Disclaimer: I don't own VA. I do own this plot.
4
Everything smelled like antiseptic, a smell that i'd come to hate over the years. Whatever I was laying on was theoretically soft but there was something sharp poking into my lower back. I recognized the feel of one of the infirmary cots.
I groaned.
"Roza," Dimitri's voice came from somewhere to my left. I felt warm fingers cover my own where they rested on my stomach. "Are you okay? Does something hurt?"
"I'm in the infirmary again," I groaned again. I cracked open my eyes and glared at the fluorescent light that flickered overhead. "I was doing so well too. It's been nearly two months since I was here!"
Dimitri's chuckle was half amusement, half relief.
"Yes. I'd prefer it if you beat that record next time."
I turned my head, careful to ease the stiff muscles in my neck. Dimitri was sitting on a small wooden chair beside my bed, tall frame somehow managing to look graceful as it was compressed. By the look of the stubble shadowing his chin he'd been here for a little while.
"I'm sorry I scared you, comrade."
He squeezed my hand briefly before leaning back in the chair once more. "I'm just glad you're alright."
"How's everyone else?" I asked, noting that the rest of the royal detail was absent from our surroundings.
"Fine. The rest of the guardians checked out with no major injuries and Lissa is catching up on sleep before the day starts."
I winced in sympathy. "I'm glad I won't have to deal with the fallout from the attack," I admitted. I liked my part in all of this. I handled the physical aspect, Lissa handled the political.
Dimitri nodded in agreement. "Your only job now is to rest. Get some more sleep, Rose."
"I don't want to," I whined. "At least, not here," I amended. "I want to go home and wash all this yuck off of me and then I want to climb into bed with you and stay there for a very long time." I gave him my best saucy look, probably not up to its usual caliber considering my current state of physical duress. Plus, the infirmary lights were not flattering for anyone.
"Rose," Dimitri said warningly, but a small smile was playing on the corner of his lips. Yes, he liked that idea very much, too. "You were injured very severely. You still need to recover."
"Oh come on!" I burst. "Lissa healed me." Obviously she had, there was no other explanation. I didn't know what 'injured very severely' constituted but whatever it had been it was over now. "I'm fine. Probably healthier now then I was yesterday and you weren't complaining then."
Nope, in fact, I remembered very clearly that he had been fully invested in yesterday's activities.
"We can discuss this in private," he said shortly, casting a cautious look around. Dimitri was by no means shy about our relationship; it was a well-known fact that we were pretty passionate if from nothing else then our personalities, but that didn't mean he broadcasted our personal lives everywhere. I could have argued the point that we were practically the only ones currently in the infirmary (aside from a patient on the far end of the room and a nurse walking into the back room) but he'd used the word 'private' and I hoped that would lead to my earlier suggestion.
"Okay," I agreed, "so lets go somewhere private."
Dimitri shook his head and stood up from his seat. He went off to find the doctor murmuring something unflattering in Russian.
The doctor came to evaluate me and twenty minutes later Dimitri and I were headed back towards the guardian apartments. When Lissa had first been crowned she'd offered us nicer accommodation within the townhouses that the royals stayed in, but we declined. We didn't need to be surrounded by the royals, many of who still looked down on us for our old student-mentor relationship, for the old accusation that I was the Queen-Killer, and Dimitri's status as ex-Strigoi. We were quite comfortable in our one bedroom apartment, surrounded by our colleagues.
A few minutes later we trudged over the threshold. I headed straight for the master bathroom, stripping torn and bloodstained clothes off as I went. A hot shower sounded like the best thing in the world to my tired body. Lissa may have healed me physically but mental exhaustion was a real thing too. I'd been passed out in the infirmary for a few hours but my mind and body suddenly craved more sleep.
I washed the battle—a combination of blood, sweat, fear and desperation—off my body, trying hard not to look at the pink tinged water that went down the drain, my last connection to Jeff and the terrible day.
Once I was sufficiently clean I let the hot rainfall of water cascade down over my back, closing my eyes and enjoying the sensation. I nearly jumped out of my skin when Dimitri's fingers suddenly traced the water droplets path down my naked back.
"Damn it, comrade," I moaned as he paused to knead the muscles of my lower back. I closed my eyes and leaned into his touch, reveling in the wonderful feeling of knots loosening and tension slipping away. "You scared me…mmm that feel's so good."
He continued to work the muscles of my back, digging in deep on the knot between my shoulders. I tipped my head back, letting the water fall on my face now as I rested my head against his shoulder. He dipped his head down and pressed his lips to the juncture of my neck and shoulders. I shivered as he trailed the kisses over my shoulder and then down my back.
"Ugh, Dimitri," I said as he placed a kiss in the small of my back. "Don't start something you don't intend to finish."
"Oh I intend to finish this," he assured me, running his hands all over my body now. I'd been with this man for nearly five years now and his touch still excited me as much as it had the first time.
"Why the change of heart?" I asked him, recalling our conversation in the infirmary. "Not that I'm complaining." I wasn't. In fact, I'd all but forgotten my desire for sleep. Now all I wanted was to get very physical with this man.
"A few reasons," he admitted. He sounded unruffled by our proximity but as he pressed closely against my back I could feel that he was anything but.
"Like?" I prompted. I turned around to face him and took up my own explorations of his body, trailing my hands over the hard muscles of his chest and stomach.
"Mmmm…well for one, I was terrified when you collapsed earlier. Seeing you covered in blood and all beat up, realizing that you had been so close to death and I wasn't there for you…" he trailed off with a groan as my explorations went lower. "It's our job but that doesn't make it easier."
"How did you find out about the attack?" I asked curiously. He backed me up against the shower wall. I shivered without the showers warmth but his body pressed against mine went a long way to warm me.
"Christian and I got back around six. I figured you'd come home as soon as you got back to Court and I was supposed to have a shift later so I went to bed." There was a pause in the conversation as our lips connected. A few moments later he pulled away and continued. "I woke up and you weren't there and you didn't answer your phone." My phone? When had I lost that? I'd have to look into getting a new one. "I went to see if Lissa was in her office. She wasn't but Chris was. He was looking for her. We were leaving when the guardians on duty got radioed about the attack."
I wasn't able to form a coherent response, not with what his hands were currently doing to my body.
Dimitri continued without prompting. "I didn't know you weren't with Lissa until she came into guardian headquarters hysterical and demanding that we send more guardians to help you. That you'd been hurt." I'd forgotten Lissa had seen me getting tossed around by the Strigoi. "I wanted to go rushing down to Lehigh to get you but by then we'd gotten the call that the Alchemists were on the scene for cleanup. You showed up less then an hour later."
"T-t-the o-other reas—oh! Reason?" I gasped out as Dimitri did something startling with his tongue.
"Other reason?" he asked, pulling away enough to shoot me a questioning look. I was putty in his hands, my own efforts to reciprocate pleasure seriously diminished by my incapability to get signals from my brain to my hands.
"Y-you said t-there w-were a few reasons for y-your change of heart," I reminded him.
"Hmm? Oh, yes." He straightened up long enough to press another kiss to my lips. "The other reason was the thought of you in here, naked and wet, without me," he said simply. Then he scooped me up into his arms and out of the shower, somehow managing to turn off the now cold tap in the process.
We didn't quite make it to the bedroom but the bathroom sink provided us with a workable space to finish what we'd—he'd—started.
An hour later found us curled up in our bed, wrapped together in a tangle of sweaty limbs and shared breath. I rested my head comfortably on Dimitri's chest, lulled by the gentle rise and fall of his chest and the reassuringly steady beat of his heart.
As I've mentioned before, Dimitri and I have maintained a high level of passion in our relationship, but whenever one, or both, of us is in a particularly dangerous situation that passion gets amped up and we collide like two trains on the same track. My body ached in the pleasant aftermath of rigorous lovemaking and I found myself dreamily wondering if we might sneak in a third round before I exhausted myself too much.
Dimitri seemed to sense my contemplation because he reached out and traced a callused finger down my jawline.
"Sleep, love. We have plenty of time for the rest once you've rested a while."
"Will you be here when I wake up?" I asked, smothering a yawn and pressing closer to him.
He pressed a kiss to my forehead.
"Always."
"You know," I said, lazily tracing patterns onto Dimitri's chest the next morning. "Lissa, Christian and I are lucky. We found the people we love in high school." I had no idea where the thought came from or what made me say it. Maybe it was the overall relaxed atmosphere in the room, maybe I was being sappy. Whatever the cause it felt right to say it. "We didn't have to wait that long."
"I found you in a high school," Dimitri said. "Does that count?"
I laughed. "Technically you found me in Portland, comrade, and brought me to high school." He chuckled lowly in his chest. We were silent for a few moments longer. "Have I ever thanked you for that?" I asked suddenly.
I felt Dimitri startle. "Thank me? For capturing you?"
"Yeah, think about it." I propped myself up on an elbow so I could look at him. "If you hadn't brought us back Lissa wouldn't be queen, Christian would've spiraled into antisocial anarchy, there'd be a lot more Strigoi lurking about, Moroi defensive magic wouldn't even be a thing, and Strogoi restorations wouldn't have come about. I would never have met you." That last one was perhaps the most important in my book. "Everything good that has happened…I mean, yeah," I finished lamely. "Don't get me wrong, it was a huge blow to my ego at the time but…" I trailed off, having said my piece.
He sighed and pulled me closer to him, pressing his lips to mine. "One of my greatest achievements," he chortled as we pulled apart. "Capturing two seventeen year old girls."
"Two highly resourceful and very stubborn seventeen year old girls," I said, just to make him feel better. We lulled into another silence, one that I was reluctant to break when the time came.
"I need to get up," I said regretfully.
He made a sound of protest. "Why?"
"I need to go check on Lissa," I said. "She healed me last night and I want to make sure she's okay. Also, I need to talk to her about the attack. Something about it isn't sitting right with me."
"Oh? Does this have to do with that feeling you had?"
"I don't know. Maybe? I'm not entirely sure but something about it doesn't feel right." I struggled for words. "If it had been a roving band of Strigoi…I mean it wouldn't be unheard of for them to hide in college towns but this…there were so many of them. I know they work together more often but seven? How did seven Strigoi manage to come across the Moroi queen just on luck?" I shook my head. "And the way they moved, divided their forces…it was too directed. Too planned. I think they knew we were there."
"How would they have known?" he demanded. "Do you think humans in the school are working with them? That they told them where Lissa was?"
I hesitated.
"I'm not sure about that but I think someone told them."
Something had been bothering me about the attack since it happened but I hadn't been able to put my finger on what that was. Laying in bed with Dimitri that morning it had finally clicked. I had seen the way the Strigoi had attacked, watched them divide up and attack systematically. That was something that a random Strigoi attack never had. They had been told. Someone had to have known where we were last night and the only people that knew that were at Court. I had to talk to Lissa.
If one of the radicals was passing information along to Strigoi and attempting to use them as a tool for getting Lissa off the throne (which admittedly would be a much better plan then attacking her or Jill themselves. That usually ended in their death or imprisonment) then we had a serious problem. Who could we trust?
Until we had the Moroi radicals in custody she wouldn't be safe. She was in constant danger from an unseen enemy. The one good thing about Strigoi, and I found it hard to say that anything was good about them, was that you always knew they were the enemy. They look like the enemy, they acted like the enemy and there was no doubt that They. Were. The. Enemy. Moroi radicals were different. They looked like everyone else, acted like you friend and smiled to your face while they were stabbing you in the back. Politics, I thought with scorn. This is why I don't like politics. But regardless, if my instincts were right politics had just crossed paths with my job and that was protecting Lissa at all costs.
I found Lissa in her apartment, getting ready for the day. Christian had already left and she was alone. She looked up upon my entry and her brow furrowed. "Rose," she said. "I'm confused. Are you happy or angry right now?"
"What?" I asked, taken off guard. "What kind of question is that?"
"Your aura," she said by way of explanation. "Your face is twisted up in your angry look but your aura is all lit up and happy."
"Oh," I said in understanding. I dropped down onto a nearby sofa. "A bit of both, I guess." I flushed a little. "I had a very good night. And morning. But something about the attack is bothering me and I don't think you're going to like it."
With that I launched into my theory of what had happened with the attack and by the end she looked properly appalled.
"Do you really think that the radicals are working with the Strigoi that way?" She'd dropped into an chair half-way through my theory and she now clutched the arms in a vice grip.
"Working with them might be a heavy word," I admitted. "But I wouldn't put it past them to tell someone where you were, which could've ultimately led to the attack. I think we need to be more careful about who we tell when you leave Court."
"But how can we keep it contained?" she asked. "Guardians, advisors, anyone who manages to see me when I leave, there's no way of keeping a cap on that."
She was right.
"Then we need to try and keep details vague. People might know you're off the grounds but we need to try and keep details under wraps. The times, the routs we're taking, where we're staying."
Lissa sighed, disappointment flashing on her face. "Do they really hate me that much?" she asked. "That they're willing to work with Strigoi?"
"Like I said, I don't think they're working with them, per se. Just using them as a means to an end. And I really don't know what they're capable of. Look at what happened with Jill." The incident with Jill was still a sore spot three years after the fact. "A lot of people don't like change. We can't help that. You're doing what's best for the majority so don't let this stop you. Leave the worrying up to me. Its my job."
