love letters • lena & ilya

[sidney]

I         L         Y         A

You're coming home with me.

There was no shot Ilya was going to let Lena go back home alone. She didn't need a big, empty house with servants and bodyguards. She needed a little TLC from someone who's known her since she was scraping her knees on the pavement, someone who would do anything to keep her safe. That's not a slight against Matteo, but Ilya only trusts himself at this point. Somehow Lena had slipped past him and gone out into the chaos of the streets alone. His shortcomings were why she'd ended up in the hospital in the first place, so forgive him if he doesn't exactly trust his instincts any longer. 

Three days more of a few tests and nights of observation, and Ilya was finally able to take her home. Deep down, he was excited. It would be like when they were kids again, staying up past midnight in his treehouse telling ghost stories. But another larger, more mature part of him was nervous. It had been over a decade since they'd shared a sleeping bag, and it wasn't exactly as if Ilya was swimming in cash. Not yet, he told himself as they crossed the threshold, Lena in tow and a heaviness in his chest. 

"Matteo's bringing your things. I already talked to him," he said softly as he shifted her weight in his arms. "You take the bed. No arguments. You need the rest and the couch is fine for me."  

He puts her to bed without much of a fight and before he can even think about washing the last few days of hospital off of him with a nice hot shower, there's a knock at the door. Matteo with a large duffel and a small box filled with a few sketchbooks, pencils, brushes. "Of course she asked for her supplies, too," Ilya laughs, taking the stuff from Matteo with a nod and a smile, despite the bitter edge to his facial expression. Get over it, he thinks before shutting the door in his face and turning the deadbolt. 

Twenty minutes later, freshly showered and refreshed, Ilya decides he'll unpack her things. Try to at least make his apartment feel like home for a bit, like she has her own space. He travels down to the basement and pulls out his mother's old easel and sets it up next to the window that gets good morning light. He places her art supplies along the window sill, pulling out the paints and brushes. But it's when the journal at the bottom of the box falls at his feet, loose pages spilling to the floor and he sees the words on the page that the smile he'd been wearing since they'd gotten home fades. 

I don't even know why I write these anymore. Can't rationalize it to myself much longer. But here I am, sitting down and putting thoughts to paper because I think maybe, just maybe, you'll understand.

And really, what else is there?

As he reads the last line, a soft thud pulls him back to the here and now, and his head snaps up towards the bedroom. His grip tightens on the page in his hand and he grimaces. 

"You're awake," he says sadly.

You're a liar, he thinks quietly to himself, betrayal planting a dark seed within his chest.

[gamemaker tallis 🧚🏽‍♂️kaitlin.]

She doesn't try to fight it when Ilya says he's taking her to his apartment.

She knows that people are probably going to talk, that there are parts of Nine that are going to think Lena Martin staying at Ilya Kingston's apartment is the thing that's even worth talking about despite the fact that there were literally a series of riots that have upended everything everyone cares about. They won't care about the fact that she's recovering from the riots; her father probably didn't even let news of her injuries hit the information network run by the spies around here.

Engagement announcement coming soon?

Lena can already feel the questions.

She knows, rationally, that they've been coming for as long as she can remember. From the moment her father took Ilya under his wing and gave his family a bigger seat at the table, she knew. This was the boy her father had chosen for her to marry one day, for her to run his empire with.

But he's always just been Ilya to her.

Home, walking around on two feet.

Staying with him when everything has fallen apart is the only thing that made sense to her, was the last thing that she had to be convinced into, and when she rubs the sleep out of her eyes and goes to reach for the edge of the bed, she knocks something off the side table instead, a low thud sounding so foreign in the quiet. He comes running though, he always does, and it makes her feel—something.

She doesn't quite have words for it, but something isn't right in the slant of his eyes, the curve of his mouth.

He isn't happy to see her awake.

"How long was I asleep for?" she asks, still too sleepy and confused from dreaming to really process the look on his face. She brings the back of her knuckles to her eyes, tries to rub away the drowsiness, runs her palms over her face and then—a sharp inhale through your teeth as you tug on the stitches running along your cheek. "Fuck, that hurts," you say, blinking your eyes open to look up at him.