Zoya Nazyalensky Imagines

After All This Time, You and I

Zoya is having a perfectly normal morning until someone finally tells her the news.

Normalcy is hard to come by at the Little Palace. It's hard to come by when you live in Ravka, when you are a Grisha, when your closest friends are kings with demons and girls without all of their eyes. One's even a Sun Saint. So yes, Zoya's definition of normalcy is a little strained. Defining this morning as normal purely means that no one has yet lit any buildings on fire.

Even this tenuous thread of normalcy, though, will not stand forever. Zoya has hardly been awake for a couple of hours before all of that comes crashing down again. Luckily for her, it's not even bad. It's just different, that's all. Zoya knows it's going to be different the same way she knows when everything else changes around here: gossip. The entire Little Palace is ablaze with it.

Zoya does her best to ignore the whispers as long as she can. Whatever new trouble has arrived to Os Alta will become her problem soon enough, but if she can push off the inevitable for as long as possible, that just means she won't have to worry for quite as long. It'll do her constantly furrowed brow some good, at least, if it can have a chance to rest every now and then.

She's not too proud to admit that she's definitely doubled back down corridors to avoid large crowds of over excited Grisha, nor that every time she sees someone who looks like they're just bursting with information that must get out at once, she comes up with some nonexistent task that she just has to get to. If it's a serious threat, someone would have come for her already. Zoya doesn't want to hear about run-of-the mill calamities. Only the finest of disasters can be allowed to ruin her morning.

Genya Safin, in the end, is the one who has to break the news. This is also possibly because Genya is the bravest, or just the only Grisha around save for perhaps David who is capable of talking to Zoya without wishing the ground would open up beneath their feet and swallow them whole. Given that David is likely holed up in his lab somewhere, tinkering on gadgets and gizmos until Genya drags him off to meals, Genya herself is the one who must bear this morning's news.

Even Zoya's friendship with the Tailor cannot protect Genya from receiving a few haughty stares. Genya emerges from the shadow of a room as Zoya walks past, matching Zoya's strides within moments despite Zoya's repeated attempts to speed up and shake her.

At last, Zoya sighs and gives in, slowing down enough that they can walk comfortably. "What's gone wrong?"

Genya laughs. "Couldn't I just be talking to you because I felt like it?"

Zoya arches a cold brow. "Are you?"

"Partially," Genya admits. "Also, there's something you need to know."

"Figures," Zoya says. "What disaster do I have to avert now?"

"No disaster, actually," Genya answers her. "I just wanted you to know that an old friend will be returning to the Little Palace."

Zoya eyes her cautiously. "I don't have old friends. Everyone I know is either here or dead."

Genya closes her eyes faintly as if searching for patience within the confines of her mind. "Zoya, I know you're never a sweetheart, but would it kill you to practice optimism every now and then? Just one day without making me listen to something incredibly depressing or cutting, that's all I ask."

"You ask for too much," Zoya says crisply. "So? Who's coming?"

Genya manages a smile in the midst of her consternation. "Y/N L/N."

Zoya Nazyalensky is not much given to surprise. She has done her best to remove that unreliable element from her very existence. On the battlefield, you can't afford for something to take you by surprise. Everything should be expected. If there is something Zoya does not understand, a battle plan or tactical maneuver she doesn't anticipate, countless lives will be lost. Shock is simply not in her vocabulary.