A/N I'm so sorry. So very very sorry. You might want a box of tissues for this next bit.
I wrote this while listening to Murry Gold's The Shepherd's boy from Doctor Who Series 9 on repeat. It's a beautiful song, I really recommend having it on while reading this chapter.
Summary: Where is the line between love and in love
Where is the line between love and being in love? It is a question that torments Aleksander.
The first time he dreams of Alina in his bed he awakes with a hammering heart and bile in his mouth. The sense of having defiled something so pure, even if just in his mind, leaves a leaden weight in his stomach, but he brushes it off. It is an aberration, a one off, a symptom of too much stress and pent-up desire. It had been many months since he had last enjoyed the release found in a lover and while half a millennium of practice has given him fine control over such base impulses, he is still a man.
It happens again a week later and then a few days after that. The dreams become more detailed, more frequent, more graphic, until he could almost swear that they are real and not phantoms of his depraved imagination.
If it were not for the fact that he awakes each morning in his own bed, his body frustrated with want even as his mind revolts at the nocturnal imaginings of his sleeping brain, he might think they truly happened. It doesn't help that Alina's behaviour has changed either. She blushes when he touches her, no matter how slight or incidental, and there are moments where she unaccountably skittish and shy when he visits. In her letters she is the same as she has always been, bright and teasing and fearless but the contrast leaves him feeling uncomfortably off balance and unsure.
After one particularly vivid dream in which his dream-self worshipped Alina's body, making her gasp and writhe beneath him, he even checks with the guards stationed outside his door. They confirm what he already knows – that he spent the night in his quarters. Alone. No one in, no one out.
There is an old Ravkan saying – we are each our own devil. We make our own hell.
He has never been a religious man, has never really believed in the nonsense around heaven and hell, but this? This might yet make him believe. His sleep has become his own personal hell. Guilt is an unfamiliar visitor. It had been centuries since he had truly felt guilt and now it is clawing at him, poisoning his blood and clouding his mind. He must truly be the monster history has branded him for him to be thinking about bedding a child, the girl he has watched grow for the past 11 years.
The dreams continue. It doesn't matter what he does, if he exhausts himself or drinks himself into a stupor, the dreams always find him. Alina's laughing eyes haunt his nights and the guilt plagues him during the day.
He thinks at first that it is just lust. The unfortunate side effect of his subconscious awakening him to the beauty of a girl on the cusp of womanhood - as if that makes it less terrible somehow, less of a perversion, less of a betrayal. He is no stranger to lust. There is no denying that Alina is turning into a pretty young woman, one who will have no problems drawing male attention. Attraction is one thing. It is a natural, if unwelcome, physiological response, and one he can master. It doesn't have to change anything between them. It doesn't have to mean anything.
At 544 years old, he has known many beautiful women throughout his many lives and various identities, and he has enjoyed what the world has to offer. No, he is no stranger to lust or the thrill of the chase and the tantalising discovery of hidden pleasures. He is no green boy or callow youth. Yet for reasons he cannot explain as the dreams continue that is exactly how he feels. Giddy and unsure, bumbling and inexperienced, fixated and foolish. The antithesis of who he is – of who he has worked to become.
With that in mind, the next time Zoya appears at his door with a fabricated excuse and a sultry smile on her lips, he invites her in.
It helps.
The dreams have not stopped but with the Squaller's presence in his bed they have at least started to abate. It can't rewind the clock, however, and take his mind back to the time before the dreams started, so Aleksander starts to distance himself from the Starkov's.
He stops visiting every week, or even every month, in the hope that absence will return his mind to normality, and he and Alina can continue on as they had before his subconscious started this nightmare. He knows this is distressing his young friend, her letters to him are filled with concern and pointed questions he cannot – will not – answer, but he can see no other way to evict these unwelcome thoughts.
It would be so much easier if it was just lust. But it isn't. It is so much more complicated than that. Far from helping him return to his normal tranquillity, however, enforcing this separation leaves him increasingly restless, fidgety and unfocused.
His distraction doesn't go unnoticed. Ivan is concerned, so is Genya, but both are too well trained to comment or ask questions of their General. If Zoya suspects that the truth behind the nights they spend together she makes no mention and seems happy enough with the casual arrangement they have fallen into.
When his mother summons him to her cottage he knows it has gone too far.
Thwack
"What did you expect, boy?" his mother says crossly once Aleksander finished explaining.
"Not this!" he retorts sharply, his ire rising to match his mother's. This is why he avoids talking to his mother and they live at opposite ends of the Little Palace.
"She wasn't going to stay a child forever, stupid boy, of course she was going to grow up!"
"I know that," he protests angrily, "Do you think me that stupid? Of course she is going to grow up. I just didn't expect… this," gesturing to himself trying to capture his emotional turmoil without being forced to elucidate further.
"I thought we would remain as we were… I thought…" He had thought a lot of things. This had never been a factor in his plans.
"You've lost your distance, you've got too close and now you're paying the price. She's nearly 17, what will you do when she weds another? Or takes a lover?" Baghra asks sharply. "do you think you will be able to standby and watch her smile at another man and take him to her bed-"
Crashbangping
Staring at the chaos that had been her orderly little cottage, Baghra heaves an irritable sigh as she takes in the carnage her son has just caused.
That ghastly vase one of her many students had made for her years before in a blatant and foolhardy attempt at bribery was now on the floor, shattered into a thousand pieces. Her favourite stool is decimated and the less said about the hole in the wall the better, but the devastation inside is nothing compared to the expression on her son's face. Raw and wrecked. The desolation and the crushing realisation as he is finally confronted by the truth he has been trying so hard not to see.
"Oh, my boy. My poor, foolish, boy," is all Baghra can say, as she strokes his hair in a rare expression of maternal feelings, watching the thoughts play out of Aleksander's face as he comes to terms with what should have been obvious from the start.
He has loved Alina for over a decade. His love for the child he watched grow from a sickly, scrawny girl has a purity and simplicity that in all his years he has never felt before. It simply is. Like true north – and that is what Alina is to him, his north. His guiding light.
That feeling is gone now or, if not gone, then buried. It has been subsumed by the monster that has awoken in his chest. The companionship of before is not enough for this demon; it is greedy for her attention. It craves her presence, covets her affections and is passionately transfixed by her. There is no simplicity in what he feels now. It is a raging cacophony, a swirling maelstrom of emotion that rips through the self-control he has spent centuries honing.
For all his many faults he has never been a possessive lover, but Alina, as always, is the exception to every one of his rules. It is a visceral thing, this need to claim her, to possess her, to be the only man in her life and in her bed, to be the one she turns to before everyone else. Primal and fierce. He would tear down cities and crumble empires to dust, for her. He would re-write the universe and stretch small science to the extremes to keep her safe.
She is his and he is hers.
Too late Aleksander understands what has happened. Too late he sees the line has unknowingly crossed. Too late. Too Late. Too Late.
He loves her.
He is in love with her.
When do you know where the line is between love and in love? – when it is too late to stop.
"What do I do?" he asks at last in a tone full of lost bewilderment, staring at his mother like he did as a child when he thought she had all the answers and could fix any hurt.
"Bed her or move on, for you cannot stand still or go back," his mother replies with her usual pragmatism, her voice as close to sympathetic as she ever gets, "even you, boy, cannot hold back the tide of time. One way or another, Alina will be lost to you. Just as I lost your father." It is a pain Baghra had hoped her son, her only living child, would never have to know, but it seems it is true what they say – the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. She can only hope it turns out better for him then it did for her. Can only hope that this doesn't start her boy back onto the path to ruin he was walking before he met the girl who softened his sharp edges and gave him back hope.
He nods, eyes shining with tears his stubborn pride will not let fall no matter the pain he feels inside. He feels hollow, as if all the light has been sucked out of him, leaving his chest empty and aching. With a final jerk of his hand in a gesture of farewell, Aleksander leaves his mother's cottage, head bowed.
Later he will remember the hole in the wall and send a Materialki to inspect and repair the damage. Later he will think on what this means. Later he will have to plan. Later he will have to decide how to act. But for now he mourns the loss of what was and cannot be again. Nothing lasts forever, he should have remembered that.
Settling himself in his favourite armchair with a glass of kvas, Aleksander watches the fire, the dancing flames soothing his tumultuous mind and calming his pounding heart. Fire gazing is a habit he shares with his mother. They both find the flames relaxing as well as a way to think through problems.
In the old days, when he was small and they were poor, the flames were the only stable element in their itinerant lives. It didn't matter where they were, if they were in a house, a cave or a glen, they would have a fire and his mother would use it to tell stories with shadow puppets dancing amidst the flickering light. He has used the same tricks to entertain Alina and make her laugh, the same method to teach her stories and old lore that are now half forgotten by modern Ravka.
It is another part of himself that he has unknowingly shared with her. Another secret unthinkingly given. Another intimacy that erodes the careful distance he has cultivated and maintained from the mayfly like lives of mortals.
His mother is right, curse her shrivelled immortal soul, he has become dependent. He has lost his detachment and focus. He has let himself need. Let himself want. Let himself pretend.
No more.
His Grisha need him. They need him to do what is necessary to protect them. It is his duty - the purpose that has driven him for centuries - and he has let them down.
Alina is a distraction he can no longer afford. A weakness that has the power to destroy him and all he has worked towards for the last 500 years. He loves her. Oh, how he loves her.
He loves her warmth and stubborn nature. Loves the way she is fearless around him and the way she caresses his shadows. He loves her courageous heart and the sense of family she has given him. He loves her, totally, utterly, completely.
Walking away will be one of the hardest things he has ever had to do but he will do it for her, to save her, because his mother is right. The love of an immortal is a terrible burden to bear and the awful, horrible truth of their unequal life spans – that even if she could love him in return and wanted to spend the rest of her life with him, he couldn't spend the rest of his with her. He would have to live on. Alone.
He had thought himself broken by love once, but he knows deep in his soul that losing Alina will be unutterably worse. The damage, the destruction, so much greater. Last time his pain created the Fold. What would his anguish do this time?
Even if they were alike, even if she did want him, it wouldn't change things. Alina deserved a life with a good man, a life with children and laughter and safety. He can offer her none of those things.
His mother is right, wanting makes you weak. Dreams are for children and it has been many years since he was a child.
He can give her so little, but he can give them both this – a final farewell to what could never be.
This visit is the hardest he has made in years. He almost turns back several times, unable to bear the thought of hurting her, of making her cry. Perhaps it would have been easier to leave a letter, to escape into the wilds like a coward, but it wouldn't have been right. It is the thought that spurs him on when his footsteps falter along the familiar route to the Starkov's house. It is the thought that gives him the strength to do what must be done.
Both mother and daughter know something is wrong the moment he enters the house - they have known him too long and too well to be fooled by the calm mask he fights to keep in place. He had known this would be painful and difficult, but the reality is so much worse. Alina's face is tear stained as he explains to her in short, clipped tones so unlike the ones she is used to, that he is needed elsewhere and that this is goodbye. She has always been intuitive, his Alina, and he can see in her frown and the way her eyes flit searchingly over his face that she senses there is more to what he is saying. He has gone away before, but it is different this time, there is a finality to his actions that his darling girl is struggling to understand or accept.
It is a final indulgence, but one he cannot resist, as he sweeps her up into his arms for a final embrace. Burying his face in her neck, he takes this last chance to memorise her scent and how she feels pressed against him, as he fights to retain control of the shadows that want to swaddle them both and bind them together in one being for all eternity.
He can feel her desperation and grief in the ferocity with which she grips him, her arms are bruisingly tight around his shoulders and he knows that his are just as tight around her. "Be safe", she whispers fiercely in his ear and his heart tears that little bit more at her anxious "promise me you'll come back safe, promise me!" Her mother's face is far too knowing at his silence. Her sad watchful eyes full of compassion he doesn't deserve when he bids them farewell, citing his imminent departure, so he can escape before he does something foolish. Like tell Alina he loves her.
It's not even a lie, not really. Within a few short days he will be leaving for the frontlines. The war is getting worse. Fjerdan and Shu incursions are happening more often and both the First and Second Armies are seeing greater losses. Hope is dwindling across Ravka and there are worrying mutterings in the West of secession. Meanwhile in Os Alta, the King grows ever more corpulent, belligerent and lazy and the position of the Grisha grows increasingly uncertain.
What they need is a miracle. What they have is a tired immortal who is losing patience with the latest in a long line of bad kings and the constant drudgery of a war he cannot win. It is a long, lonely walk back to the Little Palace and with every step he takes his heart feels heavier and the ache in his chest grows just that bit stronger.
For the sake of the war, for his Grisha, he has to let her go.
Even if it breaks his heart.