Chapter Text
Illya has suffered every injury imaginable. He has been tortured and poisoned, beaten and bruised and brutalized. Felt the sting and burn of every threat, shame, and insult hurled at him. He is intimately, exquisitely familiar with pain in all its forms.
None of it has ever hurt like this.
Going soft, Peril?
He had scoffed in response, at an impossibility that, for the first time in his life, felt agonizingly within reach. It was a not admitting of the wound, a transparent denial that he could ever be pierced by Cupid’s arrow.
He’s not denying it now.
It had been an act of mercy, he thinks, to throw him to the wolves. Infinitely kinder to leave him angry, leave him aching, leave him guessing. He could have believed in her betrayal, held onto the burning coals of her memory—the dance of her dark eyes, the weight of her hand in his—until he was numb with it. Until he had learned his lesson and resurrected all of his walls once more.
Looking down at Gaby now, the truth revealed, the mission complete, the goodbye inevitable, Illya finally understands what suffering is.
This is ruin. Unsalvageable, untamable, and ultimately, unstoppable. He has no chance of rebuilding or recovering after this. No desire to if that means forgetting her. He has to leave her. He must.
But how can he?
If a lifetime of pain has taught Illya anything, it is to surrender to it. And so, he offers her his heart, broken and undeserving as it is, and slips the ring back onto her finger.