something is forever (either way, it ends)
a/n: tiff and i decided to keep hurting each other with this fic. the actual title of the google doc was: zoyalai but make it hurt. enjoy.
Materialki: @iri-lynx (x) @tessorange-art (x) @paperplanenomad (x)
Ethrealki: @wafflesandkruge @dregstrash
Summary:
Zoya ends things with Nikolai on a Tuesday. She walks out of their shared home with nothing except the clothes on her back and a secret that's eating her alive. But before there was an end, there was a beginning.
Or, the story of Zoya and Nikolai in two parts.
Ao3 Link
Excerpt of Chapter 1 below the cut
Zoya was going to throw up.
She could feel her mouth watering in preparation for it, but she grit her teeth trying to tame it back.
“What–I don’t–” Nikolai was pale now. The palest she had ever seen him. And it did not look good.
In another setting, in another time, she would have teased him–told him that his good looks did have their limits. He would roll his eyes, of course. Then he would laugh and quirk up his mouth to an approximation of a smolder. Then he’d approach her with that same stupid look plastered on his face. And even if she turned away or clasped her hands over his face, he would make her look at him. He would stick his face so close to hers until she could see that ridiculous, beautiful, silly face until she broke. Until she was also laughing and smiling and wrapping her arms around him–
She gripped the handle of a suitcase tighter, a vague attempt of grounding her to this moment.
To this dreadful, heartbreaking moment.
“Nik–I’m–I’m sorry. I just think we’re–going in separate directions.” Her voice was crystal clear. Like ice.
Which was odd, because everything in her seemed to be crashing and burning.
“What did I do?” He burst out suddenly. The paralysis that had overtaken him was ripped away to be replaced with something a bit more panicked. “Please. I just–I don’t know what you’re saying to me right now. What did I do?”
She could feel the pressure in her head start to build. Her vision going in and out.
No. Not now.
She coughed and looked away from him.
“I don’t know how to be any clearer, Nikolai. I think it’s been clear that you and I just–don’t work.”
“Is it because I didn’t take you with me on that last business trip?” He asked. “Is it that I didn’t take your advice on that last legal issue I had with some of the product we were moving? Zo, please look at me. I just need to know what I did, so I can make some sense of–”
“It’s nothing that you did!” She snapped. Her eyes went back to him, and her resolve almost crumbled right then and there.
His face had changed from a deathly white to an angry red. His hands buried in his hair in a manic gesture. He was the perfect picture of a man who looked like he was surprised to find himself at the edge of a cliff, and wasn’t sure if he had a way to get down safely.
And Zoya had to be the one to push him over.
“Look,” She sighed, “We’ve both been busy with work. You have that new merger coming up, and I have a new case that is going to take my time. And it’s been like that for some time. I just think we’re drifting apart. And I’d rather end things now than wait for us to just realize we stopped loving each other.”
She turned to leave, but Nikolai’s hand grabbed her arm, making her face him again.
Another roll of nausea washed over her, and this time she had to swallow down the bile that was dangerously close to rising up.
“That’s it?” He demanded. “That’s all you’re going to say? That we’re both too fucking busy?”
“I–”
“Zoya, you and I have been busy our entire fucking relationship! We have gone weeks without seeing each other. We have been countries apart. Why are you doing this now?!” His hand gripped the fabric of her coat tighter. “Is it someone else?”
“No!” Zoya cried out.
“Is Aleksander back?”
“No.” Zoya replied.
“Then—” The fight seemed to leave him. The grip on her coat was weaker. “Then–do– do you not love me anymore?”
She needed to agree. She needed to confirm his worst fear, so that he could hate her. So that he could let her go. But the words weren’t coming out.
The lie was too bitter on her tongue for them to come out in any disguise of truth.
Instead she just released herself from his grip and took a step back. She needed distance. She needed space.
Because if she spent one more second being close enough to touch him, she would stay.
And she can’t stay.
“Nikolai…I just…think we should just be happy for what we had.” Now her throat felt like it was closing in on itself. “I don’t think we were meant to last forever.”
She was seeing spots in her vision again, but it wasn’t enough to block the devastated look that crossed his face.
It wasn’t enough for her to ignore the way she had completely shattered him.
She turned again, and this time he didn’t grab her. She walked towards their–his– door, but stopped when she heard a faint, “Please.”
Zoya glanced behind her shoulder one last time.
Nikolai was framed in the kitchen doorway. The only light coming from the lamp of the dining room.
“Please, Zoya…please… stay.”
She had joked with him once that he would be the type to beg for anything if it gave him attention. He had responded with his usual smirk and challenged her to it–like he always did.
Looks like she won.
The victory felt like the first of many knives into her heart.
“Goodbye, Nikolai.”
The door shut behind her as she left, and she made it all the way to her car before she collapsed on the sidewalk, her legs finally giving out.
With shaking hands she took her phone out. Zoya’s heavy breathing was all that she could hear until Genya’s “Hello?” was in her ear.
“I need you to come pick me up, and take me to the hospital. I think I’m getting worse.”
-
“I am sorry, Miss Nazyalensky,” The doctor said. She had a perfectly sympathetic look that Zoya wanted to slap right out of her. “Your results have come in, and it looks like your symptoms are progressing faster than we had expected.”
The beeping of the machines next to her was making her right eye twitch.
“What the hell does that mean?”
The hospital gown was rubbing at her skin all wrong.
“It means…it means we might have to adjust your…life expectancy.”
It was too bright in this room. She wished they would turn the lights down just a little.
“Miss Nazyalensky…we are expecting six months.”
There was a beat of silence. Then Zoya burst into a fit of laughter.
The doctor looked at her with a blank expression that made Zoya even laugh harder.
It wasn’t funny. Hearing that anyone’s life has less than a year to live was anything but hilarious. But Zoya couldn’t help it.
All her life, she has tried everything she could to make all the right decisions. She studied late nights. She got into a good school. She ate a salad every now and again. She worked out. She didn’t smoke. She stopped binge drinking. She made enough money to go to the doctor.
And what does she still get after all the right decisions?
A hereditary disease. A last gift from a mother who had abandoned her for yet another man who was going to leave her anyway.
There was some cosmic irony at play in her life. That as soon as she thought she had everything she had ever dreamed about– money, a career, someone who loves her— that was when life decided to remind her that the very family that she has tried so hard to ignore was the one that would kill her.
And that was why she was laughing.
The doctor coughed, “We need you to stay overnight to run some tests. Is there anyone you want with you? Our hospital does allow overnight stays.”
Her chest gave such a strong lurch Zoya was a little surprised that the heart monitor hadn’t gone berserk.
Yes. The admission was so close to the surface that she almost thought she had spoken it out loud. But the doctor just kept looking at her.
“No.” Zoya croaked. “No, I’m fine on my own.”
It was later that night that Zoya found that statement to be wildly untrue.
She almost hated Nikolai. She wanted to hate him.
It was his fault that there was this pain inside her that was twisting around and making her life more of a living hell. It wasn’t bad enough that she had to wait until her body decided to waste away completely.
Now, she felt like the cracks of her heart were starting to undo her, and all she wanted to do was to lay in his arms and feel his chest move up and down against her cheek. She wanted so, so badly to hear him murmur the office gossip while his voice slurred with exhaustion. She wanted to smell his cologne that lingered on their sheets when he was gone for a business trip. She wanted to tease and watch him cook in their kitchen. In the life that they had built.
She wanted, she wanted, she wanted.
Angry tears slipped down her cheeks as she turned her face into the unfamiliar pillow.
Without thinking, she pulled her phone up and hovered over the lockscreen picture of Nikolai pulling a stupid face while at the wheel of his boat when he took her sailing for the first time.
A stronger ache pushed through her, and she was close to throwing the phone across the room. Instead, she moved to her contacts, and hesitated for a brief moment before calling the one person she had no right calling.
“Hello?” The voice on the other hand was rough with sleep and confusion. “Zo?”
“Mal.” Zoya choked.
“What’s wrong?” He was more alert, and she could just picture him sitting abruptly up in bed, jostling Alina in the process.
“No–”
“Don’t lie.” He sighed. “You only ever call me if something is wrong.”
Zoya chewed on her lip.
What the hell was she doing? Maybe she shouldn’t have sent Genya away. Maybe she should have asked her to stay. Maybe that would have stopped her from calling the one-night stand that had been a result of boredom.
“Zo?” He asked in lieu of her silence. “Are you in a ditch? Is that why you can’t talk? Do you need me to come over–”
“No.” She said abruptly. “Don’t come over.”
“Why? Is it Nikolai? I thought we had straightened–”
“I just–”
“Miss Nazyalensky, I need to take your vitals.” The voice of her night nurse interrupted and Zoya was just a hair too late in muffling the receiver.
The nurse came over before Zoya could hang up the phone, and she had no choice but to be under her ministrations for a few minutes before she was alone again.
“What the fuck was that?!” Mal exclaimed. “Are you in a hospital? Zo, what happened? Why isn’t Nik–”
“Just shut up for a second, Oretsev.” Zoya’s headache was coming back. The sharp pain made it hard to piece together how to explain why she was called. Or even to come up with a reasonable excuse to call him.
“How bad is it?” He whispered into the receiver.
She could have lied, she guessed. She could have passed off this late night phone call as an accident. But she had already said her share of lies tonight, and she didn’t think she had anymore in her.
“Six months.” She muttered.
“Fuck.”
She barked out a laugh, “Always good with words, weren’t you?”
“Zoya…Nikolai…He–he doesn’t know, does he?”
She could feel Mal read into the silence. Even from a distance, Mal had a way to read just under the surface of her. It had never been enough for her to let him in–not completely (she wasn’t a fan of being the second thought after the actual woman he loved).
But it was enough that he said, “You didn’t tell him, because of what happened with Alina, right?”
“Nikolai is an idiot, Mal.” Zoya bit out.
His derisive laugh crackled through, “You don’t have to tell me twice. But that didn’t really answer my question.”
“He’s an idiot, who doesn’t know how to quit. If he knew, he’d never leave my side. He’d destroy his life trying to save an incurable disease. He’d hate himself more than he already does, and I’d still be dead in six months.”
These were the words she has been repeating to herself for months after she found out about the diagnosis. She wanted to believe that if she repeated them enough then maybe it would make her feel better about every single time she had to hide from him when she had spent half an hour throwing up, or making up some excuse to go to the doctor’s, or hiding the clumps of her hair that were starting to fall off from her head.
But telling them to Mal with the sounds of monitors and the smells of chemical cleanliness overwhelming her, the statements fell flat.
“He’d want to know, Zo.” He said simply.
She gave another bitter laugh, “Well I’d want to not be dying. But we don’t always get what we want. Not everyone can have miracles like your dear Saint Alina.”
There was silence between them for a while. Zoya knew he wouldn’t hang up on her. Not even after that comment. Because Mal Oretsev may be petty sometimes or pigheaded even more times than that, but at his heart he was kind and he knew what pain sounded like.
“You want me to come over there and try to threaten some nurses to give you the good pillows?”
Zoya smiled for the first time in what felt like a lifetime, “Oh, you’re still the softie, aren’t you? No wonder Alina loves you.”
He laughed and then sighed.
“Zo…it’s okay….it’s okay to be scared of what comes next. When Alina was sick…Alina spent a long time trying to put on a brave face for me, but I just wished she would have let me see her scared. I just didn’t know how much time I would have with her, and I didn’t want to waste one second pretending like everything was okay.”
I’m not Alina. She wanted to say. I’m not going to get better. I’m not scared of what is going to happen to me. I’m scared of what would happen to him if he had stayed with me to the end.
“Haven’t you learned by now, Oretsev?” She said instead. “I’m never scared.”
Mal gave another laugh. There was a noise in the background, and Zoya could faintly hear him talking to someone in the room.
“Alina begging you to come back to bed?” She teased.
“Something like that.” He sighed. “Call again, Zoya. Better yet, call him. You don’t have to do this alone.”
“Yeah, yeah,” She waved him off, “Just go have fun with your saint, Mal.”
“I’ll talk to you later.”
He hung up, and the silence felt more deafening than before.
She didn’t know why she called Mal. She wished she could have even said that at least Mal had gone through something like this situation before–that he would have just the right words to make her feel better about all of this.
But it wasn’t that. Maybe she called Mal because she couldn’t call the one person who would have actually come running to her side.
Zoya flipped open her phone again, and just stared at her lockscreen.
She looked and looked until her eyes felt heavy, and the humming of the hospital faded and she was dreaming. Dreaming of warmer days. Dreaming of him
