i.
"Something is on your mind."
The Darkling's voice whispers across the back of her neck. Standing in front of her mirror, Alina watches his hands curl possessively around her waist, feels him tug her back against his chest.
She thinks, for a moment, about resisting. Sometimes she even does it, pulling from his grasp, ripping away. Sometimes he drags her back, and their fights shake their wing of the Grand Palace. Other times, he lets her go.
And it is worse.
Alina blinks, and the thought is gone. She relaxes into her husband's hold, closing her eyes.
Something is on her mind. Better to keep her temper, so she can keep it to herself.
"I would be a terrible queen if there wasn't."
She murmurs it, and a quiet, distant part of her marvels at how easily the evasion comes. She had been a terrible liar, once. The words apt pupil drift across her mind, as his lips skate over the bare skin of her throat.
"Something else. Something different."
Alina tilts her head, making herself vulnerable. It has been centuries, and she is no longer his student. To make herself vulnerable to Aleksander Morozova, with his strength and his wisdom and his experience, is to own him.
"A memory," she lies, and feels him stiffen. Her husband doesn't approve of her remembering things, not unless they have to do with him. It's an easily pressed button, and so she refrains from using it unless she absolutely has to. She'd hate for it to lose its effectiveness.
The hands on her waist tighten, digging into her flesh. It's no surprise when he spins her around, the weight of his body pushing her into her dresser, but she sucks in her breath anyway. Expected or not, there's no denying the hot slick of desire that spreads through her at the hard press of his body.
"Then allow me to help you forget," he breathes into her ear, and her fingers curl into the wood she is braced against.
She can't say no. She doesn't want to. She denies him nothing, that night, and if she really had been remembering something, she's sure the thoughts would have fled from her mind.
But it's not the past that haunts Alina. When the tsar wakes up the next morning, he finds himself without a tsaritsa.
It is the future she must fear, now.
ii.
It doesn't take him long to find her.
"Come back."
There's no expresses no surprise about how he found her, or even dismay, and he doesn't ask why she left. It's superfluous, unimportant information to the both of them. At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is that he wants her back, and she does not want to go.
"I can't," she says simply.
"Alina." His voice is low, dangerous, and she smiles at him. It's been a long time since he last spoke to her like that, since real fear forced real anger into his voice.
"You've gotten comfortable, Aleksander," she says lightly, and enjoys the play of muscle in his jaw as it clenches.
"Is that what this is? A lesson, to teach me to appreciate you?"
"No one has loved me like you have."
Satisfaction flickers across his features, before that anger eats away at it.
"Then why did I wake up without you in our bed? Gone from our palace, from our city?"
Alina sighs. She's in the woods, seated on the ground, back pressed to a tree. It's been lifetimes since she slept somewhere without a bed, but she finds that her body remembers, even if her husband has done his level best to have her mind forget.
"Because." She pushes herself to her feet, watches him watch her as she approaches, the naked longing on his face that swamps all else. Something in her aches, does battle with her own sense of satisfaction at the knowledge that she has left him, that not every part of her has been consumed by this man.
His eyes close as her hand brushes his cheek, thumb sliding over the scar there.
"You love me too much to bear this," she murmurs. "And I don't love you enough to stop it."
His eyes snap open. Confusion, she sees, and then a rage - a hatred - so ancient and powerful, Alina thinks they had both thought it lost before now. Before she can think, her hands are moving, swinging down and away in the familiar slice of the Cut.
He disappears. Alina can't tell if she's relieved, or horrified.
iii.
He visits daily, until she reminds him that he has a country to run.
"I might say the same to you." His voice is acid, and she lets it wash over her.
"Maybe you love Ravka more than I do."
She won't be able to keep it from him forever, and she doesn't really hope to. She just needs to put enough distance between them, needs to confuse her trail and lose herself in any number of nameless villages. Probably she should leave the country, but if he loves Ravka more than her, that doesn't mean she doesn't love it at all.
Alina has poured her heart and soul and more years than most people can imagine into Ravka. She can't leave it, even if staying might serve to tear it apart all over again.
"I care for much more than you do, it seems."
She sighs. "Get back to work, Aleksander. If I see you before three days, I won't be happy."
You might make me a better man. Alina muses over those words as she tramps through forest, and wonders if it counts, that he listens to her now.
She thinks about her throne, so easily abandoned, and wonders if he only listens because she has become more the monster.
iv.
She's settled in a quiet hamlet before he understands. A couple of women have been giving her knowing looks, some tinged with disapproval, others with understanding.
She is starting to show. And some new (or old, buried) part of her lets her husband get close enough to tell. The sentimentality surprises her, the sudden, sharp need for comfort, for gentleness and caring. It gets the better of her.
His movements are hesitant as he reaches for her, wary of her Cut. But as his fingers brush her wrist and find no resistance, a new demon possesses him. Small bones grind against each other from the strength of his grip as he tugs her to him, like if he pulls hard enough, she will return to Os Alta.
Alina watches it hit him, taking some small pleasure in this artificial closeness while she can. Something is wrong, says the way his eyes narrow. What is it? murmurs the tilt of his jaw. He pulls back, and the hiss as one hand grazes her abdomen tells her that he knows.
"No." The word is a growl. "Alina."
In his grasp, her name contains multitudes. First and foremost, is betrayal.
And then his eyes dart to her surroundings, taking in the architecture, the window, the church that can be seen through it. Alina curses, tearing one hand from his even as the other performs the Cut.
"I'm not sorry," she whispers to the empty air.
It doesn't respond. Ruthlessly, Alina clamps down on their connection, and begins to pack.
v.
The midwives tell her that she had an easy birth. Alina considers tearing the midwives in half and asking if that was easy for them, but ultimately refrains.
She is a simple peasant girl done wrong, just another Alina amongst the hordes named for the tsaritsa.
"You look exhausted."
His voice is quiet. Alina says nothing as the women of the village chatter around her, cutting cords and swaddling and all those things that she should care about in this moment. Someone asks her if she wants to hold the baby, but her gaze remains fixed on the shadowy corner where her husband stands, looking like he can't decide if he wants to kiss or kill her.
It is not her own life she worries for.
Whispers drift towards her, something about 'strange girl' and 'just in shock' and 'going to need checking up on', but her gaze remains riveted to the Darkling as he approaches.
"I thought you weren't due for a week."
She snorts; she can't help herself. She hadn't told him, of course. He'd picked a date and done the math, like the obsessive, egotistical man he is. She doesn't plan on speaking, but even if she did, there's no way she would tell him he was right.
There are ways of inducing these things, especially when you are a centuries old Grisha. Alina hadn't wanted him to be there.
The whispers rise, nervous glances becoming concerned stares, pinning her in place. She ignores them, and her husband steps closer, his face a blank slate wiped clear of any human emotion. Something strange flutters in her gut, and it has been so long since she last experienced this feeling that it takes a few laboured breaths to put a name to it.
Fear.
The word startles her so much that she forgets herself, puffs out a laugh. How many years since she has feared this man? Alina can't put a name to the number. He stops in his tracks, bare inches from her bed, and she lifts her chin defiantly, smirking up at him. When it comes to the Darkling, the best offence is a well laid trap; the best defence is a good offence.
She's barely aware of the women shifting her body, pulling her upright, moving her arms. It's only when she feels a faint, warm weight settling against her that she realises something momentous has happened, right underneath her nose.
"It is a boy," a midwife informs her, and she pulls her gaze away from her husband to meet the bleary, grey eyes of her son.
Alina gasps, the sob tearing itself from her chest. Her whole body shudders from the force of it, and she clutches the tiny creature in her arms to her body, like she's terrified he will be ripped from her as well. Fear, she thinks dizzily, as seven months of it boils up from somewhere deep inside her, threatening to take her over.
"Shh, shh." Another of the women is making soothing noises, and a gentle hand strokes her sweat-slicked hair back off her forehead. "It's a hard road, dear, but you have survived the first steps. You will survive the rest."
Her cheeks are wet. They think she is young, a lost lamb of a girl. She is older than their grandmothers, but looking down into the screwed-up, red face of her son, that second part might not be too far off the mark.
He doesn't even cry. A beat passes, two, before Alina remembers how to breathe properly and looks over to the women. "Is he - well?"
"Disgustingly healthy, considering the turn he gave us," one of them grouses. "I imagine he's far too pleased with himself to fuss much for the time being."
Alina's facial muscles stretch, and it takes her a moment to realise that she's grinning, the expression tired and pathetic and actually, genuinely happy.
"Good." Like a magnet, she finds herself drawn back to his tiny, perfect face. Well - it's squished, a little, and the residue of bodily fluids she'd rather not think about is still present, but that doesn't make him any less perfect.
It's the hollow ache in the centre of this strange and new joy that jogs her memory, forces her to look up and to the corner. Her grin twists into a wry smirk at the sight of the empty space, and as that hollow chews itself wider, Alina knows that she made the right decision.
"Do you have a name for him?" The midwife who speaks is the one who assured her she had an easy birth. Alina has almost forgiven her for that.
Her face tips up to the ceiling, and the faces of a hundred worthy companions tumble through her mind, reaching all the way back to a prince with a tongue as sharp as his mind, and a tracker with eyes as warm as his heart.
"Isaak," she says finally.
She has never known anyone called Isaak.
A/N: when i write my autobiography, it's going to be called 'this was supposed to be a one shot what happened'
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