#SONYA // ( verse 001: sonya is good )

[dcarhcarts]

♛ : sharing a dessert

“I brought cake,” is what she opens with, half-whispering when the door cracks open, mischief dancing in the golden fragments of candlelight reflected on warm, dark eyes. A delicious sense of wrongdoing lifts the corner of Sonya’s lips. “Maman knows nothing. It’s absolutely a matter of life and death that you let me in before they catch me redhanded!”

It’s not the first time she’s terrorized the kitchens certainly, though no one ever seems to notice. The Rostov household has been chaos since the departure of Nikolai. The family lives from letter to letter, the threat of war and death looming ever-presently over their heads. 

Sonya slips into Natasha’s bedroom and sets the plate down on the vanity, forks clattering gently against the china. “They call it a Napoleon, see? After that French Emperor our Nikolai is fighting.” She picks up a fork and cuts deftly through a piece of the mille-feuille, places it in her mouth with a triumphant grin. “There, now I’ve cut through their ranks.” A giggle escapes her lips at the silliness of it. “Won’t you help me finish them off, dear Natasha?” 

@lifeawoke || non-sexual acts of intimacy || accepting !

[dcarhcarts]

@personnages || closed starter

She stops abruptly at the edge of the room, suddenly still when her gaze settles on a familiar figure. Around her the voices and the music from the ballroom next door seem to rise at a steady cacophony. The Rostovs have not been frequently in society for the past few weeks - what with Natasha ill, and the count and countess still more so for all the matters of the household. In fact, Sonya has only been allowed out of the house because Marya Dmitrievna has agreed to chaperone her for the evening.

It is somehow still difficult, Sonya thinks, to be perceived as neither the wronged or the wrongdoing. Not that there are such parties in this case, only that there may be to some people, depending on the perspective. Yet everyone, absolutely everyone who knows, seems simultaneously not wishing to speak of it and yet wanting to believe that she is somehow obligated  to share her thoughts on her cousin - on her betrothed, on Anatole Kuragin. Sonya cannot defend her cousin without being hushed quickly, cannot sympathize with Prince Bolkonsky without appearing false. At least on Kuragin their feelings are unified.

Marya Dmitrievna’s gaze falls disapprovingly and hawk-like on her - and she wants to scream defiance. Still - she doesn’t run away when she comes upon Andrei Bolkonsky. Instead, she steps into the room as hesitantly as once she was called into the drawing room to greet him that very first time, and sits down, awkward and uncertain on the sofa.

“I’m sorry,” Finally she says, unsure whether or not she’s right in doing so, voice and gaze diminished. It’s like the first few weeks of their acquaintance all over again, when all they had in common is the girl they both loved, when she has not yet grown used to thinking of him as a future brother, when everything is before them and not behind. What has happened to them - to Natasha, to Prince Bolkonsky, to their family - is a tragedy.  “For what it's worth, I - I should have so much liked to be your cousin-in-law.” 

[dcarhcarts]

@dreamersdashed || continued from (x)

Tears circle in the frame of her eyes but she refuses to let them fall, lifts her chin and her eyes up to the ceiling. Her fingers curl tight, knuckles turning white, into the fabric of her sleeves, bunched lightly at the elbows, and she breathes, shaking. A smile struggles valiantly on her face but is abandoned immediately. “He says - he’s fallen in love.”

What can she say to that? What can she say to him, eyes serious and soft as he explains to her all that she needs to know with just a glance? “I have released him.” What else could she have done? To love someone is to wish most fervently for them to be happy. What can she do, when she is the one standing in the way of his happiness? “He says - I must be a saint.” Her voice does not change, high and wavering and unnatural to herself. The word tastes bitter on her tongue. Saint she is not - Sonya’s a fool. 

What has she become in the past years, waiting and waiting endlessly? Enduring the countess’s harsh words, giving tears and love and youth to a man who returns and tells her he’s fallen in love - but what about her? Who is she?  A porcelain doll who must smile on with sculpted cheeks and glass-marble eyes, to be boxed up and put away with all other forgotten things? But that’s not who he is, she knows. It isn’t his fault what he feels, and he never means to hurt her. Only she wishes she could ask him, ask him why - is it because she didn’t write to him enough when he was away? Because of the bloodstain on the handkerchief she embroidered for him, because she couldn’t get the flowers he wanted to plant to grow, because she never could play the accompaniment to that one song he liked just right? 

(But she doesn’t ask. She doesn’t ask and she smiles and says “I understand” and lets him talk. Hasn’t he told her he made her no promises? It’s all wishful thinking in the end.)

“It was just a dream,” Sonya says, out loud, the dreamer awoken and the spell dispersed, half to Natasha and half to herself - and the tears finally fall, scalding hot. “A beautiful dream.”

[dcarhcarts]

@lasrbeams liked for a starter ! 

They quarreled very little as children, Natasha always being so lovely and kind,  but that all seems unimportant now, in the magnitude of what has happened. Sonya finds herself - frightened. In the days after that night at Marya Dmitrievna’s house, Natasha leaves her bed very little, and speaks even less. After Pierre’s visit - after Sonya’s shaken awake late at night and her dearest friend tells her that she’s swallowed arsenic - well, Sonya hardly recognizes the girl she grew up with . 

Hesitantly, she knocks on the door, and then steps into the room, quiet as a mouse. “Natasha”?” She sets the silver tray in her hand down gently on the vanity. Natasha did not come down for lunch that day. “Natasha - won’t you at least have some tea?” 

[dcarhcarts]

“would you consider pride a virtue or a fault?” for sonya !

“Can’t it be both?” Sonya asks, cracking an eye open and very much awake for having been lying on her stomach, seemingly half asleep just moments ago. She hums, breathing through her nose as she turns over and leans her cheek into the fold of her arms, considering. “Well, one can’t live without it, I suppose. We all ought to have something to take pride in.” A smile and a hint of mischief touches her lips as she continues. “But too much of it can make one seem a bit…unpleasant.” Insufferable dancing partners who barely seem to want to look at her, ladies whispering behind fans. All observed phenomenon detailed over giggles to Natasha when they’re home and shut up in their own rooms, hiding behind closed doors and under a fortress of pillows and covers. “And then, I suspect someone’s bound to make conversations of your snobbery not unlike this one, in the privacy of their own homes?” 

@lifeawoke || pride & prejudice

[dcarhcarts]

'he is going to the war and has no pity for me. why is it?' @ sonya oof

Sonya thinks of what she knows momentarily - of Nikolai, and his reasons for going to war - and thinks maybe she understands, a little.

Even so, her heart breaks for her cousin but she doesn’t have an answer. What good reason is there, after all, to fight in the war? To defend the fatherland, to do one’s duty as a patriot? To prove oneself, or perhaps to conquer, or for honor or glory or money?  These are reasons - but there are others. Every man has his own reason for going away to battle, but none of them are good. What good can there be - in death? In killing or being killed?

What Sonya presumes to guess would not bring any comfort to Natasha. “Shhh, dearest Natasha, of course, of course he cares for you,” she says instead, and puts her arms gently around her cousin’s shoulders. “It’s only for a little while. He’ll be back before you’ve realized he’s even gone -  and then you shall be happy for the rest of your life, I just know it.”

@rostohva || war & peace starters 

[dcarhcarts]

❝ This pain has not passed, this pain, I’m afraid, it will never pass. ❞ @ sonya

“It will,” Sonya declares vehemently - presses her hands to either side of her cousin’s face much like Marya had long ago when they first came to Moscow, dark-eyed gaze glittering fierce and stubborn like tempered steel. “It will. It’s going to go away and you’re going to be happy again.” She spoke with as much conviction as if she were literally speaking it into truth. With all the years ahead of them and the future still very much uncertain, Sonya has and always will choose to have faith in Natasha. Kuragin and Bolkonsky, the whispers and the sideways glances, all of that is - irrelevant. 

“And if you can’t be happy here we’ll - we’ll go somewhere else.” They may be titled women, but the family has never been excessively rich, and they are easily enough well-educated. In a society rampant with young heiresses who need companions and unruly children of married socialites to be watched over, it can’t be very hard to find employment - and Sonya isn’t cowed by the prospect of living off her own labor. “We can run away together and -  make do - somehow.”

@rostohva || meme from what i feel like is probably a long time ago but idk

[dcarhcarts]

(oop late but) i don’t want any other life, and i can’t, for i know no other. (marya @ sonya!) (friends??)

“Still, you mustn’t abandon yourself like that.” Her brows knit and she reaches across to press the hands of her dear friend tenderly. Sonya lives relatively content in her world of sitting off to the side in drawing rooms and accompanying Natasha on the piano when she sings. Sonya has grown used to it all - used to being the friend, the confidant, the keeper, the girl who watches with closed-off, careful eyes. But she knows - she knows deep down that it cannot always be like that - that while there is joy in giving there is only so much of oneself one can give away before there’s nothing left. “Masha, you of all people are deserving of so much more happiness. Certainly, you’ve more kindness in your little finger than most people possess their entire lives.”

@personnages || war & peace starters

[dcarhcarts]

@thronekept liked for a starter ! 

Sonya has never liked these evening parties. She finds herself uncomfortable eating much seated between people she doesn’t know very well, and then awkwardly deprived of her cousin by dazzling gentlemen when the music starts to play and the dancing begins. Sonya is not a wallflower - not by any means, but her prettiness can only make up so much for her distinct lack of a dowry, and there are few people she truly wants to dance with anyway. So she contents herself standing beside the refreshment table, under the perpetual pretense that she’s about to take a flute of champagne, but never does.

It is so wearily that she makes her way into a more secluded corner of the hall, and sits herself down awkwardly across from a woman she must have met once or twice at some ball or other. “Um - hello. Sofia Alexandrovna Rostova. May I sit here?”