#twilit heroism.

[qqueenofhades]

an angsty 50 for darklina, pretty please?

50. Beyond the Veil

She hears him for the first time at dusk at the autumn equinox, the very moment when the days tip over into darkness, rushing toward the domain of the Starless Saint, Ravka's endless cold winter nights and heavy snowfalls. She's put the chickens out to their coop, and she's bending down to make sure the latch on the cage is secure -- there have been too many foxes recently -- when the voice comes. She thinks it's just the wind. And then she doesn't.

Alina.

She drops the bag of feed and straightens up, whirling around, her heart pounding in both terror and-- well, there's no other word for it, hope. "Aleksander?" she says, looking at the empty meadow, the line of twilit trees that border the farm. "Aleksander, is that -- is that you?"

He came to her before, after all, regardless of physical distance or emotional estrangement -- their secret meetings in the dark of his old chambers, now hers, in the heart of the Little Palace. Death is different, but perhaps for the most powerful Grisha who has ever lived, not eternal. Alina wipes her hands on her apron, waiting. Speak to me, she wants to say. Tell me that you're there. That you're safe.

Alina, the wind sighs again. It does sound like him, or maybe that is only her wishful thinking. You left me no choice, she wants to shout at him. I would have done anything -- anything -- to save you, but you forced my hand. She can't regret that the Fold is gone and Nikolai has become king, that Ravka has a chance to make amends for what it has gone through, but Alina remains profoundly unsettled about her own part in it. She knows that the man who kissed her so tenderly was also the tyrant who would have unloosed the volcra on every one of Ravka's enemies, real or imagined. You cannot reckon with the sum of Aleksander Morozova's life and leave out the poison and the destruction and the hatred, as well as the idealism and fervor and heroism. I had to kill you. I had to.

And so, here she is. On the farm with Mal, her Sun Summoner powers relinquished, the wider world believing her to be dead, the future that she always said she didn't want. How has this happened to me? Alina tries to be kind to her younger, traumatized self, the girl forced into a war she didn't want and didn't understand, the burden that was heaped on her shoulders far before her time, and which would have buckled anyone twice her age. All the hungry eyes, the desperate hands, the plaintive calls. Sankta Alina, Sankta Alina, help us, help us. It was never something that one barely-grown girl should be asked to bear. No wonder Alina cracked. No wonder she fled, back to the idea of the one place she had always felt -- however wrongly -- safe.

The farm is... fine. As farms go. Mal is still Mal, sometimes. But you can't go back. You cannot pick up the threads of an old life as if nothing has changed. Alina's hands curl and ache in longing for her vanished power, the ability to matter -- she threw it out with the rest, too frightened to understand what it meant. But Aleksander knew. Aleksander tried to tell her, to warn her, even in his clumsy and damaged way. There is no one else in the world like us, Alina.

Her head starts up; she isn't sure if that came from her memories, or if the ghost of him -- or whatever is here, haunting her -- said it instead. She peers at the shadows in the fields. Is that peculiarly man-shaped thing -- is that him? Or just another of the strange creatures that gather by twilight, and should not be looked at too closely?

"Aleksander?" she says aloud, into the stillness. "Aleksander, please, are you there?"

She would give anything to hear him answer. Anything at all.

There is only silence. The bloated red sun disappears behind the horizon. The wind blows cold, and Alina Starkov -- no more, no less -- feels more profoundly alone than she has been in her entire life. And with that comes the simplest and most difficult of realizations.

She has made the wrong choice. Her time is not done. She needs to go back. She needs to find what is hers. Her power and her dark prince alike, and make it better than it was before. Is that not the entire premise of history, the arc of the universe? They are not simply doomed to a repeat of the disaster that came before, mindlessly following the same dark path to the same shattering end. They can make it right, and raw, and real. Aleksander Morozova may yet achieve his dearest dream after all, theirs. Alina only needs to be brave enough to face it, and, she realizes, this time, she is ready.

You and I are not done, she tells the shade of the Darkling, wherever and whatever he might now be. I'm coming to find you.

[spooky season fic prompts]