this is my first time requesting after years, just like the old times.
so, alcina dimitrescu needs to learn how to patient because her wife (reader is an immortal biologist) is urgently need by mother miranda for cadou shit. the only communication they had is the old phone but reader is the one who must call alcina due to her limited time. if the first call rang and alcina missed it, it will never rang again.
the phone is static and barely audible which alcina's patience is wearing thin. she just needs her wife🥹🥺
A/N: Hello guys! how are you? I hope you're all well💙 I'm so excited to post this, especially since it was requested by my dear friend, a long-time friend! I truly cherish the friendships I build here, a precious thing I value immensely, and besides that, I respect and I am very inspired by Aya's work, you are my muse! (PS: I still haven't forgiven you enough for deleting that story that I loved more than anything... hmph😭). enjoy it, baby girl! thank you for requesting 🐻❄️ྀིྀི
Plot: Alcina Dimitrescu has never been a patient woman, until a phone line that only works once forces her to become one.
The phone had been useless for three days.
Not broken, worse than broken. Alive, technically. A dial tone if you pressed it to your ear and listened hard enough, buried under so much white noise it might as well have been silence. Alcina Dimitrescu had smashed one already, the first time you'd been gone, when Mother Miranda's courier arrived with nothing but a folded note and no explanation for why her wife had been summoned like a servant instead of a woman who ran a house of her own. The pieces of that first phone were still somewhere in the receiving hall, swept into a corner, because none of the girls had dared clean them up and she hadn't asked them to.
She had not smashed the second one. She had learned, in her own graceless way, to wait.
It did not suit her at all.
She sat at her vanity with her hands flat on the glass, looking at the phone beside the perfume bottles as though staring would make it ring sooner. The candles had burned low enough that her reflection had gone strange and doubled in the mirror, and she hadn't called for more. Daniela had stopped bringing her tea an hour ago, after the second time Alcina had looked at her like being interrupted in her waiting was a personal insult. Bela had taken Cassandra and Daniela out hunting, the way she always did when she wanted to give her mother a moment alone. After the hunting, Bela alone had approached, curled in the doorway like a cat, watching her mother with the particular patience of someone who has seen this exact kind of waiting before and knows better than to name it out loud.
"She will call.." Bela said, not for the first time.
"I know that." Alcina said, too fast, too sharp, in the voice she used on soldiers who asked questions they already knew the answers to.
Cassandra didn't flinch. She never did anymore.
Alcina didn't say anything more than that. She turned the phone an inch to the left, as if angle mattered, as if anything about this ancient, Miranda blessed piece of junk could be improved by her touching it. Somewhere in the walls the house made its low settling noises, wood and stone breathing the way it always did at night, and every one of them made her hand twitch toward the receiver before she caught herself. She was too old, too tall, too used to being feared, to be sitting like this, folded in on herself, waiting on a sound.
You had told her, before you left, that the connection only worked once. That whatever Miranda had done to the line, some old, ugly magic stitched into copper and static it would carry a single call through, and if it rang and went unanswered, it would not ring again. Not that day. Not that week. However long it took for whatever process kept you tethered to this world to circle back around and give you one more chance to reach her.
One call, you'd said, holding both her hands in yours at the gate, your bag already over your shoulder. So please, for once in your life, be patient.
She was not, by nature, a patient woman. She had built an empire out of not waiting for things, for permission, for respect, for anyone to tell her no twice. But she had learned, somewhere in the years since you'd first stood your ground in her receiving hall and refused to be afraid of her, that there were exceptions worth making. That patience, when it was for you, was not weakness. It only felt like it, in the hours it demanded of her.
The phone rang at half past two in the morning.
She had it against her ear before the second ring finished.
"Alcina." Your voice came through a wall of static so thick it barely sounded like a voice at all, thin and warping, cutting in and out like something dragged underwater. "Alcina, can you—"
"I'm here." She said it too loud. She didn't care. Cassandra had already gone still in the doorway, watching. "I'm here, I'm listening, say it again—"
"—hear me? I don't know how long—" The line hissed, swallowed half your sentence whole, spat you back out mid-word. "Miranda needs the samples from the east wing, the ones in the— the cold storage, she needs them before the equinox or the whole cadou line collapses, I need you to…"
"Slower." Her knuckles had gone white around the receiver, the wood of the vanity creaking faintly under her other hand. "You're breaking up. Say it slower."
"—can't, I don't have…. Alcina, I don't have long on this line, please just listen…"
And she did. God help her, she did, she who had never in her life simply listened to anyone, who interrupted kings and any lord by fun, sometimes Miranda herself when she felt brave enough, sat perfectly still with her eyes shut and let your broken, static-drowned voice wash over her in pieces, catching words like they were coins falling through her fingers. Cold storage. East wing. Before the equinox.
"I'm here." she said again, softer this time, the way she never let anyone hear. "I'm here. I have it. I have all of it."
Silence. Not the static kind, a different silence. Her hand tightened so hard on the receiver that Cassandra actually rose from the doorway, alarmed, before Alcina waved her back down without opening her eyes.
Then, faint, unbearably faint, almost lost under the hiss: "I miss you."
Something in Alcina Dimitrescu's chest, something that had been clenched since the first ruined phone, unclenched all at once, so suddenly it nearly hurt.
"I miss you more than is dignified…" she said, and her voice cracked on the last word in a way she would have denied to anyone but you. "Come home. Whatever she wants from you, get it done and come home, do you understand me?"
"—trying. I'm trying, I—"
The static rose, a wave of it, drowning your voice syllable by syllable. She pressed the receiver so hard against her ear it left a mark. "Say that again. Say it again, I didn't…"
The line went dead in her hand, and this time it stayed dead. No dial tone, no hiss, nothing at all. The single call spent, gone, exactly the way you'd warned her it would go.
Alcina sat with the receiver still pressed to her ear for a long moment after there was nothing left to hear, long enough that Cassandra finally crossed the room and gently, carefully, took it from her hand and set it back in its cradle herself.
Alcina didn't answer right away. She was looking at the door, or past it, at the long dark hall and the stairs down to the east wing, already counting the steps to the cold storage in her head.
Then she stood, hands that were not quite steady, and her voice came back sharp and commanding, closer to itself than it had sounded in three days.
"Fetch Bela. Tell her to leave whatever she's doing, we have samples to prepare, and I will not have my wife come home to find this house has failed her."
Cassandra almost smiled. "So you were listening."
"I am always listening," Alcina said, already moving, already half a corridor ahead of her own daughter. "I simply choose, most days, not to act like it matters to me."
Behind her, the phone sat silent and dark on the vanity, useless now, nothing left in it but the shape of your voice still ringing somewhere behind her eyes. There was an equinox to beat and a wife to bring home, and for the first time in three days, Alcina Dimitrescu finally had something to do with her hands besides wait.
The house woke up in a way it hadn't in three days.
Bela arrived within minutes, hair still damp, boots not even properly laced, face still flushed from the hunt, and took one look at her mother's face before she stopped asking questions and started giving orders of her own. Daniela was sent for lanterns. Cassandra didn't wait to be told anything, she was already halfway down the east stairwell by the time Alcina reached the landing, calling back over her shoulder that the cold storage locks hadn't been touched since autumn and would need oil before they'd turn.
"Then find the goddamn oil!" Alcina said, and didn't slow down.
The east wing at that hour was colder than the rest of the house, so bitter only Alcina could go there, and as she worked her way into it, she kept thinking that she had not touched the cadou samples herself in years, that had always been your work, your careful hands and your careful notes, jars labeled in your small, precise handwriting that she'd never admit to reading over sometimes, alone, when the house was too quiet. Now she stood in front of the same shelves and had to think, actually think, to remember which markings meant which strain, which vials could bear the cold of the carriage ride and which would spoil before they ever reached Miranda's hands.
"This one…" She remembered the description you'd told her as she held a jar up to the light, "she'd have flagged this one for discard. Look, the color's wrong."
It took the better part of two hours. By the end of it Daniela had gone twice to check the road from the east tower, twice come back with nothing to report, and the third time she went Alcina found herself following, unable to stay in the cold storage a moment longer once the last case had been sealed and there was nothing left to do with her hands.
The night was clear. Cold, but clear, the kind of sky that made the stars look closer than they had any right to be, and from the tower she could see the road unwinding pale in the dark all the way down toward the tree line. Nothing moved on it. She stood there long enough that Daniela quietly stopped hovering at her elbow and went to find Cassandra instead, leaving her mother alone with the view.
Come home, she had said. As if it were that simple. As if saying it into a dying phone line could make the road produce you any faster.
She did not know, afterward, how long she stood there. Long enough that the cold stopped registering. Long enough that when the first sound finally came, wheels, faint, and then the particular creak of Miranda's carriages, a sound she'd have known anywhere after all these years, she almost didn't trust her own ears.
Then she saw it. A shape on the road, dark against dark, moving.
"Finally!" Her voice cracked through the tower like a whip crack, and within seconds all three of her daughters were at the window beside her, no longer pretending patience, no longer pretending anything at all.
"That's her," Daniela breathed. "That's her carriage!"
The girls were already moving before she finished speaking, down the tower stairs in a rush of movements and a flutter of wings from sheer excitement, Daniela laughing about something Bela said, Cassandra outpacing them both without seeming to try. Alcina stayed at the window a moment longer, watching the carriage grow from a shape into a shadow into something almost real, something with edges, something that was, finally, finally, coming up the last stretch of road toward the gate.
She let out a breath she felt she'd been holding since the phone rang three nights ago. It came out unsteady, more like a shudder than a sigh, and she pressed one hand flat against the cold stone of the windowsill as if the wall itself might hold her upright a moment longer.
Alcina did not run, had not run in longer than she cared to remember, had built an entire life out of the principle that she arrived when she chose to arrive and never a moment before. But her steps down the stairs were faster than dignity strictly allowed, faster than she'd have permitted herself in front of anyone but you, and by the time she crossed the receiving hall the girls were already spilling out through the front doors ahead of her into the cold night air, lanterns swinging, voices rising over each other.
The carriage came to a stop just inside the gate. The door hadn't even fully opened before Daniela was at it, before Bela was calling something about the samples being ready, before Cassandra hung back just enough to let her sisters have the moment first, the way she always did.
And there, stepping down, tired, travel worn, achingly real after three days of static and silence and a phone gone dark on a vanity, there you were.
Alcina stopped at the top of the steps for exactly one heartbeat. Long enough to look at you. Long enough to let herself believe it.
Then she came down them the rest of the way, past her daughters, past everything, and pulled you into her arms like she meant to make up for three days of not being able to in a single embrace, one hand at the back of your head, the other locked around your waist, her face buried against your hair as though she could will herself to stop shaking simply by holding on hard enough.
"You're late…" she said, voice rough, muffled, nowhere near as steady as she wanted it to be.
You laughed, tired and a little broken, and felt her arms tighten in answer. "I know. I'm sorry."
"Don't." Alcina pulled back only far enough to look at you properly, hands framing your face like she needed to check, needed to be sure, that you were whole and unbroken and truly here. "Don't you dare apologize to me. Just." She stopped. Swallowed. Pressed her forehead to yours instead of finishing the sentence, because some things, even now, she couldn't quite say out loud in front of an audience.
Just don't leave again, she meant. Just stay.
Behind them, Daniela was already talking too fast about the cold storage, Cassandra was rolling her eyes fondly at her, and Bela stood a little apart with the particular quiet satisfaction of someone who had been right all along, she will call, she will come home, and had known it the whole time.
You reached up and covered one of Alcina's hands with your own, still cold from the road, and she held on like she had no intention of ever letting go again.
"I'm home now." you said.
"Yes," Alcina said, finally, finally allowing herself to breathe. "You are.”
