Chapter Text
It takes time—such an excruciating length of time whose agony Natasha will come to forget, but as it’s happening, she feels as if she is suffering just as much as Andrei is, waiting day-to-day and hour-to-hour for him to take a turn for the worse again—but slowly, surely, Andrei heals. From that terrible night where he came so close to dying he thought he already had, it takes a month before he can prop himself up in bed, another month after that before he takes his first, timid steps around the room, first leaning on Natasha’s trembling, eager arm, then on a cane as his steps become more sure and he slowly comes to the conviction that he will live to take another one. Still, his face remains troublingly pale, his clear blue eyes ringed bruise-black with circles that do not seem to go away. Still, when they go for walks together, timidly slow, barely to the end of the garden path before she insists that they turn back, and Andrei inevitably stumbles, when Natasha catches him, his ribs and spine protrude far more than they should.
But the first day she notices that his cheeks have a hint of color in them again, the first time his smile reaches his eyes as he sees her come into his room, Natasha thinks that it would be worth it to spend the rest of her life like this, bounded by his sickbed and the garden’s edge, if he would always look at her like he does now. She thought, before, when, as she feels now, she was still so young, she had known what it was like to be looked like with love—she had seen on the one hand Andrei, whose eyes had studiously followed her around the room, grown heavy and distant when she sang, had looked at her with wonder, as if he’d never seen anything like her before. And on the other hand had been that prince Kuragin, whose first name she hasn’t been able to say since then, as she could replace lexically the formality and separation that had once existed between them and never should have been broken. His eyes had darkened with desire when he looked at her, and she had blushed and felt like shimmering.
Now, the wonder is back in Andrei’s gaze, but it’s tempered by an indescribable tenderness—where once, it seemed, he couldn’t quite believe that she was solid flesh and not some bird or phantom, poised to fly away from him or shatter underneath his touch; now his wonder seems to take the form of not quite believing that she’s real at all. She feels like she could spend hours staring into his eyes—they’re so expressive, she never realized it before. He’s not one to free gesture or open expression, but now that she knows him, she realizes she can read everything he feels in his eyes. She feels like he could speak to her without a word, with just his eyes. And so, of course, she falls into the routine of spending the day trying not to meet them—communicating with him by touch, the hand she uses to help him out of bed, or rests on his back to steady him as they walk, rests on his chest when, as usual, he falls asleep as soon as they get back inside, as she pillows her head on his chest. Sometimes, she drifts off with him like that, bent over him from her chair or kneeling on the floor; often, she listens to his heartbeat, thanking God for the miracle of its strength.
It’s in the evenings when she lets herself look at him. By candlelight, his face looks truly skeletal, but she grows used to it, allows herself to re-learn his bone structure, the sharp line of his nose, his long, dark eyelashes, the curve of his lips. Then, he looks at her in what, though unspoken, she can only identify as desire in his own particular way. The feeling that it sparks in her is completely different from how she felt before. When Kuragin had looked at her like that, she had felt like she was glittering all over, from her skin and in her heart and stomach, hands shaking. Now, she feels, low in her abdomen, a precipitousness, as if she’s about to fall from a very great height; a steady burning. She allows him to take her hand, to trace it back and front, clasp it in his own. Though this is a very different Andrei from the one who loved her then, it’s in this intensity that she knows that deep down, he’s still the same, and she is still the same Natasha who once loved him back. They’ve changed, fundamentally, both of them, but they’ve found their way back to each other somehow.
...
“We should talk about it, you know,” she finds the nerve to tell him, one day a little over two months after the day he came so close to dying. They’ve just come back from their morning walk, and, as his energy has begun to return, and he’s started sleeping less during the day, she’s gotten into the habit of reading to him after that, she’s returning to his room from his study with the book they’re reading in her hand.
“About what? There’s so much, and at the same time I feel like there’s nothing at all,” Andrei replies.
…
Even now, Andrei is unable to stay up very late, and so Natasha always has a few hours to herself before she goes to bed. Often, she spends them with Marya, who’s busied herself, as always, with Nikolushka, and as of late, with the business of the Bolkonsky estate, which Andrei has yet to be able to look to himself. As it turns out, the princess has quite the head for numbers. For the past few days, Pierre has joined them at Bald Hills, taking a much-needed break from the bustle of the city. He has death of his own to deal with, and Natasha will never forget how they’ve turned to each other in their lowest moments. Since Pierre’s arrival, the three of them have been talking together late into the night. Pierre and Marya, Natasha finds out, have been close friends for a very long time, have been adults together since Natasha was still a child, and despite her intimacy with Pierre, she often feels left out. Sometimes, she leaves the conversation early, pretends to go to bed, and instead watches Andrei sleep.
That night, though, Marya has a headache and so retires early as well, leaving Natasha and Pierre to stand out on Pierre’s balcony and look at the stars together.
“How is he?” Pierre asks Natasha, as he does every night.
“He fell asleep while I was reading to him,” she replies, “but otherwise, today was good, I think.”
“I’m glad.”
“So am I.” Then: “He doesn’t want to talk to me,” she confesses.
“He only wants to talk to you,” says Pierre.
“But we don’t talk . We look at each other, we touch, I read to him. We make small talk. But it’s been two months, we’ve spent every minute together, and we still haven’t talked about before .”
“Give him time,” Pierre replies. “That’s just Andrei’s way. He’ll talk to you when he’s ready.”
“Oh, Pierre,” says Natasha, and to her embarrassment, she breaks down crying. Dimly, as Pierre enfolds her into his big, warm embrace, arms wrapped around her shoulder and down by her waist as she curls her hands into his chest and weeps, she remembers what he told her: if I were not myself...I would ask you for your hand . If he were not Pierre. If she were not Natasha. If Andrei, dear to them both, didn’t lie like a yawning chasm between them gaping with wounds. Pierre presses a kiss to the top of her head and she wonders what would have happened if it were just the two of them.
“Dear Natasha,” says her dearest friend. “Has anyone told you have good you’ve been to him?” She shakes her head. “I can’t imagine what you’ve been through. I wish that I could have been there—every day, I wished I were by his side as well. I am so sorry that I couldn’t be here for you—for both of you.”
“I know you couldn’t help it,” says Natasha, and she thinks of Hélène, the other person between them the last time Pierre had held her like this. Hélène, her marble shoulders, round cheeks, plump arms, the very picture of graceful femininity that Natasha had always lacked. Hélène, her beautiful mouth whispering into Natasha’s ear as she smoothed a dress over her waist. Hélène, her brother’s agent.
She thinks of Hélène, dead and alone, cold in her bed for a week before she was found. How Hélène died alone, like Andrei could have, and didn’t.
…
She finds Pierre, the next day or perhaps the one after, at Andrei’s bedside. His broad shoulders are shaking as he presses his face into Andrei’s legs swung over the side of the bed, Andrei’s thin fingers smoothing through his hair.