Zoya | Laia (relinquished) wrote in dunhavenic, @ 2018-08-08 16:38:00 |
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Entry tags: | !log, * kit, * terri, c: elijah marshall, c: zoya marshall |
WHO: Zoya Nikolaeva (Marshall) and Elijah Marshall
WHEN: August 8, 2018
WHERE: Arbor Crossing Apartments #101
SUMMARY: Reunions and Revelations
WARNINGS: Lots of feels. Like...don't read if you don't want to be crying at your desk at work feels. A little cussing.
When she had left Dunhaven three years prior in a state of turmoil the likes of which she had never experienced before, it hadn’t been as sudden as it had seemed to everyone else. Elijah had been on so many work trips during that span of time that she had hardly seen him. She had barely talked to him. She had been at such a loss that it felt like there was nothing left to say. No matter how much she tried to talk to him, he had always swept her into some romantic date or he’d done something extravagant and generous to soothe wounds. Whenever she voiced her concerns or her wishes for things to be different, he promised her the future and told her that things would just be like this for now. But then, it was all she had been able to see. She had missed her husband to the point of feeling so distant from him that it was like welcoming a stranger who had once been her best friend back into their home. Even when he was there, he was always planning the next time that he could leave, and she hadn’t been able to live like that anymore. It would have been one thing if he had been in the military. She could have taken the distance then. It wouldn’t have been so...voluntary. So intermittent. It was supposed to be the best years of their lives. They were supposed to be building together, and instead, she felt more alone than she ever had. She knew that part of it was her fault for not pushing harder. Confrontation made her uncomfortable and clammy. It made her feel like her heart was seized up and she couldn’t move or breathe, and expressing her unhappiness with him was harder than she ever could have imagined. She loved him deeply even when she left, but she hadn’t been able to continue living like they were. She was so tired of being on the outside of his life...of waiting for him to come back to her just for a day or two until he was gone again before she could even memorize the feel of his hands against her skin once more. Leaving had been an act of desperation that she regretted and felt that she could never take back. She at least should have done it differently, but...Zoya didn’t know that she would have had the strength to leave if he’d been right there in front of her...if he had asked her to stay. Doing her research had been the easy part. Having a lawyer draft the papers wasn’t even a large fee. She’d packed up her belongings into boxes and duffle bags, and put them in a container to be shipped to Duluth. She had even given two weeks notice at her job. She’d let that knowledge sit in her heart for two weeks, and she’d even given herself time to back out of her plan. She could have shredded the papers. She could have returned the shipping box empty. She could have told her employer that she could stay, and they would have been overjoyed. But as the days rolled by and the conversations over the phone with Elijah just became increasingly strained - was busy, he was working, he would be home in 4 more days, he couldn’t talk tonight because of a dinner meeting - she found herself pulling away even more. He had never turned in the divorce papers. She knew, because she had asked the lawyer. She was stuck in this marriage unless he would sign or she took further legal action, and moving on with her life was increasingly difficult when she had daily glaring reminders that she was actually still Zoya Marshall. In the eyes of the law, they were married, despite not having seen one another in such a long time. She still felt that raw, unraveled sensation that she had experienced three years ago when she left Dunhaven as she stood in front of Arbor Crossing Apartments. It hadn’t been that difficult to get his address. She was his wife, after all. Hesitation lingered in her step as she approached the first apartment on the first floor, and she wondered at first if he would even be home. He could have jetted off to another business trip after his birthday. She didn’t plan to be in town for long, though, and they needed to get all of this aired out. They both needed to move on. It was time they stopped hurting each other, and she would never be free of him if they were always connected this way. She steeled herself and lifted her hand to knock, though she tried to be polite instead of demanding. Zoya had no idea what she was going to say. No amount of rehearsal would have mattered anyway. Usually, when Zoya was in Dunhaven, Elijah was not. It had always been his intention to get to a point where he could work less and maintain a comfortable lifestyle for his wife and whatever family they started together but, after she had left him with no warning, Elijah had thrown himself so completely into his work that he now had the luxury of being able to pick the assignments he wanted whenever he wanted them. He usually wanted any assignment that took him anywhere she wasn’t. It shouldn’t have surprised him, really, that there had been no warning of her temporary return. After all, Zoya was best at blindsiding him. His birthday had been a small reprieve from the misery of knowing the woman who still inexplicably held a vice grip on his heart was so close to him and still so far away. Now that the drunken stupor of turning another year older had passed, though, Elijah was restless and moody. He’d thrown his wedding ring back in the top drawer of his dresser, hoping the absence of it would make him feel slightly better but the faded circle around his finger did little but remind him of what had been there. Zoya always had this effect on Elijah, whether she was in the same city or not. He’d gotten good at going more days in a row without accidentally thinking about her, but she always existed somewhere in there in the back of his mind slowly driving him insane. It wasn’t enough for his heart to be irreparably broken, she had to break the rest of him, too. At the knock, Elijah stood up from the dining table where his TV dinner and nearly empty bottle of beer sat steadily nearing room temperature. He hoped it was one of his brothers come to steal him away for another ill-advised trip to God knew where because that, at least, would be better than sitting in his hollow apartment wallowing in self-pity. It wasn’t them, though, and the sight of Zoya’s too familiar face on the other side of the door almost made Elijah want to slam the door closed out of some sense of self-preservation. Instead, his hands went into his pockets and he frowned, trying desperately to feign indifference. “Zoya.” At some point in the past, she had been carefree and steady. She had been constructed of some delicate mix of steel and hope and certainty, and it had all wound through her until she had felt invincible. That was how it had been throughout the entirety of their friendship and even the first few years of their marriage. She had been so deliriously happy that no bad mood had been able to touch her. She had spent a hundred nights making him dance with her in the kitchen while they both had sudsy hands from doing the dishes together and a hundred more laughing so hard that she ended up half sprawled across his lap on the couch. Somewhere in the last year that she had lived in Dunhaven, those steel threads that bound her together had begun to snap. The hope had leached from her veins and been replaced by worries and fear. The certainty has soured into hesitations. She had been remade in those months until the girl in the mirror did not know what that easy laughter felt like anymore. Zoya had been spun into a girl of glass. She felt as transparent and fragile as ever as she stood there, taking in the sight of him for the first time in three years. The fractures in her that had begun back then seemed to split even deeper now, cutting her right through the heart as her name fell flat on his lips. There was no small part of her that had even hoped that he would be happy to see her. A wish like that was begging to be broken, and after all that she had done...the mistakes that she had made, she did not deserve that kind of hope. She swallowed past the lump in her throat, “Elijah.” Maybe she was wrong and she should have practiced what to say. What did someone say to their estranged spouse? Especially if that someone had once been their best friend. Especially when you still loved that person to the point of true stupidity. She ignored the nauseated roll of her stomach, the hot flash of denial and resistance that roiled through her blood, “I’m going back to Duluth soon, but I wanted to see if you still had the papers.” The papers in question should be obvious, but he may have set them on fire for all that she knew. It was like no time had passed at all between the moment Elijah had come home to an empty house and divorce papers. She was so blunt in her reasons for being there at his door and he found that a large part of him was more than a little devastated that the permanence of their broken marriage was what had brought her here. He wasn’t sure what else he might have expected. He certainly didn’t hope for reconciliation anymore, not after if had taken him too damn long to accept the fact that she wasn’t going to come back. His fingers curled into fists in his pockets, an effort to suppress the anxiety, the turmoil that rose up in him at the very thought of those damned papers. He couldn’t even pretend to not know what she meant. The papers sat untouched in his desk drawer where they’d been since the day he’d moved into this place after selling their house. Seeing her here, so unchanged in so many ways yet still a stranger he hadn’t known for three years, it was like a knife to the gut all over again. “I wasn’t amenable to the terms, so I sent them back,” he lied. “So if that’s all you came here for, you can have your attorney call mine.” She just wanted this to be over so that she could go back to Duluth and try to heal from these wounds that had been torn open all over again. She lived with daily reminders that she was still so tightly bound to him. Her license still bore their shared name, even if what she could had been changed to her maiden name. That had been more of a means of self-preservation than a real desire to be a Nikolaeva again. It just hurt too damn much to be a Marshall. His words, however, even and smooth, settled wrong with her. She had spent so much of her time when they were together not having the arguments that they should have had. She’d never wanted to hurt him, so she’d let herself be hurt instead. Her feelings had seemed ridiculous or weren’t validated when she spoke them, so she suppressed them until she couldn’t anymore. Right now felt like one of those times, and instead of shoving down the budding frustration, it bubbled over and spilled from her like a pot over-filled, “The only term that I had was the divorce itself.” The word divorce felt thick and unpleasant on her tongue, and she struggled to say it, flinching at her own words. “I didn’t ask for anything else, Elijah. I didn’t - and don’t - want money or the house or anything else we could have divided down the middle. What could we possibly negotiate with that?” she felt that tight ball of nerves in her stomach tighten, but she couldn’t let herself just back down from this and walk away empty handed. Elijah knew this wasn’t a conversation that needed to be had in his doorway but he couldn’t bring himself to let her inside. Letting her in felt too much like letting her in and he knew that, if he let her in, it would hurt even more the moment she stepped back onto a plane back to Duluth. He didn’t care what his neighbors heard. He’d rarely cared about much more than her. His nerves stood at attention, little soldiers ready to march in a line and destroy him. No, she hadn’t asked for anything else. All she’d wanted was the one thing Elijah couldn’t give her. No matter how many times his hand had shakily hovered over the signature line, he’d never been able to press pen to paper. And when no one had pressed him for a decision, he’d found it easier to just not make one. Elijah could have given Zoya anything, he thought, but not this. Still not this. “Like I said, I didn’t like the terms,” he repeated, his jaw clenching and unclenching out of habit. He wished so desperately that he could be a mask of indifference. No feeling, no emotion, no tells. He wanted his expression to be as hollowed out as his heart was, as dead as he felt inside without her. “Not that you would know. I had no say in the goddamn papers.” She bristled, noting the clenching of his jaw and the tick of the muscles there. His voice was a thread of tension, ready to snap into place. She’d only asked to be released from being his wife...and he didn’t like those terms. He didn’t want to give her the only thing that she’d asked for. Was it just out of obstinance or was it something else? She’d thoroughly broken the both of them, she was certain, so how could he still want to keep this hold on her? How could he keep that tether between them? “I tried,” the words were small and brittle as they passed her lips, as though they’d been sitting there on her tongue for three years, waiting to be spoken. She wanted to be angry. She wanted to rise up and scream, but those screams would have just split her to the core and shattered her into a thousand pieces. There was a sag in her thin shoulders, her cheeks splotched from emotion, “I tried to talk to you. For months, I tried, but you didn’t hear me. I never wanted there to be any papers, but I couldn’t handle it anymore, Elijah. I couldn’t keep watching you walk out that fucking door over and over again, so I--” Her voice caught in her throat, heart somewhere around her toes, a strangled noise passing her lips. Zoya braced her hands to her hips and partially turned away from him, squeezing her eyes tightly closed. She took in a halting, jittery sort of breath. There had been moments where all she had wanted was to go back and make a different choice, and she still didn’t know if she’d made a wrong one or - for the sake of her sanity - if it had been right. She was unhappy now...but would she have been just as unhappy and bitterly resentful towards him now if she hadn’t left? She had known even when she was there last that she still loved him, but his constant and insistent choice to pick his job over their crumbling marriage had driven her away, “I ran.” It felt, and had always felt, like Zoya wanted to place the responsibility of the way she'd left on Elijah. He was not too proud to admit that he had made mistakes, most of which had more to do with tragic miscommunication rather than any conscious efforts toward destruction. He knew he had worked too much, had been too narrow-sighted, had let his personal life be neglected because he'd wanted so much for their future. In the beginning, he'd resented the ghost of her for wanting him to choose between a life with her and the work he'd needed to feel fulfilled, to feel like he had done the best he could by his family. He hadn't understood why there needed to be a choice, at all, when there was no reason why it couldn't be both. It had taken him months to realize that maybe he could have had both had he understood balance better than he had. By the time he'd realized it, though, it had been too little, too late. He could still remember the day he'd shown up in Duluth just over a year after she had left. It hadn't been the first time he'd tried to win her back, but it was the first time he'd been able to be the man she'd needed to fight for her. He'd been up for a promotion at the time, one that would keep him at the office coordinating consultations rather than being out in the field and he'd thought that finally, finally he could convince his best friend, his wife to come home. But she had already moved on from him and the realization that she was so irreversibly done with him had done even more to damage his ability to hope than her leaving in the first place had. Hope had once been the reason he wouldn't sign. After that trip, it had been this need for her to tell him to his face that it was over that stayed his hand. That and not wanting to admit that it was well and truly over, that he had lost her. He hadn't been able to sign his name to the acknowledgement of his loss. Elijah let out a short, derisive laugh that was as sharp as the knife point twisting into his broken heart. It wasn't even really a laugh, at all, because it wasn't funny. It had never been funny. He looked away from Zoya then, a vein pulsing in his neck from the strain. “I didn't listen. I didn't hear you. I made mistakes. I ruined us. But you-- you ran. You gave up. You chose to be--” his breath caught in his throat, the shape of the words choking him as he swallowed around then and gasped for air. “--to be nothing to me. I came home and you were gone and the break was too clean to have been anything but intentional. So you can stand there and tell me how this was my fault, and how you didn't want a divorce until I forced your hand but it's bullshit, Zoya. You say you didn't want it but you planned it and you executed it. You wanted out, so you got out and it's bullshit. You and your blame and your papers can all go to hell. I've already been there for three years.” “I was desperate!” she let her voice rise for the first time and it felt like she was floating, like her heart had skyrocketed somewhere above her and left her chest as empty as it had felt since she departed that day. She had taken much more of the blame onto herself than he seemed to think, though it wasn't unfair of him to say that she had counted his mistakes, too. Ultimately, it had been her choice that had led her out that door, but only when she could no longer see the path in front of her clearly, “I was alone and I was stretched thin and I couldn't breathe, Elijah. I missed you. All the time. I wanted you. I wanted us. And every time I turned around, it was just me. I know that not pushing the issue was my fault, and I know that I made the choice to leave. I was trying to save myself from that loneliness, but all I did was break myself and you too.” She paced a step or two, reaching up to run her hands through her short hair in her frustration. She had given up, but at the time it had felt like pulling herself out of torrential waters instead of letting herself drown. That weight had returned to her chest now, crushing her lungs behind her ribs until she felt like the smallest breath might split her in two. Tears slipped down her cheeks, but she didn't let herself dissolve into sobs, though her voice cracked and sounded strained to her own ears, “Do you think that a day goes by when I don't think about everything that happened? That I don't regret how I handled things? That I just don't feel anything at all about being so damn lost that I destroyed our marriage and our friendship? Because most days I can't look at myself in the mirror, and I hate what I did. At the time, I was in the darkest place I'd ever been, Elijah. Then it got darker, but my head cleared and I was left with the choices I made that I could never unmake.” There was the truth of it. The truth that she had been hanging onto for so long that it felt like a poison that had slowly been killing her all this time. She had never had the chance to tell him. He'd never reached out to her. She had been too terrified of his ire and the wreckage that she had wrought to go back, “I made every mistake available to me to make, but it was never out of hatred or revenge.” It absolutely killed Elijah to see the tears on Zoya’s face. Whatever else had happened between them, he still loved her in spite of himself and had never wanted to see her hurt. When he'd learned that she had moved on, the need for her to be happy had been the reason why he hadn't fought back. Still, the rest of their baggage could not be forgotten and, even as she spoke, he could feel the easy way she could tear him apart. While part of him wanted to step forward and wipe her tears away, the larger, more broken part of him could not. “I have a hard time believing that, Zoya,” Elijah replied, voice a fraction softer. It might have been a welcome change in his tone had it not been so defeated. “Because you never tried to come home. You left and you never came back. But maybe you just didn't trust me to be able to hear you if you tried. Whatever it was, what's done is done. If you want me to sign those papers, you're going to have to look me in the eye and tell me the real reason you’re giving up.” What's done is done. Whatever her reasons for not coming back, they didn't really matter now. He didn't believe the truth that she was telling him now, just like he hadn't believed - or wanted to believe - that there was anything wrong three years ago. Did anything she was saying matter, or was she just wasting her breath and breaking herself a little more in the process? “I'm just tired, Elijah,” though her height was diminutive as it was, she had never felt smaller. She turned back towards him, lifting her gaze to his, “I can't take it back, and you don't believe me. I keep hurting the both of us, and I didn't come back because I didn't think it would change anything if I did. I didn't think you would want me to. You never came to find me either. So…what's done is done, as you said. I didn't think I had any other options left. So if we aren't going to be together then I'm just going to go live by myself where I can't hurt anyone anymore.” Elijah shook his head. She was unbelievable. She couldn't even look at him and admit that it wasn't just about the two of them. “I guess the day I stood outside your parents’ front door screaming your name until my throat was fire while you say upstairs in your room refusing to see me doesn't count. Or the day a year after that when your father, at least, was considerate enough to put me out of my misery. Tell me, Z. Did you leave me for the guy, or did you at least wait a few months first?” He winced, hating the bitterness in his bite. He'd wanted her to be happy, even if it wasn't with him, but right here, right now, he couldn't help himself. If he was honest, he hated her just a little bit, too, for being able to move on when he couldn't even stop wearing his damn ring. He hated how sick the idea of her with someone else still made him. It wasn't fair, he knew, to hold moving on against her. At some point he knew he'd have to find a way to do the same. “I'm sorry,” he said, closing his eyes and working his jaw again, “I shouldn't have said that. That last part, at least, I didn't really mean. I just-- I did try. You can't tell me I never tried because I tried really fucking hard. I just think I deserved a little honesty in the end. From you, not your father.” She felt, for a moment, like she was suspended in time. The air around her seemed to crackle, her ears hearing nothing but the racing of her heart because everything else had become a dull roar. She couldn't breathe. She couldn't see. She couldn't feel her feet beneath her because it felt like she was in a free fall. Everything he had said was so confusing until the last. She was a leaf in the wind and she might just blow away. He had come for her. He had…tried to fight for her, and she hadn't known. All this time, she thought that he had just said to hell with her and stayed steadfastly in Dunhaven. Perhaps that's what he should have done, but he didn't. And her father. He knew. He had known the whole time that she had cried on his shoulder and he had comforted her, saying that all other men in her life would always disappoint her. But not him. What he'd done was unthinkable, and for a moment, all she could do was take a horrified, stumbling step backwards, “...no…” She felt a tremble work it's way into her hands, and she brought them to her face even as she pressed them to her eyes and tried to fight her way back to something steady, “Oh my God…” a sob lingered in her chest, and she didn't have the strength to combat it, “I didn't know. I don't…I didn't know. ” She shook her head, her hair haloing around her shoulders, “And I never - - I never moved on. There hasn't been anyone else. I couldn't…” She felt more fragile than she ever had, and in that moment, she didn't know that she could be fixed. Her voice was a wisp, and she was lost all over again, “He never told me.” Again, Elijah was struck with this need to go to her, to wrap his arms around his wife and protect her from hurt and harm. It was impossible to process what she was saying, though, because he'd had years of a truth that may or may not have ever been true. It was impossible to turn off the hurt that he'd felt over and over again every time he remembered the truth he had lived with. “I think he's the one you should be talking to right now, then,” he said, his voice stretched thin over the wrongness of it all. He swallowed and ran a frustrated hand over his head, mostly just to have something to do. He needed to retreat, needed to think about everything he thought he knew, needed to let himself process without her watching, without his fingers itching to touch her. His heart hurt for her and it hurt for him, for them, but he didn't think there was much here could do about that right now. Because, in the end, she'd still left and that, above all else, was the unadulterated truth. “Yeah,” her throat felt raw from the strain of it, and the tears had not stopped. They may never stop. The shock was beginning to wear off and all she was left with was the stinging, open wounds of betrayal. She'd lost years of her marriage because she knew now that if she had been told Elijah had come for her…she would have run right back into his arms. Her father had taken away that chance, possibly for forever. She could not forgive him for it. She never could. Every good memory that she had of him would be forever tainted by this thing that she now could never unknow. He could not have loved her if he put her through this pain. She started to turn, but hesitated, mouth dry and palms sweaty as she looked up at him, “Don't sign the papers?” She paused. After all, she had no right to ask him of anything. “Unless you want to.” The desperation she had felt for this to be done and over with had to be reevaluated in the face of this new information. They weren't all right and maybe they still couldn't ever work things out, but maybe there was a little more understanding and a little less hurt than there had been when she first arrived. Elijah nodded, wondering if he was making the right choice letting this chasm stay so securely between then. He didn't know, but he did know that it was the smart thing. If the wounds had not healed already in three years, they certainly wouldn't heal in the few seconds it would take for him to reach out to her. “Like I said, I don't have them anymore, anyway,” he lied, again. He didn't want to make promises, though, and hope was, at its heart, exactly that. He didn't have it in him to give her hope right now, but he could give her some kind of assurance that the line above his name still lacked his signature. And then, as she walked away--this time feeling a little less like goodbye than her original disappearance--he closed his door, slid down to sit on the floor, and rested his weary head against his knees. For the first time since they'd started, he wished for a dream to come. In that moment, anyone else's head seemed a better option to be in than his own. |