Chapter Text
He can tell something is wrong. Something has been wrong for a few days at least, and if he wasn’t afraid of the answer, then he would have asked the moment he sensed it. But Nathalie is well-aware, he is used to her trying to hide, hardly by shrinking or hanging her head, but with the firmness of her gaze and level tone of voice, betraying no waver. He doesn’t have a clue how to proceed when the trouble is plain.
Of course, he will dote on her health. He will spend entire nights with her to ensure she can breathe properly through them. He will hold her as she shivers with this perpetual fever, allowing her refuge in the heat of his skin. But when it is her heart that is sick, he keeps at a distance. He is wide-eyed and talks little. Nathalie doesn’t blame him. When his own heart is ailing so, how can she expect him to know how to heal hers?
The reason Nathalie doesn’t hide this trouble the way she hides the rest of them, letting her concrete exterior erode before his eyes, is that she might actually want him to ask. To chase after her pain. To know it. There are some things she can never tell him. Some truths which are forbidden in words, though she sings them out in her every touch, her every action. She has made her life into the truth. She has made her death too.
And that is her problem. Part of it.
It’s part of two problems, actually. Her real problem and the challenge of not knowing how to explain the real problem to Gabriel. As much as she may or may not want to.
She knows how to begin.
It started with an email.
He’d been there when it came in. At a little after 10 PM that night, he was on the other side of the room, hunched over the chessboard and restoring all the pieces after they’d finished their game. She was in bed, fighting sleep, because she didn’t know if he’d stay or leave and she wanted to be awake for as long as he was around. Her tablet chimed. She saw him perk up.
“What’s that?” he asked. Nathalie’s inbox had been dry for weeks since she’d officially gone on medical leave, but even the occasional messages that dropped in tended to do so during work hours at least.
The only reason she bothered opening it at first was because the potential for conversation would keep him around longer. Never mind her tired eyes, her aching head, that plush promise of sleep...
And then, she kept it open, not to talk about it, but because it wasn’t even composed in French.
“Oh,” Nathalie murmured. “I’m...not sure.”
She could read it. She ought to have been able to read it. She learned to read in this language.
Only…
This.
This caught her mortally off guard.
And so Nathalie, when she decides to tell Gabriel what has been eating her alive the last several days, can say to start, “Remember that email I received on Thursday night?”
He won’t remember the email itself, because Nathalie ended up reciting not a word of it. Rather, she hastily set the tablet aside, not before closing out of her email application to get it as far away as digitally possible without having to delete it. “It’s not important,” she told him. A lie, and he knew it. But that’s when the mask started to fall. That’s when he stopped knowing how to help her.
He’ll only remember that she seems to be running from something, and whatever it is, it’s hiding in that message.
From there, Nathalie might say, “It was from somebody I haven’t seen in a long time. I was startled.”
“Who?” asks the version of Gabriel in her head on which she’s practicing this conversation. This Gabriel also has a guess already what the answer might be. A guess that will make his silver brow pull together with sympathetic displeasure. He’ll be close. But the distance he misses is crucial.
She gives the name provided on the email, which is of no help to him apart from her accent. “Mariya. Mariya Babkina.”
He blinks at her.
“My sister.”
This will be a brief point of confusion that will need to be cleared up. Nathalie can get it over with. She can say it’s the half-sister with whom she shares a mother, the one she never told him about. Because Nathalie hasn’t seen her in twenty-six years. Almost Mariya’s entire life.
There’s very little that Gabriel knows. There’s very little he needs to know when Nathalie confesses what is going on, but that doesn’t stop her from pouring almost everything she can remember out to the listening figment of him in her head. She sees him sitting on the bed. Sees him looking at her. Sees his body flinch and his blue-gray eyes flicker with the emotions crashing through her body as she lets herself think about.
Because normally, Nathalie never thinks about it. She can’t afford to.
She remembers the day her father died three years ago, well before her life spiraled out of control. She remembers trying to convince herself, for years and years, that when that day came, she’d feel nothing. It’d pass over like a dark but rainless cloud. Casting shade alone. And shade can be pleasant. But that is not how she felt.
Instead, Nathalie cried. She cried hard. And she didn’t exactly know why, but she knew it was for more than one reason. What she hated the most out of anything is that her father was right. She would be upset when he was gone.
So upset that Gabriel noticed. But three years ago, he had yet to shut down. Three years ago, he could sit her down across from him, ask what was wrong, and not have to fear an answer that acknowledged suffering he deemed his own fault.
Nathalie told him what she could. Shared sparse and carefully detailed memories, a little more than enough to serve as an explanation for why his analytical, cool-headed assistant was suddenly a blubbering mess. Something about her family being complicated. Something about them being estranged. Something about bitterness and failing marriage and a child who bore the blame for as long as she could carry it before it crushed her. Something about thinking she was free. Something about living ghosts. Being haunted. Being sorry. And wrong.
She’d fought with herself for years, pulling the chain over the line, back and forth between believing everything she’s ever been told and believing what she felt. Believing the pain, the weight in her heart. Because both sides of that struggle had led her here. Knowing that is why Nathalie doesn’t like to think about it, because it starts to make her window into the world make sense, and the scariest thing she can imagine is that her place in it all has a reasonable explanation.
If it was a matter of fate, of chance, of absurdity, then she couldn't fight it.
She just wants to let it carry her.
She just wants to exist despite what her existence has done to her.
But she’s hit another bump in the road with this email. With this sister, this stranger claiming to be a sister - though Nathalie has never known what the word even means.
“She’s coming to Paris next month,” she’ll inform Gabriel. “She wants to see me. To meet me.”
He’ll shrug. “Okay. Do you want to see her?”
That’s a question she can’t even answer in practice.
So she cuts to the chase.
“How am I supposed to talk about this? ” Nathalie, as if she has an audience, gestures to everything within sight: her bed, where she spends hours and hours on end, rain or shine, night or day, and the wires running under the sleeve of her well-worn pajamas to track her pulse; the crutches leaning against a chair nearby, which she still needs on the days her body wishes not to participate in consciousness just to get the the adjoining bathroom; herself, her sickly skin and dulling eyes, lungs as substantial as paper and a head that hammered hard enough to make her skull feel like a tuning fork. Mariya, who by the sound of her email, is thrilled by the prospect of meeting her long lost older sister, will be meeting a dying woman. Pitiful Nathalie Sancoeur with no other family, living out the rest of her days in some other man’s mansion.
And that. That is her problem with Gabriel.
She can tell him what’s wrong. But that means telling him what’s really wrong.
Somehow, her whole life story has added up to this.
Nathalie is not afraid of disappointing or even horrifying her sister with such a story. She doesn’t imagine Mariya has had a very easy life either. But now, Nathalie’s has to begin somewhere. She has to trace roots that she has tried to unearth before. She has to remember .
Tonight, like many others, Gabriel sleeps in her bed. And as Nathalie sinks into his warmth, fighting the fevered chills slithering up and down her body, she looks into his face and hopes he ended up here by chance. Hopes that she burst senselessly, helplessly into existence. Hopes that when she tells her story she doesn’t find the reason she loves him more than he deserves, or the blueprint to her heart and soul.