known human emotions in a matter of seconds.
—
seven hours ago
With the Great Anakt no longer meddling in their lives, Ivan is forced to prevent details of his sister’s disastrous wedding night from leaking to the press the old-fashioned way: with a lot of money.
And a little blackmail. But mostly through bribery. It’s his bad luck that the detective interviewing him looks like the honest type. Ivan lets his face stay expressionless and makes his shoulders tremble a little as if he’s putting on a show of being composed; he’s supposed to be in shock and mourning, after all.
“You have no idea who might have done this or how?” The policeman asks.
Had they kept things inside the house, the forensics department wouldn’t be puzzling over the liters of blood sprayed over the lawn or the human remains scattered through the house. Ivan had wanted to accelerate the fire to obfuscate the evidence a little, but Mizi was understandably unwilling to let him act alone at that point. The consequences of his actions, Sua might say, although she won’t be able to say anything like that without coming across as a hypocrite for at least twenty years.
He puts on a pensive expression. “My parents have had their fair share of family disputes and business rivals, but to suggest someone go as far as murder….”
“We have reason to believe this was a personal matter,” the detective says. Well, they’ve probably heard about the crossbow bolt removed from Sua’s thigh and Mizi’s cut hand. Hardly the work of a professional assassin.
“It was. My family belongs to a cult and they believed they had to murder my sister-in-law to maintain our wealth.” The detective looks like he wants to hit him. Ivan takes a minute to appreciate the way the reveal doesn’t burn his tongue. So Anakt is truly gone.
Ivan considers his reputation, his family’s reputation, and the likely consequences. Naturally, he has no desire to be hounded by paparazzi…a freak accident is the most benign take on this sordid night, surely? The press interest will burn out soon. In any case the newlyweds can think of it as an extended honeymoon; they’ve always lived in a two-person world after all.
But first he must get through this interview. “I’m sorry, officer,” Ivan says, slumping and running a hand through his already messy hair. “It’s hard to accept that the people you’re closest to can do something like… but I really didn’t expect…”
The police detective leans forward, hooked on the reveal Ivan is dangling just out of his reach. The man must be new; he’s too naive. “What happened?”
The words rush out of Ivan like he’d been holding them in. “In laws.” He says hollowly. “You see….”
—
two hours ago
“You scapegoated your dead husband.” Sua deadpans. Mizi is asleep next to her, curled up on a cot and all but sleeping on top of Sua’s arm. They must have talked already; both of them look like they’ve recently cried.
“And our elitist parents,” Ivan corrects lightly.
The hand attached to the IV stand twitches. “I should’ve accused you in my interview.” They’re at an impasse, Ivan knows. He helped them without truly standing on their side, which Sua will always remember, but she’d held his hand. Or he’d held hers; out of mutual agreement, they are both doing their best not to recall that moment —although Ivan suspects they’d reached for each other simultaneously. Mizi had said something similar about Ivan loving Sua. Admittedly, she had done so as a poor manipulation tactic, but he…felt something for Sua. Even if they weren’t exactly the same. Even if he was still, fundamentally, alone. They were on parallel lines; even if their lives had not been on intersecting tracks, when he turned his head to look, Sua had been there.
Sua strokes Mizi’s hair. She hasn’t stopped actively touching her wife since Ivan’s arrival. “It really all burned. The Grea— they’re gone. But how did we…” not explode, she doesn't say. As if she’s afraid of tempting fate —or Anakt.
“The power of love…?” Ivan suggests. Sua glares at him balefully; she hates his suave and cheerful persona and Ivan’s allergy to anything that isn’t lighthearted joking when he puts it on.
“I burned their idols,” Sua muses. She’s not just willing to accept a miracle, not when her continued life with Mizi is at stake. “Or…we didn’t drink the wine.”
“Oh Great Anakt, with this libation we pledge ourselves to thee,” Ivan intones. Sua glares at him and covers the sleeping Mizi’s ears. “Well, the conditions were the family versus the bride. I suppose you are a bride, and I am disavowed. Ergo, not family. A perfectly workable loophole.”
“And now we’re suspects in our family’s murder.”
“I’m an accessory at best,” Ivan says lightly. Sua concedes the point. Anyways, they’d both lied about the timeline to cover up whose blood was on Mizi’s hands.
Sua stares through him. “And that best man speech you gave, was that meant to be your suicide note?”
Ivan says nothing. Sua thinks about his cryptic, needling words after the wedding party. “You knew,” Sua says, her conviction growing. “You just….let them carry on with the night? You were laughing at my naivety.” She wants him to bleed, now. She hates him.
“I used to believe I had something to hold over you,” Ivan admits. “You were so convinced that you were right and you think and behave as if you only have yourself and your feelings to consider.”
The hedgehog’s dilemma hadn’t considered the possibility of a hedgehog who enjoyed biting. Sua’s glare is caustic.
“You didn’t give her a choice,” Ivan reminds her tauntingly.
“Did you give her a choice to be part of your twisted little experiment to understand love?”
“I never claimed to be the person she loved the most, or the person who loved her the most,” Ivan says, smiling right back.
“Well? Did you find what you were looking for?” Ivan recalls that he had said something about wanting answers during Hide and Seek. Ah. Protective Sua, gauging him to see if he’s an active threat to Mizi.
“You made me realize I had worse than nothing. I could have lived the rest of my life not knowing that.” The admission creeps out of him like bile. It’s one of those lapses of control he can never seem to fully eliminate, the kind of outburst that only makes Ivan’s life infinitely more complicated and never in a good way. Ivan hates it. Hates her. He gets up. “I need to go,” he says stiffly.
Even though she wishes Ivan would disappear to a deserted island with no way to contact the rest of humanity, Sua feels pity swell over her like a wave towards her stupid younger brother.
After all, she and Mizi had both reached out for Ivan (with varying degrees of reluctance). As Mizi said, he owed them; more importantly, Sua will have to teach him thoroughly, instead of letting him pick up everything in his skewed, indirect way.
The first lesson will be how to ask questions directly, but that will have to wait.
At this angle and with her recovering injury, Sua can’t wiggle down the bed to kiss Mizi’s sleeping face the way she wants to, but she kisses the pad of her fingers and then skates them down Mizi’s nose. Her ring glints in the late afternoon sunlight.
They have time. Mizi, Sua’s precious, wonderful savior, her wife and her everything, has given them time.
—
fifteen minutes after sunrise
The Ivan Mizi is getting to know doesn’t make sense to her, and she’s starting to get the impression that she confuses him an equal amount. She doesn’t know what to make of the person who bandaged Sua’s wounds and then left her unconscious body on the floor, only to round it off by holding her hand when they both thought they were dying. On balance, Mizi still thinks Ivan probably loves Sua, although if it is love Ivan's is miles away from the security Mizi has come to know from Sua’s love.
It's strange to think about how the person in front of her used to stand with his arms held out under trees when Mizi climbed them to fetch stuck kites and rubber balls. Once, Mizi fell and broke his arm.
“Type A positive blood,” Ivan says when people start making noise about getting Sua a blood transfusion. “Hers is type O negative,” he says about Mizi. She's a little surprised when, seeing the obvious confusion on her face, Ivan explains, “Sua was jealous that she couldn’t give you blood.” Mizi hadn’t known that. She also hadn’t realized until she registered her own surprise over how Ivan actually answered her unspoken question that she expected Ivan to change the subject or misdirect. “I held it over her,” Ivan continues. “Because I was terribly jealous and wanted her to feel bad like I was.”
One of the things Ivan thinks he owes Mizi is unvarnished honesty. He’s become openly petty towards Sua in a way that would’ve made Mizi dislike him without the cults and betrayal, but petty, unlikable Ivan is easier to accept in the aftermath than smiling, good-at-hugs big-brother Ivan.
Unlikeable, petty Ivan still helps Mizi wipe off the incriminating blood still crusting on Mizi’s hands and coming off in little rusty flakes.
Arriving at the hospital is a blur. Five people have to drag her away from Sua and it’s only after she starts bleeding over a hospital orderly that someone notices Mizi’s hand has been cut open. Then people make noises about getting her cuts stitched up and by the time they’re done Mizi finally processes that Sua is in surgery and not being taken from her. She and Ivan wait from opposite sides of the hallway until the surgeons come out and say that everything will be fine. They wheel out Sua on a hospital bed.
The relief of seeing Sua again, even hooked up to a dozen machines, is enough that Mizi finally feels her all-nighter catch up on her. She drops like a rock.
—
two hours and thirty minutes ago
Sua is asleep and Mizi knows this because she has her thumb over Sua’s pulse where her heart beats. It’s different from the usual rhythm Mizi knows, but that’s okay because she’s sleeping off the general anesthesia. It’s not nearly as horribly fast and light as it had been in the helicopter, which was the last time Mizi got to hold her wife before they rushed her into surgery.
Ivan has been hovering around the hospital ward since he got out of his interview with the police. He was there when Sua opened her eyes, briefly, about an hour ago, but Mizi bristles when he gets close and Ivan has picked up on it. The hospital bed is large enough for Mizi to fit next to Sua and there’s a cot for any overnight stays. Ivan probably arranged all of it, but Mizi still doesn’t want him here right now, even if she did ask Anakt to spare him.
Mizi watches Sua breathe. She told herself that she wasn’t going to say anything, that she was only grateful that Sua is here and she doesn’t have to be afraid anymore, that she wasn’t going to pressure Sua with questions straight after waking up from surgery because Sua almost died, but when Mizi went to sleep she had the dream where Sua saved her again, only this time Sua explodes into a million pieces and—
The wet stickiness on her face is from tears, not blood. Mizi can recognize the difference now.
Sua wakes up before the tears dry on Mizi’s face. The words spill out uncontrollably.
“You were going to leave me,” Mizi says hollowly. “You planned to. You packed a runaway bag and told me to bring a change of clothes in case the ritual happened and you weren’t even going to say goodbye.” And in the morning…Mizi can’t think about it.
Sua flinches like she’s trying to avoid a blow. “I didn’t. Mizi, I didn’t,” Sua says, frantic. “It was only supposed to be a worst-case scenario. I thought it wouldn’t happen. It’s only happened once in living history!”
“But it happened to your aunt,” Mizi says.
“I always thought it was because he didn’t want it enough!” Sua cried. “He didn’t like my parents or my grandparents. He kept saying that a smaller ceremony would have been enough and he hated it when my aunt tried to buy him things. And then Ivan married Luka and all he got was chess, so I was so sure–” Sua tears her hands through her hair and bites her lip. Mizi instinctively jolts forward and thumbs Sua’s poor lip free.
“Why didn’t we just…elope?” Mizi asks. She wants to understand. Not because she’ll ever leave Sua, even if she gets really mad and can’t forgive her —not that Mizi imagines that ever happening, because choosing to love Sua is like putting faith into a god; it’s not Mizi’s job to question how her happiness arrives, or the order of her universe, but to be thankful for it— but because…Mizi wants to know her wife better than anyone else in the world. Because Sua should never be alone, even in her thoughts.
“It’s how most of our extended family died out,” Sua says miserably. “The original stipulation was that all of our ancestor’s descendants had to undergo the game night ritual. But then eventually the family gets big enough that a second cousin or something thinks they can move their family away and stop coming to the main house…and the newlyweds always die within a month of the wedding. Literally all of them. My great-uncle had a dozen unrecognized kids from mistresses and we identified all of them from their obituaries, Mizi!”
Sua starts crying and tears slip slip slip in a continuous stream down her little face. Mizi kisses and licks the tears before they can drop down her chin. “And,” Sua says when the tears have stopped and she’s too tired to be anything but honest. “You knew you wanted to be married since you were four.”
“To you,” Mizi protests. They’re lying down now.
“I know,” Sua says immediately, with complete conviction. Mizi loves her so so much. “But I didn’t want to make you choose between me and anything you wanted. I could have persuaded you, but it felt….wrong to do that. I was changing you so you’d give up on your dream and it wasn’t even because I didn’t want to give you that, but because I was scared of something I was convinced wouldn’t happen.”
Mizi rolls over abruptly and holds Sua’s face in her hands so she can’t look away. “Sua,” Mizi says solemnly. “If you died, the Mizi right now would die too.” Sua flinches and her head jerks away. Mizi holds her steady and keeps looking into her purple eyes. It’s such a soft, soft color, perfect for Mizi’s sweet Sua. Her sweet Sua, who has tears welling up in her red-rimmed eyes. Mizi kisses the tears away. “I’m serious, Sua. That person would be a stranger. I would only have one thing in common with that other person: we would both love you, but that’s all.” Mizi squeezes Sua’s waist. “I’ve never felt anything like that,” Mizi confesses. “I don’t even think I can call that being angry. I felt flesh splitting under my fist and liked it, Sua. It was like being a stranger….but I loved you. And you’re still here.” She whispers. “So I can live with being me, but please…” Mizi nuzzles Sua’s face. “Marrying you means choosing to be changed. For better and for worse, remember? I want to know when I’m choosing something.” She bites the tip of Sua’s nose. “We make a good team, remember?”
Sua closes her eyes, but not she’s not trying to get away. She looks more at peace than any time Mizi has seen her in what feels like a lifetime. “Okay,” she sighs. She’s as beautiful as a saint.
Mizi kisses the crown of her head and matches Sua’s breathing. Still holding Sua, she drifts into a sleep without nightmares.
—
“Ah,” says Ivan, getting bad coffee from the hospital cafeteria. In the process of suppressing the police investigation and ensuring that no one went to jail, he’d forgotten that under normal circumstances a house fire claiming the lives of one’s family could be considered fairly alarming. To other people.
He’d forgotten to update Till.
—
now
Unnoticed on the counter, Till’s phone starts to vibrate with notifications as it powers back on.
Ivan: (8:30 am) Don’t worry, Mizi and Sua are in the hospital….
Ivan: (9:36 am) I apologize for how vague the last text was. Mizi and Sua are both in stable condition…
Mizi: (12:46 pm) till, don’t freak out. there was a little accident…but Sua & me r fine! we’re at hospital XX…
Mizi: (12:50 pm) till?
Mizi: (13:28 pm) okok you’re probably still sleeping.
Mizi: (14:07 pm) OMG TILL DONT LOOK AT THE NEWS WE’RE ALL OKAY!!