Sometimes, you have stories planned out for months and don't actually start working on them for ages.
And other times, you suddenly get clubbed in the back of a head with an idea, and wake up with a finished oneshot in your hands. This is one of those situtations.
Inspired by reading the battle scene in Behemoth over (and over, and over) again for Minotaur, a little idea started to format in my head, and this was born. I also wanted to branch out a little, because all of my fics are third person, past tense, and I NEED VARIETY. I thought the way this fic plays out worked decently for present tense, but I am still waaaay more comfortable with past, haha.
I may or may not have an idea for an aftermath fic for this. (Which is a fanfic author's way of saying, "I totally do, but I am too lazy/apprehensive to actually write it.")
I also considered 'the reveal' fics to be a strange sort of initation for Leviathan fanfic writers, and I was pushing back my own take for far too long. (This is my third fic on here, people, and the first to actually focus on Deryn and Alek. What.)
Anyway, enjoy!
Alek's shoulders tremble in his piloting jacket, as he stares out the view port, expressionless.
"Oi, you still there, your highness?" Deryn raises an eyebrow, leaning towards him. The prince had sat like this for the past two minutes, still and shivering.
"There's no other choice," He murmurs in German, and his defeated tone makes her wish she couldn't understand him.
"No other choice for what?" She drifts over to his pilot seat, trying to catch his eyes. He continues staring blankly foreword, crease between his dark eyebrows.
"There's no way I can break the supports on my own," Alek replied quietly, and Deryn silently agreed- she saw how badly he struggled earlier, only managing to snap one, and barely so. "However, I can conduct all of the electricity into this walker. "
"Are you barking mad?" She shouts, suddenly horrified by the insanity of the situation. " It'll kill you!" The blonde grabs him by the shoulders, forcing him to face her, trying to find some barking sense in that daft Clanker brain of his.
"I'm aware," Alek says calmly, and his green eyes meet hers, stoic and dead set.
"Mad," Bovril says softly. She could swear the beastie sounded almost mournful, shivering on her shoulder, just like the pilot before her.
She gives the prince a look of complete disbelief, almost ready to slap him.
"You know it's the only way, Dylan. Klopp's, Lilit's, and Zaven's walkers are destroyed. Every one of them." He swallows, hard, and Deryn feels a shiver run down her back. The corpses of their walkers lined the battlefield, dented and torn apart. There was no way to tell if the other pilots were all right.
"Aye, but you're supposed to be a barking emperor, Alek! You can't just throw your life away!" She feels her vision blur and her voice hitch up and curses herself for it. She would not cry. She'd rescue Alek from his mad plan, dragging him kicking and screaming out of the walker if she had to. "Not for some daft revolution, at least," Deryn adds, voice softer.
Alek glares at her, actually glares. "God's wounds, Dylan," he says, voice low and angrier then she's ever heard it. "I'm doing this for you…r ship." He makes a face at the second to last word, catching himself and changing it quickly.
Deryn feels her insides crumple like a tossed sketch. Alek stares at her in desperation, anger fading quickly from his features.
"Please, Dylan. Return to the Leviathan." He glances out the view port. "…With Klopp and Bauer, if you can." He sighs, looking down at his hands, laced together.
"Perhaps… Perhaps this is what providence had planned for me the entire time."
Deryn just stares at him for a long moment, absolutely silent. The smell of smoke washes over her through the opening in the walker, and she remembers that horrible moment of falling two years ago, watching her father give her one last smile as she did.
The words are easy to say, after that.
"Move over."
He starts, surprised, shifting his posture so he's sitting up straight, nice and princely. "Dylan, you have to go now."
"Aye, and you can pilot with your right arm broken," she remarked, recalling the incident with one of the war elephant's earlier. "Move over," she repeats, almost anticipating Bovril to join her.
Alek just stares at her for what seems like years, before his face broke into a sad smile, like he forgot how to do it properly. He shifts in the chair, leaving her room.
"I assume there's no way to convince you otherwise."
"If some Clanker prince is willing to sacrifice himself for my ship, I'm going to look like a barking coward if I don't as well, aye?" Deryn gives him a forced smile in turn, perched on the edge of the piloting seat.
He just looks at her in a way that makes her want to weep and throw her arms around him at the same time.
"Thank you, Dylan." His hand finds hers, and she felt the touch roll up her arm. This is it, she reckons, glancing at his dirt covered features. He looks knockered and weary, dark shadows under his eyes, and she knows it's now or never to tell him who she really is.
"How… much time do we have, Alek?" Deryn's voice squeaks dangerously on the question, but Alek paid her no mind.
"Based on the Leviathan's arrival… four minutes." He swallows hard, realizing that's all they have left as well.
"I need to tell you something." She looks down at her knees, voice soft. She raises her head quickly. "But you have to swear you'll let me stay here, afterwards. It doesn't change anything."
Alek frowns. "Why would it?"
Deryn doesn't say anything, just stares at him seriously.
"I swear." He says seriously, green eyes locking with blue.
She exhales nervously, hands shaking. This definitely wasn't how she saw the reveal unfold in her head. They were supposed to be on the Leviathan together, happy and relatively calm, not a borrowed Walker waiting for their deaths with shaking hands.
But she'd rather tell him now then not at all.
She stands up, being much taller then him helps her confidence. "I'm not who you think I am, Alek. I'm… I'm a girl."
His eyes widen, and she felt his hand break away from hers.
Alek won't look at her. "You're not serious." He says in soft disbelief, voice turmoil of emotion, staring at their recently unlinked hands.
"Why would I lie now?" She scoffs, feeling her stomach drop, wondering if she made everything go completely pear-shaped this time.
Hours pass, it seems, and Alek is just dead silent.
"I wish you told me earlier," is all he says after a while, looking out in front of him.
"Alek…" She starts, reaching for his arm. He moves away from her hand with a calculated sort of coldness, formal and carefully distant, a strong attempt at trying not to offend.
"I'm not going to spend my last moments angry with my only friend, if that's what you're wondering." He sighs through his nose, looking at her. "You're still the same person, aren't you?" His voice is strangely hopeful.
"Aye." Something like relief courses through her, daft as that is. "…Different name though. Deryn Sharp, at your service." She holds out her hand, half smiling.
He takes it, shaking it slowly.
"Alek. Just Alek. Not much of a prince, anymore."
She can hear him reconsider the past fifteen years, all the time yearning for something more, then finally getting it.
Just to lose it all like it never even mattered.
She doesn't think before she leans down and hugs him- she just does.
He gives a little twitch of hesitation, staying still for a while, attic probably scrambled by this small sign of affection. She recalls the last time they embraced. He had enacted it, but of course, that was before he knew she was a girl.
He finally reaches out and puts his working arm around her in turn, sighing softly as he did so. She kneels into the chair, so they're both sitting in it together, Bovril curled up in a gap between their chests.
"This is vastly inappropriate," he murmurs in her ear, after a long few moments of just silence, miserable and blissful at the same time.
"I don't care," she replies, burying her face into his shoulder and, remarkably, he doesn't push her away. Apparently, all you need to make a Clanker soften up like butter is tell him he's about to die.
Teardrops fall off her nose onto his piloting jacket. Bovril makes a low purring noise near her ear, still quaking. This is all they ever would be, a final embrace in a cramped room.
He'll never know how she feels.
But for some daft reason, she finds herself valuing the end of a friendship more then what could be the beginning of a short lived romance.
"Time's up." Alek says softly, reluctantly. They pull away slowly, tassels of their jackets catching on the other's.
"I don't believe the doctor will be pleased to learn that we got her creation electrocuted." Alek remarks dryly, taking Bovril from her, placing it on his own shoulder. He wipes at his eyes stubbornly with the back of his palm.
"Probably not." Deryn replied, running her hand over the creature's back one last time. Alek settles into the seat next to her, their feet tangled together below the chair.
He reaches for the left saunter, and she puts her hand in the right.
"All we have to do is grab the tower, right?" The Scot asks softly.
"Right."
Their unattended hands find each other, squeezing tightly.
"On the count of three?" He asks, and she nods.
"One," Deryn says, blinking back tears, thinking of Newkirk and Barlow and even Volger. All saved, because of one daft plan.
"Two," Alek's voice breaks. Bovril repeats the number. She thinks of a far off country, losing a ruler it never knew it had. Electricity dances in taunting patterns before her eyes.
"Three."