In the sun drenched courtyard, outnumbered five to one, the battle starts. A bullet from a fascist she does not know the name of and has never had a conversation with blows through her shoulder and sends her to the ground. Another bullet ricochets from the metal struts of the church and grazes her neck. Bleeding out, her fingers reach for Sidney's, who had fallen less than three feet away, but can only just brush them. They die and their names are not remembered.
This is likely. This is probable.
The first shot is fired and Zhenya takes one shot into the opposing crowd before dropping the gun, picking up Sidney's hand and running. They don't look back as they run and run, far away from La Cage, far away from anybody that knows them.
Zhenya with her fake ID and money she had scraped together by selling her pride, Sidney with the right sort of clothes and voice and name - they manage.
The apartment is small, the window has a crack in it and they have to shove a bucket underneath the sink. They love it. They hang up repurposed bed sheets as curtains, make a bed out of stolen pallets and work far too hard for far too little.
In this ending, Zhenya forgets the promise she made to Dolores. She forgets that her title is Martyr. She is Zhenya Novik and love is enough. Sure, sometimes they bicker and the milk is sour and the wind is cold. Sure, sometimes Zhenya cannot get her nervous system to not see love as a threat, an offered hand as a fist. Sometimes they are tired and unkind and difficult. They get through it. Over and over again, they choose each other and choose a new, better life.
A path could diverge further here too. Perhaps Zhenya remembers her promise to suffer. Perhaps Sidney could never hurt her enough for this oath to be fulfilled. And so she turns to self-punishment, be it blade or bruise or bad decisions. She becomes the Sacrifice that Dolores always needed. So it goes.
In another ending to the war of Le Cage, fate forces Zhenya's hand.
The battle begins and she forces Sidney to run, pushing her gun into her hands so she could cut her way out if need be. Zhenya doesn't bother ducking from bullets, doesn't run, simply scans the crowd until she sees who she is looking for.
She strides across the battlefield, hand on knife, weaving through attacks even though she barely registers them. She follows the sound of the laughter, the flurry of movement, the shock of orange and blonde. Their eyes meet. They both smile. Only one of them will come out of this, if either of them come out at all.
Zhenya doesn't feel afraid. She doesn't feel panic, as she did not ten minutes ago. All she feels is a surety, a rightness, that her feet have led her exactly to where she needs to be. She unsheaths her knife. Time to end this. One way or another.
_____________________________________________________________
They crash together like stolen cars. Like magnets. Like a fist against flesh. They steal moments in the back of the tea room, the democracy room, the now-empty Krott house.
Zhenya kisses like she's drowning, bleeds like a saint. The marks on her skin aren't purely from Luka - her own two hands can enact Dolore's will all on their own. She's no longer under any illusion this is good for her, but that's not the point. The point is the pain.
She learns the language of salt and scrub and how cleaning can feel a lot like purifying. She learns to avoid looking at herself in the mirror. She might not have bruises to hide anymore, but shame has its own glow. She isn't sure if the shame grows from her want or from her fear, but she isn't sure that it matters any more. It is what it is.
Sidney never hurts her. Treats her gently. Like she's precious, like she's fragile, like she's worth something. Zhenya knows she's wrong. Knew it even when all they dared to do was brush each other's hands. She had warned Sidney that she was broken, that she didn't know how to be loved unless it came with endurance.
Zhenya had stopped being a Krott. She had stopped being a wife. She had stopped being a gangster. So what was she, with those things stripped from her? She never knew how to just be. She clung to the title, the purpose that Dolores had blazened on her soul. The Martyr, The Innocent, The Sacrifice. It let her know exactly what to do. Submit, endure, suffer.
-
You wouldn't think it would hurt so much. Some rice scattered on a hardwood floor. But when you had been kneeling on them for several minutes, discomfort set in. As time ticked on, the pain built and built and built until it was unignorable. That's the space that let the Innocents in. When you couldn't disassociate from your body and it became about how long you could let the pain in for.
Zhenya took a deep, shuddering breath, a furrow between her eyebrows as she tried to still her shaking body. It was particularly pronounced in her outstretched arms, each of which held a book. Sweat was beading on her forehead. She had closed her eyes; she felt it more keenly the less sensory input she had. That included checking the time - pain had a way of distorting it, stretching it out and out until each second felt like an hour. Checking the time gave your permission to quit if the numbers said it had been long enough. Zhenya was not interested in facts. She was interested in pushing her body as far as she could based on feeling alone. She would go until her body quit, not sooner.
The strain in her shoulders finally became too much and the books tumbled from her hands with two hard thumps, making her gasp as the blood rushed back to her dropped arms. For a moment she couldn't move them at all, her nerves not responding to her requests for them to shift. She forced herself to be thankful for this - it gave her longer on the rice as she was too hungry to have the strength to push herself up on leg power.
Which meant she couldn't move quickly enough when she heard the door opening. Luka, home early. She had knelt for too long.
She tried to scrabble to her feet but her arms still weren't in full working order, and she pitched sideways, slamming her shoulder into the wall. She managed to get to standing, but rice was sent rolling across the floor. She didn't have time to pick the rice out of her knees or shove the books out of sight. She didn't have time to catch her breath or wipe the sweat off her skin or hide the small, sharp metal blade that had been resting on the table, in case she couldn't kneel long enough.
Her brain is still clouded such that no plausible excuses come to her tongue. She was bad at lying at the best of times. And Luka in particular had a way of looking at her that made her feel like she was flayed open, every secret and every flaw as visible as if under a microscope. Her body betrayed her with its treacherous shaking. From pain or weakness or fear was woefully unclear. She stands in the middle of the room like a naughty child.
Even years into marriage, Zhenya's breath catches when Luka walks into the room. She looks like a queen in fur and eyeliner and power and Zhenya feels like a ghost next to her. Paled in beauty. Maybe this was part of the suffering too - knowing she could never be good enough for her.
Luka takes in the room, whatever she was about to say when she entered dying on her lips. Confusion and amusement played out in equal measure for a second until the pieces slotted into place. Her eyes rested on the red knees and the blade. Then she crossed the room in two strides and curled a hand under Zhenya's chin, tilting her head up to force their eyes to meet.
Zhenya didn't even mean to start talking, but like so many other times when faced with the possibility of Luka's anger, she started pleading. This was different from the old begging though. She'd had less and less cause for that these days, as the blows came fewer and further between, as more and more flashes of the love Zhenya always knew she was capable of broke through. This was not trying to avoid hurt. It was trying to explain it.
" - And I'm grateful for you, I really am, I know you've been trying and I know we've been better, but that's the problem don't you see? I made a promise to an Innocence and I can't break it. So if you won't hurt me, especially when I deserve it, I'm not keeping my promise and - " She was crying now, breath hitching in-between each word, becoming less and less coherent while Luka looked into her face, searching her for untruth. " - I just want to be good. She said, Dolores Dei said that she'd chosen me for a role, that I was her Sacrifice and if I don't suffer Luka, if I'm not good at it, she'll leave me and she won't love me anymore so I need it, I need to hurt."
"Fuck, Zhenya." Her eyes keep flicking down to her knees, and then to the blade and Zhenya knows she is wondering where she's done it, if she's done it, if she caught her early enough. She releases Zhenya's jaw and does the totally unexpected: she grabs her upper arms and pulls her close, wrapping her arms around her in a crushing embrace. That's what breaks Zhenya completely. Her words stop being comprehensible as the panic, not born of violence sets in but the panic of the lack of it. She gives one single half hearted struggle against the arms containing her and then just sobs into Luka's chest. "Alright. Okay. We're gonna fix this, you and me. You don't need to listen to some Innocent, okay? Just need to listen to me."
Zhenya attempted to shake her head, but stopped as soon as Luka hushed her. "No. None of that. I broke you, alright? So now I just gotta fix it."
