Work Text:
He barely feels the tug of Alisa's hand as they retreat. He barely feels anything as images from the last few moments - the red emerging from Marshall's chest, the firm set of Juliette's jaw, Mybergh Road - make his heart sink and his throat tighten. How can he have the capacity to feel anything when he feels too much - grief for Marshall, grief for his mother, grief for the hope that had been so recently rekindled - ?
"None of it was real," Juliette had told him, hurt and anger flashing behind her eyes, days before. Those words stung; they tore at a wound that Roma had ignored for four years, renewed his mourning for all the blood and hurt he'd caused.
He supposes she was right in the end, just as she always seems to be. If his vision would clear, if his head stopped spinning, he would see her back in the hospital room, telling her cousin how it wasn't real, in fact. A dalliance for information, she called it.
He'd objected. He'd thought he changed. Yet for all his worry that he'd become a killer, a monster, with no room for softness or what's right, a part of him was too soft. Too hopeful. Too willing to believe that their love - or his love, he realizes now - could survive in this city. That it could be real.
And God, how he'd hoped. He can recall the touch of the glass window against his fingertips, taste the liquor on her lips from the night at the brothel, feel the softness of his hand against hers in the alley. She'd reached for him, told him they'd have a 'proper chat' when it was all over. A laugh gets caught in his dry throat at the thought - he knows now what she must have wanted to say.
For a few hours, he'd hoped that could just be Roma and Juliette, not Roma Montagov and Juliette Cai, the heirs of rival gangs. He'd thought that they could slip into how it used to be, that they could be a team again, that he could come home.
But like Juliette, he'd been right, at least at the beginning of their 'dalliance.' He thought that she was not the same indomitable girl but a monster, a monster that he hated. He thought that she'd changed, that she was dangerous, that she no longer mourned or cared. And he had been right, even when he thought himself wrong.
Their love, real or not, had always been rooted in understanding. When they were fourteen, they understood each other's need for a confidant, an escape. They'd understood each other's references and strategies, their pressures and ambitions, better than anybody else in the world could.
And now, feeling too little and too much, he understands it all too well. He understands how his hope had been a dangerous and doomed thing. How he'd been a fool all too easy for her to play. How they had both changed too much to ever be the way they were… or at least the way he thought they had been before the words Mybergh Road came from her mouth.
He understands it all too well, and he can feel his heart splinter and harden as he does.