Chapter 35 - Marco
He brought me home as promised.
It was hard.
Especially convincing my parents that I was going to Alexei’s home and not my own. The hospital wanted to keep me but Alexei promised.
And Alexei kept his promises. He told my parents that I needed stability and that he could give me that more than they could. That he had the resources to be with me twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, in a way they simply couldn’t match.
It was harsh.
I had watched my mother’s face while he said it. I saw the tightening around her mouth that meant she was holding back something she wanted to say. I also saw my father’s jaw, but they had admitted it too.
Because it was true.
My mother was sick. Her diabetes was getting worse, not better, and the stress of caring for a dying son on top of her own deteriorating body was something she couldn’t sustain. My father needed to work.
Alexei could be with me.
Twenty-four hours a day.
Seven days a week.
Even though he shouldn’t.
He shouldn’t waste his time on me. He shouldn’t restructure his entire existence around a person who might not be there next month.
But I was selfish.
I was so, so selfish.
Because I wanted him to.
I wanted him to be here. I wanted him to hold me and count my heartbeats and cook me meals I could barely eat and wake up beside me and fall asleep beside me and exist in the same space as me for whatever time I had left.
I wanted it so badly that the wanting outweighed the guilt.
Most of the time.
I was home now.
His home.
Alexei was sleeping.
That was the first thing I noticed when I woke up. He hadn’t slept in days so I didn’t want to wake him up. I reached over slowly and I pressed my lips to his forehead.
Then I slipped out of the bed.
Walking was hard lately.
My body had entered a new phase of decline, one that the doctors had warned me about but that I hadn’t fully understood until I was living inside it. My legs were weak.
I made it to the hallway wearing one of Alexei’s shirts. I was halfway to the room when I saw him.
Dimitri.
“I was hoping you’d wake up first.”
“Alexei is… still sleeping.”
“I know.” He pointed at the chair.
The armchair near the window, the one Alexei usually sat in when he was watching me. “Sit down,” Dimitri ordered. “You’re shaking.”
I swallowed and sat.
A bit further from him than the chair suggested. I pulled the chair slightly, angling it so that there was more space between us.
“Marco,” he sighed. “I have a request from you.”
“F… from me?” The stutter always came back when I was nervous.
Dimitri nodded. “Alexei had a compatibility test done. Do you know this?”
“Test for what?”
“For his heart,” he paused. “For your heart transplant.”
I felt like the entire building shifted and came down on me, all at once, my body suddenly shaking as if I was freezing under ice. Dimitri went to the kitchen and came back with a cup of water.
He set it on the table beside me, within reach but not pushed at me. “I take it you didn’t know.”
Tears blurred my vision, the world smearing into wet shapes that made no sense. Everything dissolved into an all-consuming fog of grief that arrived so fast it overrode every other function.
“Wh… but he would die.”
The idea of his heart beating inside my chest, keeping me alive while he lay in the ground, was the kind of thing that would destroy me in a way no illness ever could.
“Yes, he would.” Dimitri sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “My request, as selfish as it is, is for you to stop him. Take the idea out of his head.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” he continued. “I wish you survive. Rei would be sad without you, but Alexei is…”
Alexei was his cousin. His blood. The person he had grown up beside, fought beside, bled beside.
Dimitri didn’t want to lose him.
“I would never allow him to do that.”
I would rather die a hundred times than let Alexei Morozov give me his heart.
I would rather stop breathing than breathe with his heart inside me.
Dimitri nodded. “I’m glad you think so.”
The relief in his voice was subtle but present.
Then he looked toward the bedroom and his eyes narrowed slightly, hearing the noise.
“I have to go,” Dimitri said, already moving toward the door.
“Take the idea out of his head,” he repeated, pausing at the threshold, turning back to look at me with an expression that was serious and underneath all of it, desperate. “I mean it, Marco. Stop him.”
Then he was gone.
My hands were in my lap, trembling. I heard footsteps coming from the bedroom. Moving through the hallway, getting closer.
Alexei walked out. He was shirtless. His hair was messy from sleep, falling into his face in dark, disheveled strands.
He looked around the room and he saw me.
His face changed and the sleepiness vanished. The soft expression that had been there a moment ago was replaced by panic.
My eyes were teary. The tears didn’t stop. I couldn’t make them stop. I couldn’t wipe them away fast enough.
I looked at him.
He looked at me.
Two people.
One who was dying.
One who had offered to die instead.
Alexei reached me, his hands coming up to my face, his thumbs brushing under my eyes where the tears were still falling.
“Why are you crying?”
I looked at the face of the man who asked someone to cut his heart out of his chest and give it to me. “Is it true?”
I saw the confusion on his face. “You took a test… for a heart transplant.”
His eyes changed. They went from surprise to anger.
The anger wasn’t directed at me but I could see he was nearly fuming. “Who told you that?” he asked.
“That’s not important, Alexei!” My voice rose.
I never yelled at him. At the beginning it was because I was scared he would kill me, but later on I just never felt the need to raise my voice at him. But I yelled now.
“How could you even think that?”
His jaw clenched harder. The muscles in his neck tightened. His eyes went flat and I knew he was holding something back. “How could I not?”
“You would die!” The words tore out of me.
“You would die, Alexei! You would…they would take your heart out of your chest and put it in mine and you would…you would be dead, you would be gone, you would be—” the sentence collapsed.
The words wouldn’t come anymore because the throat they were trying to pass through closed. I felt like a stone sat there.
“Yes, but you wouldn’t!” His voice was loud now, matching mine.
I flinched and my shoulders drew in.
Alexei saw it and the fury - whatever was left of it - drained. His voice softened. “You wouldn’t,” he repeated.
I shook my head. “Alexei…” His name came out broken.
“No,” he said. “You… just let me do this, okay?”
He wasn’t asking permission but requesting compliance, and while I was naturally obedient, I would never submit to this request.
“I owe you this much,” he added and I furrowed my eyebrows.
“You don’t owe me anything.” What was there to owe me? I’d argue that I was the one who owed him, not just money but also the time and patience he invested in me all this time.
“How do I not? Aren’t I part of the reason for all of this!?”
I blinked and the confusion took over my face. “Why would you be the reason?”
He swallowed and I could see he was struggling to speak. “I lied to you. We didn’t meet on that rooftop.”
A flashback from one year ago came in my mind.
That was the moment the world had split in two - the before and the after, the time when I had not known Alexei Morozov existed and the time when I could not stop knowing.
But now he was telling me that wasn’t the beginning and I was left more confused than before.
“I know you,” he continued. “I… I have known you for so long. You don’t remember this, and that’s fine. But I saw you. When I was ten, I took a trip to Italy. I snuck out one night and ended up in a garden.”
I felt something weird fluttering in my chest.
“I saw you there.” His eyes were wet.
Alexei Morozov’s eyes were wet.
“I… I felt something,” the words were barely more than a whisper now. “It was the first time I felt anything. I was supposed to find you again. I knew you were sick. You told me.”
His eyes stared down at the floor as if he was embarrassed to even look at me. “But after I left Italy, I didn’t look again.” The pain in his voice was more evident now. “And you know why?”
He didn’t wait for me to answer. “Because I’m a coward.
I was scared of feeling.” He clenched his hands in his own lap.
“Up until you, I didn’t feel shit. I was diagnosed as unemotional.
An empty shell. The doctors told my parents I was broken.
That something in me didn’t work. That I would never feel anything for anyone because the part of me that was supposed to feel just…
wasn’t there.” He seemed to remember it so vividly.
“But then a boy with the most beautiful bright eyes made me feel.” He looked at me again and there were so many emotions swirling in him.
He stood up and went to a shelf.
His hand moved to the back of the shelf, to a place that wasn’t immediately visible, and he brought down a piece of fabric.
He came back to me but now his hands were holding something - a small, folded piece of material that looked old, worn, faded by time. It was blue.
Pale blue.
“You gave me your ribbon.” He held it out.
I remembered it vaguely. My brave thing.
The thing I used to hold when I was scared. It was a gift from my grandmother once she noticed I took a liking to ribbons. It made me feel close to her and more safe, yet I had given it to him.
And he kept it.
For years.
He smiled at me. The expression was so unexpected, it nearly caught me off guard. “I held on to it all these years.” He looked down at the ribbon in his hands. “But I never looked for you.”