Note: Happy 2015! Over on DeviantArt, the fabulous Peachdust came up with an idea for a New Year's-ish picture of Deryn and Alek, then asked if I wouldn't mind writing a ficlet, based on said idea, to accompany it. I was more than happy to oblige. :)
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It's not until the clothes are delivered to their hotel room that Deryn recognizes the feeling in her stomach for what it is.
Dread.
She opens her pasteboard box, tosses aside a thousand sodding layers of tissue paper, and looks at the ball gown.
Miles of cream-colored silk and silver embroidery, just as it was in the dressmaker's shop yesterday. If she lifts it out of the box, underneath she'll find a petticoat to fill out the skirt. A pair of long gloves – also silk, with wee buttons running the length of them – are laying to the side.
Deryn stretches one hand towards the gown. Sun-browned and scarred. Calloused. Dirt under her nails, somehow. It looks ridiculous next to all that delicate silk.
She doesn't take the dress out of the box. She sits on the bed beside it, as if the sodding thing's not burning her, and says, "How many balls are you attending, Your Highness?"
Alek throws her a dark look as he carefully lays out his two pasteboard boxes on the opposite side of the bed. "Laugh if you like – but I haven't had a new suit in ages, and Herr Weiss offered me an extremely reasonable price for the second."
"I hope you bargained, at least."
"Like a Scot," he says, smirking at her.
"Aye, weel done, then, laddie," Deryn says in the broadest possible accent. She flops onto her back and laces her fingers across her stomach, watching him upside-down as he wades through the first box's tissue paper. Trying to ignore the unease crawling around her guts, she asks, "Which one are you wearing tonight?"
He shrugs. "Whichever goes best with your gown, I suppose."
He lifts out the first one: a smart, crisp white jacket. Trousers to match. Blisters, what was he thinking? He won't be able to put Bovril on his shoulder wearing that.
Bovril, curled up on Alek's pillow, lifts its head and proclaims, "Quite a daring fashion, sir."
"Do you think so?" Alek looks at the jacket. "I found it striking."
It is that, but… "It won't do with cream," Deryn says.
Alek makes a noise of agreement and neatly tucks the jacket into the box again. "The other suit is black."
She gives him a smile. "Perfect."
He smiles back, then busies himself in removing the black suit. It's just as smart, and he'll look every bit as striking in it.
Meanwhile, she'll be trapped inside miles of silk.
Deryn digs the heels of her palms into her eyes, hard enough to see stars. Pure dead torture – but this trip isn't about her, it's about Alek. She wants him to have a brilliant time here in Vienna, and if that means wearing a sodding dress and waltzing for hours at some daft New Year's Eve ball...
She loves him. She's done worse.
"We'll have to find a photographer," Alek says. "I'm sure your mother would be delighted to see you in a ball gown."
"Aye," Deryn says, a squick grim. She lets her hands fall away, though she keeps her eyes closed. "The aunties, too."
He makes a hmm of acknowledgement, then asks, sounding pleased about it, "Aren't you going to dress?"
The last trip, they'd gone to Glasgow and Deryn listened to her ma and the aunties whinging on about her trousers and boots for the entire time. "You're a married woman," Ma had told her, exasperated and cross, near the end of the visit. "You playing at being a lad before, well, I wasn't keen on it – but it's past time to give up that sort of foolishness."
It'd dug hot claws down into the soft, uncertain part of herself, where she – secretly – wonders if she shouldn't be leaving Middy Sharp behind in favor of Mrs. Hohenberg.
And now Alek is mad to have her in a ball gown.
"Not just yet," she says. Guilt joins the dread swimming around her innards. "There's still time."
A soft click; he's checking his pocket watch. "Not much, considering the number of buttons I'll be doing up for you."
She opens her eyes just long enough to scowl at him. "In a minute, then."
A pause.
"All right," he says. Not pleased any longer, though not nearly as cross as Ma had been. "I'll change into my suit."
"Go ahead," she says, more snappish than she'd intended, thinking, Brilliant, now we're going to have a bloody row over it – but even that's not enough to get her bum up from the bed and into the gown.
Cloth rustles. She listens to the sounds of Alek dressing for the ball, rubs her closed eyes again, and decides to stop being a ninny about this.
Accordingly, she pushes herself into a sitting a position, then off the bed altogether, and grabs the dress' box with an internal sigh.
Well. Not entirely internal, maybe.
On the other side of the bed, Alek leaves off fussing with his shirt collar; his eyes narrow suspiciously. "I thought you wanted to attend this."
" 'Course I do," she says.
"Are you concerned about waltzing? You oughtn't be – you're the superior dancer by far."
"No, love," she says. She feigns a yawn. "Just tired, that's all."
From the pillow, Bovril says softly, "Lad in a dress."
Alek looks at Bovril. Looks at the ball gown. Looks at Deryn. The gears are turning in his clever princely brain.
"Ah," he says. "I see."
Now there's a squick of embarrassment to go along with the guilt and dread. "It's a lovely gown," she says, because it is. Nicer than what she was married in, certainly. Her ma and the aunties would cheerfully murder half the neighborhood to get their hands on it.
Alek comes around the bed, and she goes to meet him, admiring, as she does, the clean lines of him in the new black suit. He catches her hands and squeezes. "But you would rather venture forth in your knickers?"
She grins – especially because the tips of his ears turn a faint pink at the word knickers. "There's that, aye."
He kisses her then, firm and sweet, and her heart flutters like a daft schoolgirl's. "Well," he says, stepping back, smiling at her. "I suppose it's destiny that I bought two suits."
