posed like a hyphen (grishaverse | nikolai & zoya)

[fiachairecht]

posed like a hyphen. the grisha trilogy - leigh bardugo, nikolai & zoya. it's never alina anymore, but they manage anyway. 682w, rated t.

He feels Zoya's eyes on him even before he's fully awake. It's always her, these days, and he's stopped wondering how she gets in. He would, in fact, almost be disappointed if he woke up and didn't find her curled in his armchair, kefta somehow immaculate over contorted limbs and mascara hardly darker than the shadows under her eyes.

"You're still here." Voice hoarse, too early for it to push easily past the scars on his throat. Pre-drawn light presses against his eyelids, and he decides against opening them. Better to just imagine Zoya for now, to see her in his mind's eye twisting a lock of hair around her fingers.

The hand in his imagination has a scar running along its palm.

Zoya hums quietly from across the room and he frowns, squeezes his eyes shut tighter until the image dissolves in scattered dots of light. "I'm here every morning," she says, and he is suddenly, inexplicably grateful that she doesn't mention that she hadn't been there when he fell asleep, that there is nothing still about her presence.

She returns to silence, then, and Nikolai waits. Thinks about a time when nothing between them would have been silent, when everything around them would have been refracted through ... Her. He digs his fingers into the mattress and hates himself for missing the war.

"Why?" he asks. He's asked every morning since she started doing this, and she's never answered before, always preferred wriggling out of the question with some sly dissimulation or distraction. He doesn't really expect anything different this morning.

But she does speak. "I don't—" Too fast, too short: a truth she didn't mean to say, and she cuts herself off with a sharp intake of breath.

Nikolai holds his own breath, keeps waiting, keeps his eyes shut. Listens to whisper of Zoya's kefta against the chair, wonders how much she'll say. The room is lightening around them.

"I don't know," Zoya says, almost inaudible. Has she moved away? He hadn't heard the click of her boots on the bare stone by the doorway. "I don't know," she repeats, louder, frustration and pain bleeding into the words like he hasn't heard since the worst days of the war. "Because you're here, I guess. And she's — they're not."

"She?" But he can already tell he's said too much.

When she speaks again her voice is flat, though not unkind. "You need to get up."

The door creaks, slams. He opens his eyes to an empty room.

*

The next morning is different. He wakes all at once, an extra weight on his bed and Zoya's gaze closer than ever. She's cross-legged at the foot of his bed, just out of reach, and he gives silent thanks that this isn't one of the mornings he's woken screaming from nightmares.

She speaks first this time. "I'm not her, you know."

In anyone else's voice, the pity would have been too much to bear. In Zoya's, it's so unexpected that he's breathless with the gift of it.

"I don't want you to be." The platitude comes too easily.

"Liar," she says, and smirks with a twist of her lips that doesn't nearly reach her eyes. Her hair looks like it hasn't been brushed in days, and he realises that he hadn't seen her once yesterday.

He sits up, clutches the sheet against his scarred chest. "I've been told I'm good at it."

The joke falls flat, the smirk slips off her face. "You bloody idiot. You think you're the only one who misses her?"

Yes, he almost says, but he knows better, and knows better than to try to lie to Zoya twice in as many minutes.

"She's not here," Zoya continues. He listens to the not-quite-crack in her voice, fights the urge to reach out for her. "She's not here, and one day we're going to have to be okay with that."

"Sure," Nikolai says, in a voice even he doesn't believe. "One day."

He closes his eyes again. Pretends he doesn't notice when Zoya shifts up the bed to sit beside him.