#au where vasya ends up on the pta for irina after anna and pyotr die and she habitually brings morozko with her

[words-writ-in-starlight]

26, 27 and 37 for Vasya/Morozko or Caleb/Molly

For this ask meme!  And I’m doing Vasya/Morozko because I love them and never get to talk about them.  There are spoilers here, y’all.

26. How do their friends feel about their relationship? Their families?

Medved…is Medved.  He hates Vasya for outsmarting him, and he adores her for freeing him, and he annoys her and dotes on her and tries to charm her because it bothers Morozko to see him do it.  Vasya learns to ignore him, even though Morozko never really does.

Vasya’s family is a little more of a going concern (I’m writing this fic).  Kolya takes it…poorly.  He’s been muscled around on the subject of chyerti, and the people of Lesnaya Zemlya put out porridge and milk for the domovoi and barley for the vazila again, but he is not on board with the winter-king, either as an extant being or as his sister’s lover.  He’s mortified when Vasya tells him, flat out, that she’ll never marry Morozko, and he’s outraged when Morozko admits under questioning that he would never think to ask it of her, and it pretty well goes downhill from there.  Eventually he comes to terms with it, but he and Morozko never…like each other, merely tolerate each other for Vasya’s sake.  Olga is never fully at ease with Morozko, but she comes around slowly, especially when Marya comes back to Moscow from visiting her aunt with a fine fur-lined hood and whispers to her mother, “You know, Lord Morozko is not so scary.  He gave me these.”  And she shows her mother a trio of birds, carved from pale birch wood and sanded beautifully smooth, all small enough to perch on Marya’s little fingers.  Marya saw the winter-king carve them himself, with knife and slow care, and that���that somehow does more to soothe Olga than anything else.

Alyosha is far easier to bring around–Alyosha killed an upyr with Vasya, he saw her driven out as a witch, and so when stories began to trickle through the trade routes of a girl with eyes like a hundred years in the forest and dark hair who turned Moscow on its ear and escaped her own pyre and helped win the day for Prince Dmitrii, he wasn’t surprised.  Seeing his sister show up with a stranger on the finest horse he’s ever seen, both of them dressed like royalty in velvet and furs, is…a shock.  Then she gets him alone and says “This is the winter-king, Morozko, who Dunya used to tell us tales of when we were small.  I love him.”  And that’s beyond a shock, but it’s also wholly typical.  If anyone was going to woo the winter, it would be his wild witch of a sister.  If she loves him, and she’s happy, that’s good enough for Alyosha, after everything.  It’s awkward at first–it’s awkward for a while, really–but Morozko and Alyosha are sort of like friends, eventually.

Irina adores Vasya as much as ever.  That, in combination with watching Morozko twist ice into an unmelting tiara that he sets on her hair, decides her in under half an hour.  She isn’t as comfortably fearless as Vasya, but she’s probably the next closest mortal in the world.

27. Do they have kids? Grow old together? Split up?

Vasya ages slowly after going to the lake–very slowly.  When she is a woman of a hundred, she looks like a young and vigorous thirty.  Varvara is still strong and hale when Marya’s children die of old age, and Vasya has been steeped in more magic than anyone in her family save her great great grandfather.  She does not worry overmuch about her eventual death, from old age or from violence, and instead she dances in the first snowfall of each year and is adviser to princes and tsars, and Morozko stays with her, unchanging as the bite of ice.

They never have children themselves–Vasya likes children perfectly well, but she never felt the need to bear one herself.  If she never has a child, the world will not end, and she has never yet allowed herself to be pressed into doing something she didn’t want with her whole heart.  Vasya asks Morozko, nervous, if he’s upset that she doesn’t plan to give him children, and he blinks at her blankly for a long moment.  The demon Frost as a father?  He never really considered it, and now that it’s been brought up, he still finds the thought too strange to be comfortable.  He disregards it almost immediately, and kisses her hand, and tells her that he wants for nothing.

Because, of course, there are children.  They are not Morozko’s, but they are Vasya’s.  She brings witch-children to the edge of the lake, to her cottage–Marya and one of Kolya’s girls and then others, girls that Varvara and Midnight and the chyerti show to her, who need help and guidance and care so that they might never be Anna Ivanovna.  They never stay long, although some come often, and they learn not to fear the chyerti, they learn to walk fearlessly beside the lake of the rusalka and give honor to the leshy in the trees, they learn to be bridges who feed domovoi and go to church on Sundays and fear neither god nor spirit nor mortal man.  And they come to know the winter-king, when they see him kiss their teacher and drape her in diamonds and furs, and they love him, fierce and fearful and forever, as maidens love monsters.

37. How much would they be willing to sacrifice for each other? Any lines they refuse to cross?

Vasya would not sacrifice Rus’ for Morozko, but that’s about it.  As for Morozko–his life, his power, his freedom, he’s spent it all for her before, and he’d do it again without batting an eye.