Hold my Heart {Lana & Zalgiman}

Three days.

Lana had rearranged an entire room in her house and cleaned it, making sure that the love of her life could use it comfortably. The dresser is cleaned out, the closet is spotless, the bed's been tidied up with new bedding that's tucked and folded neatly like he'll be staying at a hotel. She has no idea how long he'll want to use this room, really, but it's as much for her comfort as for his that she's giving him a room that isn't hers. As much as she loves him, she might die of anxiety if he wants to spend their first night together. She wants this to be slow.

She's put a vase of red roses in his room, a beautiful little floral arrangement that she had delivered. She even has all sorts of little Russian-branded snacks delivered to her doorstep, which she puts in his room as well, just to make him comfortable. In case he gets homesick.

She even cleans out the shower that's next to his bedroom, making sure it's in perfect working condition. When she spots towels with little hearts embroidered onto them on her favorite shopping site, she orders them immediately and has them hanging from the rods as little reminders of her feelings for him. His feelings for her.

Three days.

On the morning he's to fly in, Lana hardly doesn't sleep. She gets up bright and early. She puts on the dress she'd ordered just for the occasion, as well as the floral-knit tights she ordered, too, and slips on a cute pair of ballet-style shoes she's ordered, too. She takes the time to style her hair so it's in perfect waves. For once in her life, she likes her own appearance, and it's because she can see an inkling of the beauty that Zalgiman told her that she is. He's not a liar; he wouldn't lie to me about that, she thinks. She puts on a perfume that her mother always wore, a subtle little thing of lavender that's not offensive to the nose, and then she gathers up another bouquet of flowers before she leaves her house--with the intent to leave and go somewhere further away than within a fifteen-minute-walk in a very long time.

The limousine that she's commissioned arrives at her doorstep, and she rides in it quietly into Boston in the back seat. She clutches her phone the entire time, looking at her phone. He hasn't messaged her since that talk in Savior. He hasn't logged on, either. She's a little worried. But she knows that he's the one who's being uprooted to leave his whole life behind. She feels a little guilty for that, but he was going to be sent to Amsterdam anyway, and... She couldn't allow that. Not when she knows how much he wanted to quit escorting, let alone what Chimera wanted him to do.

Three days.

She arrives at Logan International, and the driver drops her off, giving her the instructions to call him when they're ready for the pickup. Lana graciously thanks him for his attentive service, and the man drives off to occupy a parking spot somewhere special. She walks into the airport over by baggage claim, and it doesn't take long for her to spot the area where the bags are already moving on the carousel that's for his flight coming in from Moscow.

But she doesn't see him. Her heart's pounding in her chest. Maybe he's just gone into the bathroom. He wouldn't leave his luggage behind, would he--

And then she spots him from across the long hallway. The turtleneck, the scarf, the jeans--his long hair. His silver eyes. His lovely face.

Before she knows it, she's moving toward him. It's a jog, the fastest she's walked in a long time. "Zalgiman!" she calls out to him. It doesn't matter to her that there's so many people. For once in her life, she's not thinking about all of these people might think of her.

Because her eyes are on him and only on him. They've always been.

Silver eyes press closed and Zalgiman tries desperately to stop himself from imagining what the rest of his life is going to be like. Marswards parting words are ringing in his ears. An echo that he feels like a weight on his shoulders. He doesn’t want to hear them again. His hand lifts to his head and he’s so upset that he can hardly think straight.

Get yourself together!

"Zalgiman!"

It’s a so-familiar voice, and he finds himself turning toward it in complete dumbfounded surprise. The shock of her being here is written across his face plainly. Almost, it’s what does him in; that surprise. Thankfully however, he manages to keep himself from crying from sheer gratitude toward her. Then, for just a second he’s so glad to see her that he acts without thinking.

He smiles at her, and moves toward her as if he means to embrace her. They’ve done it so many times, but never in reality, and it’s that realization that stops him just a few inches way from what would comfortably be called her space. He flushes and looks down at his feet. “I’m sorry. I was just so happy to see you; I forgot myself.”

Marsward would already be teasing him mercilessly, or insulting him. He could almost hear Lana’s gentle voice chiding him, but it’s not her voice. Not really. It’s Marsward. Marsward caught up in his head.

“I didn’t mean to embarrass you.” He looks around, checking to make sure no one is looking. It’ll be so much worse if someone is looking. He doesn’t want to be yelled at for making a public display. Not again. He quickly tries to change the subject so that she doesn’t have a chance to get mad at him.

“I don’t know where the luggage is.” Great. Something else for her to be mad at him for. He’s an idiot.

Lana finishes what she starts, even though she's a full foot and four inches shorter than he is. Small thing that she is, she throws her arms wide around him and hugs him gently, her face going to his chest. She lingers there for a long moment, squeezing him a little tighter, before she looks up at him with such a wide smile, sparkling in her eyes behind her glasses. He's so warm. He's real. He's flesh and blood. And he loves me--loves me for real.

"Nothing to be sorry about," Lana says sweetly, still not letting go of him, not quite yet. "And you could never embarrass me. Never in a million years." She's proud to be the one that he chose. The one that he loves. She hopes he wears her love as a badge of honor, too, a beautiful thing to declare to the world.

Finally she lets go of him. "It's okay, the baggage claim here doesn't make any sense--but I found your carousel just a moment ago anyway, by accident. Guess I'm lucky like that."

Lana reaches out and takes his hand, smiling so brightly at him. "Come on, I'll take you with me. Was your flight okay? I looked it up earlier and it said it was over nine hours up in the air. That can't have been comfortable." She chats so easily with him, so happily. It's a remarkable thing for even herself, really. Her whole world is simply... lighter, and easier, for having him here.

She hugs him easily. Lightly. They’ve done this so often that she doesn’t even think of it. He wraps his arms around her gently but with a little more caution. He doesn’t have to worry. She offers him comforting words, and he feels strangely relieved. He’d been expecting her to be upset but she’s not.

She’s actually happy to see him.

It’s miles away from his expectations, though he feels like he should warn her that he’s exceedingly good at embarrassing people. That she’s wasting her time with him. That he’s an utter failure in life. How can he say such things in the face of her bright cheerfulness? He lets her take his arm and lead him toward his luggage.

He’s grateful that he will not have to leave his things behind, and as they approach the conveyer belt he spots his gray luggage bag and this cheers him up immensely. Zalgiman quickens his step a little and motions toward the bag. “There it is!”

Almost, for a second, he feels happy. Normal. He even feels comfortable enough to chat with Lana, offering her replies to her polite questions. “It was a long flight, but I listened to music or napped through most of it.” He smiles a little at his luggage. It’s everything he owns now. Everything that’s left to him. He has no illusions that he’ll be going back to Russia.

“What about you? Did you drive all the way here by yourself? I… I didn’t expect you to come all this way for me.”

"There it is!" Lana can't help but echo at the sight of the bag on the carousel. Joy radiates from her, really, just to see that the bag's made it in one piece. She even tries to lift it from the bag carousel for him, but, well, she's short, thin, and without much muscle, and the carousel comes up to almost half her height to boot. She tries, though, and once the bag's in hand, she seems even more cheerful.

"No, I don't drive," Lana says. "A lot of people don't here. They take public transportation, a ride-share app, or have someone else drive them. I have a driver waiting for us."

She offers him another wide smile, grinning. "I didn't want you to think you were going to be here all alone in a country you've never been to," she says. "Being left alone... hurts an awful lot."

Her voice turns oddly downcast, but she hides the flicker of knowing pain within her eyes as she pulls out her phone. She goes to dial the driver again. "Hello, pull up to Baggage Claim Terminal E. We'll be out in a few moments."

Lana hangs up the call and smiles at Zalgiman. "Let's head outside. He'll be pulling up in a silver limousine shortly."

Zalgiman listens to her chatter about the state of public transportation and smiles at her efforts to pick up his luggage. Not only is it something that was difficult for her to reach, but it must have been very heavy for her to try and wrangle also. He estimated that it weighed about half as much as she did since he’d packed every pound that the airport would allow him to take with him into his bag.

He could have packed two more bags.

“Let me get that.” He says gently, pulling it almost effortlessly out of the carrossel, and onto the floor. With a little flick he had the handle out and ready to go. His whole life in two bags. It felt… Empty.

"Being left alone... hurts an awful lot." Her words are soft with knowledge and he finds himself nodding. That was something that he was well aware of. It might have been easy to assume that he had a lot of friends, or that because he’d been infatuated that he didn’t feel lonely. Yet the truth was far more complicated than that.

Sometimes, even being in Marsward’s arms was the loneliest he’d ever felt.

He follows after Lana, strange as it is, she’s never made him feel that way. Wherever they were together the whole of her attention was on him. So much so that it was easy for him to forget that she was paying for their dates, or even that they were dates at all. At least until recently. Now, he wasn’t sure what to think.

She was his only remaining tie to this world.

“Wait… Did you say limousine? You… have a limousine?”

"Not really," Lana responds almost sheepishly as she walks with Zalgiman out of baggage claim and waits on the sidewalk outside on the curb, where passenger pickup is located. "I paid for a round trip in one to and from the airport. I thought you deserved a nice and open space to ride in considering you were stuck inside an airplane for over nine hours."

She smiles sweetly up at him again, her arm wrapped around his. "It's not that far. It'll be about half an hour's ride. I almost wish you could have come here in the fall; the autumn leaves' colors are beautiful then."

It isn't long before the limousine pulls up to the curb. The door opens automatically, and the driver appears to take the luggage from Zalgiman–rather insistently in his own silent fashion–and then usher them into the car. Lana takes a seat inside. Her violet eyes strike a different sort of character because of the darkness that's within the limousine; they almost seem like little amethyst gems hiding in cave walls.

"When we're home, I'll show you your room, and then we can get a bite to eat delivered from somewhere," Lana offers. "Plus you can shower, or anything else you might possibly need or want–"

And then she reaches into a compartment where she'd hidden the bouquet. Red roses again, alongside other lovely and fragrant flowers of love. "And these are for you," she says sweetly. "I hope you like them."

She looks at him with her heart in her eyes again, like she had back in that conversation with Chimera. She wants him to know how much she loves him by all these gestures, by how much thought she'd put into everything. As much as she quietly yearns for that little greeting kiss, she won't push it onto him. She'll ask when they're home and he's had a moment to catch his breath.

She’d rented a limo. For him. It doesn’t make any sense. Particularly not in his current mindset. To his own perception of himself; he’d reached one of the lowest points of his life. He had no value. He was nothing. So why was she being so kind to him? Why would she go through all this trouble? It was something that he couldn’t fathom.

The driver took his things from him, much to his chagrin, and he watched his luggage disappear into the car. He almost ended up standing there staring after them like a lost dog, but Lana was kindly leading him forward into the limousine. He didn’t need to think. He just needed to follow her. Why was he here?

“That sounds very nice. I am grateful.” He says to her offer of food and a shower. Somehow even the thought of a nice warm shower couldn’t pull him out of his mood. He tugged lightly on the scarf around his neck. It really was too hot for what he was wearing. Would be for at least another month or two. Not that he even considered complaining.

She reaches into a compartment and pulls out a bundle of roses for him and he finds himself dumbstruck again. Almost he lost it. It took all his willpower not to do something unspeakable. Scream. Cry. Tear the delicate roses to bits and pieces. He did none of those things. “Thank you.”

The trip to her house was thankfully brief, and he managed to be a little social with her. He found himself stroking the flowers at odd times, trying to understand but he couldn’t. It just didn’t make any sense.

They reached her house, and after a - again brief - tour of the house. She showed him his room, the bathroom which he could use. The major facilities such as the kitchen and living space. It was a huge house, but she thankfully didn’t try to show him the whole space in one go. Instead he was left in his room to take a shower after asking what he wanted to eat. He smiled a small smile and told her that he had no idea what was in the area and that she should pick something that she liked best to share. Then, left alone for the duration, he gathered his supplies and walked the short distance down the hall to the bathroom to take his shower.

The warm water did nothing to soothe him. If anything, being left alone with his thoughts was the worst thing he could have done. All he could think about was that he had nothing. No reason to keep waking up every morning. He wept, again. Hated himself the weakness. The weakness of having broken down, and the weakness of walking out of that shower still alive.

It wasn’t strength that kept him alive then, it was the thought of Lana finding him.

She didn’t deserve that.

Zalgiman finished his shower and wrapped his towel around himself after a quick dry only to realize that out of habit he’d left his clean clothes in the bedroom. Well, hopefully Lana wouldn’t catch sight of him on his way to the bedroom. He looked at himself in the mirror freshly scrubbed and winced at the vision he saw there. It was a solid reminder of his failures. There were black marks all over his pale skin. Though he was muscular from years of a strict exercise regime, it wasn’t the light scars that were first noticeable. Though the circular one on his hip looked like something that had been hurt.

No, it was the bloom like black roses in a ring around his neck. The little hand and finger-prints. The marks of nails blooming on his back and slightly filled with blood. He touched the white bandage on his arm and frowned. It was soaked through, but he didn’t have another bandage to replace it with.

It would have to do.

Stepping out of the bathroom quietly, he made his way toward the room designated as his.

There's not a single clue in Lana's head that the man she loves more than anything is dealing with a pain that only he knows, a darkness that only he sees. She's able to explain away his relative quiet by realizing he'd gotten on a plane late and had chased the sun. Moscow is, after all, a good seven hours ahead of her time zone, and jet lag never helps. And airports are cold places. The scarf doesn't get questioned. She just keeps smiling at him, especially when he strokes the roses that she's given him.

He's tired, but he loves me, she thinks to herself.

When he's in the shower, Lana busies herself with browsing the food delivery app on her phone. Something to share? It has to be the best that her town can offer. It's his first meal with him. It has to be…

Her eyes flash as she sees the highest rated place is the local pizza place down the street. Of course! American pizza! But she has no idea what toppings he might like. She's noticed he gravitates to meat-forward dishes in Savior, but that doesn't mean anything.

She realizes across the way, as she's pacing around in her too-large house, that the sound of the shower has stopped. The door to the bathroom clicks open. He's out of the shower. She can just ask him. So she spins about on her heel and scrolls down the list of toppings. "Zal? I was thinking we could get pizza. But I didn't know what toppings you might…"

Lana's eyes wander up from her phone and onto him. Looking up at his chest. He bared it often in Savior, and she'd seen a bit of it on that little video call, but it's another to see it here in her house, the slight slick of the skin from the shower. And while she feels her face reddening–it doesn't take long for her to see things that send her into a mild state of panic. The bandage on his arm. The marks on his neck. The older scar on his hip. He'd been hurt. He'd been hurt before he even came to her.

She came forward, her hand reaching out to touch… something, some part of him, but it falls away. Some part of her wonders if she's even allowed to touch him in his beauty like this. Another part of her screams at her not to touch him because it'd be like hurting him all over again. Her eyes brim with tears.

"What happened?" she asks gently. "Did someone hurt you? Are you okay?"