can i go where you go?
dimya + post canon + being grossly in love
Anya loved being in love. With her memories mostly restored, though some more muted than others- like a hazy dream you could only kind of remember after you woke up but something about it still made you feel it vividly. But glancing over at Dmitry with his handsome face and soft hair, it very much melded together her two beings of Anya and Anastasia, and she could remember being young and thinking herself in love with all sorts of boys. Soldiers, diplomats, brothers of friends. It wasn’t exactly the same, and she could recognize her younger self hadn’t been in love with anything, but she did feel the same gush of giddiness spread through her chest that she felt when she looked over at him as she did as a child, more in love with love than with anyone.
Dmitry was sitting on the edge of the bed, hunched over a book, one of his bare feet tapping against the wood of the floor as he read. That’s how she knew he was reading in French. Frustrated Dmitry was always married with fidgety Dmitry. She crawled up behind him, looping one arm around his shoulder and the other around his waist, and then pressing her face against the fabric of his tank top.
“Can I help you?” He asked, softly, and she closed her eyes against the sound of hearing Russian again. During daytime hours they tried to speak only French, a way to help Dmitry master the language, and her to practice her skills that hadn’t been sharpened during the years of her amnesia and imprisonment. But in the morning and at night, they were tired and went back to their own language.
“No,” she said, her voice muffled by shirt and muscle.
She could feel the smirk and the rolling of his eyes, despite the physical impossibility of her being able to know either.
“You’re very annoying,” he said, just like she had always dreamed of a boy would when she was a little girl.
Anya smiled, and then lifted herself up enough to press a kiss against his jaw. “You’re very annoying, too. Ignoring me for that book.”
Dmitry let out a chuckle, and she released him as he leaned forward to place the book on the nightstand. “You’re very demanding of my time and attention.”
She smoothed out the skirt of her nightgown, and kept her back straight. “You knew what you were getting into with a Grand Duchess.”
He crawled onto the bed, his face close to hers, “I don’t think anyone could anticipate you, Your Highness.”
Anya laughed and brought her lips forward to meet his. So much of their life felt like play acting. Play the Princess Anastasia, play the orphan girl with no past, play the Dowager Empresses' granddaughter. Everything was so different than how it had been when she had grown up, and so different than those ten years she spent traveling the length of Russia.
She fell back on the bed, relaxing. Here, though, she was young and in love with her handsome husband and nothing had ever felt more real. Anya reached up and pressed her palm against his cheek.
“Come down here with me,” she pouted, applying light pressure against his cheek. “I spend all day looking up at you and it’s going to ruin my neck.”
Dmitry let out an exasperated sigh, playing his part. He settled next to her on the bed, laying on his side and resting his hand against her stomach. “Any other demands tonight?”
Anya reached down, interlocking their fingers. She turned her head to look at him from underneath her eyelashes. “Not right now, but it is a woman’s prerogative to change her mind.”
He absently rubbed her thumb against her hand where they were joined, “I think you owe me a foot massage.”
“How so?”
“From the abuse they get from you always keeping me on my toes,” he teased and she wrinkled her nose like she hated it.
She wanted to spend forever in this bed without a country, speaking her native tongue with the man she loved.
Instead, she stuck her tongue out at him in response.
“Anyok,” he said, releasing her hand to bring his up to playing with the curls of her hair.
“Dima,” she returned, playfully.
Instead of responding, he merely closed his eyes. His stupid long lashes against his face.
“You can’t sleep,” she poked at his shoulder, though that may have hurt her more than him. “You have to entertain me.”
“And how does my love wish to be entertained?” He did not open as he asked.
“Tell me a story,” Anya told him.
“You know all my stories,” he responded but he did open his eyes to look at her.
“Already?”
“It was a very long journey to France,” Dmitry reminded her. “And you asked many questions.”
She had been nervous. The Bolsheviks had sent people- or at least a person- to murder her, and she wasn’t certain who she was still, and she was about to meet her possible grandmother. Asking questions of Dmitry and Vlad had been a good use of time.
“I don’t know all your stories,” she insisted, with a sniff. “Tell me of all the girls you’ve seduced.”
He wouldn’t and he never had.
“Ah, but there’s only one girl I’ve ever seduced,” he said, leaning over and kissing her. He attempted for her lips but she turned her head and be caught her on the corner of her mouth instead. “And you know that story well.”
“I am not your first girl,” she said. Though, she was certainly his last.
And if that had been a seduction, then it certainly had been a mutual one.
“No,” he agreed and her face pinched slightly though she already had known. “But all the other girls had seduced me.”
She let out a dramatic sigh, and rolled over onto her side to face him. “It must be so difficult to be as young and beautiful as you.”
“It truly weighs on my soul” he responded, dryly. “Tell me of all the boys you fell in love with before you knew me.”
“They were boys,” Anya said, remembering men in fancy clothes and tutors and sailors. “I think I fell for every single one I met. I’m much more discerning now.”
“How many boys are you in love with now?”
She pretended to think about it, “Just you, I suppose. How many girls try to seduce you?”
“Legions,” he said, and she let out an offended gasp. “But only you have been successful these days.”
“Maybe I’ll no longer attempt to seduce you,” but her fingers already missed the feel of his skin beneath hers.
How ridiculous to think for that brief moment in Paris they would ever live without each other.
“Are you asking to be seduced?”
“And ruin your ego by making you humble yourself to do so?” Anya teased, “I could never.”
“So what was your request?”
“A story.”
“Have you heard the Story of the Duck With Golden Eggs?”
“Not for many years,” she said. It seemed silly of all the things she remembered and could not remember that fairy tales would have stuck around. “You’d tell me a fairy tale?”
“My father told me many fairy tales,” Dmitry responded. “He was quite the dreamer.”
So was his son. She wished she had met his parents so she could see the blueprint of his soul. “I think I am a fairy tale.”
This time she allowed him to kiss her on the lips. And went back for more when he pulled away.
“No one could have the imagination to make you up,” he told her. And from him, it was a compliment.
She sat up in bed, turning around so when she laid back down she could rest her face against the pillow. She felt the familiar dips and shifts in the bed as Dmitry made his way to tuck himself behind her. She leaned into him as his arm wrapped around her.
Anya let herself relax against the familiar in and out of his breathing behind her. “You never let me hold you in sleep.”
“You kick out,” he pressed a kiss against her neck, “I stay awake all night as your tiny feet become steel against my legs.”
She frowned, though she didn’t mean it. “Tonight I will dream of kicking in.”
She could feel Dmitry’s laughter against her. “You can do anything you put your mind to.”
Anya should pull the sheet over them but it was warm in Dmitry’s embrace and she was loathed to move from it.
“You know what you do in your sleep?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“You lock me in your arm and I can’t move,” she said. However, she held it in place when he went to move it. “I’ll perish if there’s ever a fire and you don’t wake up.”
“I’ll wake up if there’s a fire,” he promised. “Are you afraid to sleep?”
The nightmares came so infrequently now, but she always felt the anxiety before she went to bed that they might be there lurking somewhere.
“Sometimes,” she admitted, and turned so she was facing him. Or rather, tipped her chin up so she was facing him. “Kiss me for awhile?”
Dmitry answered with an obliging kiss. It was so very nice to be in love, indeed.
