Note: Over on Discord, VeyZ said, "I am appalled we didn't get a Deryn carrying Alek scene." And that is appalling! So here's two such scenes, plus one scene where Alek carries Deryn.
The final scene is also a follow-up to chapter 100, "love and war".
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1. as a bet
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Alek scoffs, but regrets it a moment later when Dylan's expression takes on a mulish cast.
"Aye, I can too," the other boy says, arms crossed over his chest, looking Alek up and down. It's an assessing look, and a scornful one, as well. "I'm at least as strong as you, Your Princeliness."
"I'd put a quid on that," Newkirk says. They're sitting at the table in the middies' mess, ostensibly eating breakfast but now, apparently, placing absurd bets.
"You haven't got a quid," Dylan says to him, impatient, still glaring daggers at Alek.
"Fine, then. A shilling."
"You haven't got a shilling, either, ninny. I won all your money the last time we played cards."
Newkirk's shoulders slump, and he stabs a dejected fork at his breakfast potatoes. "Oh, right."
"It hardly matters," Alek says, "because Dylan can't carry me."
Dylan is strong enough to clamber up and down the ratlines with ease, but there's a difference between lifting your own body and lifting another's dead weight. And while Dylan may be the taller of the two of them, he's also slighter of build. It's simple physics.
Isn't it?
Alek isn't actually certain. However, he's made his claim, and now honor decrees he stand by it.
"Oi, that's it!" Dylan says, pushing back his chair and standing. "Enough blether. Let's prove you wrong."
"Here?"
The mess is also the staff room, and the ship's officers will be arriving shortly for their morning briefing. Surely they won't approve of the Leviathan's midshipmen - and its Clanker guest - wasting time.
But Dylan has already shed his jacket and is rolling up his shirtsleeves. "Aye. Here and now."
Newkirk all but leaps from his seat, delighted. "My bet's still on Sharp!"
Alek stands, too. He can hardly do anything else. And if he's being honest, this is… fun. Arguing over trivialities with friends. Placing ridiculous bets. Taking childish risks. The sort of thing normal boys do. "Ten paces, at least."
"Fair enough," Dylan says.
In a matter of moments, the rest of it is decided: Dylan will carry Alek to the door and back to the table (the mess being small, as all spaces are aboard ship), and despite his bias, Newkirk will serve as judge to his crewmate's success.
It's not until Dylan steps in close that Alek realizes his friend will, of course, have to pick him up and carry him.
But before he can feel too awkward about the situation, Dylan has bent down, placed a shoulder against Alek's abdomen, looped an arm around his leg, and straightened again.
Newkirk applauds.
"See, Your Highness?" Dylan says, voice slightly strained but still quite smug indeed. He turns his head to face Alek, his eyes and grin full of mischief.
"You haven't won yet," Alek points out, with as much dignity as one can manage when one is being carried like a sack of grain.
Dylan snorts. Leans forward. Finds his footing. "Make yourself useful and count it out."
He feels a perfect fool, but he does, with Newkirk echoing him the entire way. Five paces toward the door, five paces back, and then Dylan stoops down, and Alek regains his own feet once more.
It's not an elegant dismount; he staggers a bit, and somehow he and Dylan get their limbs momentarily tangled, and Dylan's face is very close and something about it leaves Alek feeling a thousand times more flustered than he did being hoisted on the other boy's shoulder.
But he seems to be the only one. Dylan gives a half-laugh and pushes him away, saying, "Steady, lad," and Newkirk doesn't appear to have noticed at all.
"I wish I hadn't lost my brass to you, Mr. Sharp," Newkirk says, hands on hips. "That would've been an easy quid."
Dylan snorts. "Daftie. Alek's pockets are as empty as yours."
"What?" Newkirk asks, scandalized. "But you're a prince!"
They discuss money - or the lack thereof - as they clear the breakfast dishes and ready the room for the officers. By the time they exit the middies' mess, any awkwardness has been entirely forgot.
At least, that's what Alek tells himself.
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2. out of danger
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The building's on fire, but the bigger worry is how Deryn's to get Alek out of it.
"Is it bleeding badly?" she asks, crouching down beside him. She means his leg.
He shakes his head and grips her hand with the hand not clutching his side, which is bleeding. Two bullet wounds. One to the torso and one to the leg. If the German bastard who shot him wasn't already dead, Deryn would kill the man. "Nein. No. At least - I don't think so."
She looks around, squinting through the thickening smoke. The church, like the rest of the German village, was abandoned during the war, and everything useful has long since been stripped out - first by the townsfolk, then by Clanker armies, and then by the Darwinists. There's nothing that could serve as a crutch.
"Right, then, love," she says, trying to sound brisk and not like she's about to spew her last meal all over her boots. She's never done well with fire. "Up you get."
She slides her arm under his and, with some help from him, levers her prince up to his feet. If he can stand, she can be his crutch -
He tries to take his weight on the uninjured leg, but that's the same side as the bullet wound, and the only thing the effort gets them is a sharp exclamation of pain as he crumples again.
"Bollocks," she says, which is an understatement. The fire is crawling up and along the plaster of the far wall, where the German agent dropped his lantern when Alek shot him. If it reaches the ceiling - or if it wraps around to the wall with the door -
Alek curses in German. "Go," he tells her. "You could get help -"
"Sod off," she tells him. Panic and nausea twist at her guts, but she crouches down again, this time in front of him. She'll have to carry him out. Not over her shoulder; not with a wound to his side. "Put your arms around my neck."
"I don't think this -"
"Just bloody do it!"
She's crying. She swipes at her face, missing most of the tears, but it doesn't matter because the heat is getting worse and the tears will evaporate soon enough. Right about when the ceiling will catch. Then they'll both die. They'll burn, just like her da.
Alek puts his arms around her neck. She grabs his forearms, braces her feet, and lifts. Her bad knee shrieks at the weight and angle, but it can sod right off too.
She bends forward, taking as much of the burden on her back as she can, and starts the long walk to the vestibule door. The tips of his boots drag on the floor behind her.
If they can get outside, the other Zoological Society agents will find them. They'll patch up Alek. Everything will be fine.
If they can get outside.
The fire is halfway to the door, and licking along the wood beams of the ceiling. The smoke is getting thicker. It's harder to see. Harder to breathe. Her knee is screaming.
She reaches the door before the fire does, but not by much. Coughs on the clean night air outside. Oh, bugger it, there's stairs here, leading down into the churchyard.
"Put me down," Alek orders, coughing himself. She can feel it against her spine.
A wall of hot smoke billows out around them. Gritty soot stings her eyes.
"Don't be daft." She takes a fresh grip on his arms - her palms are sweating - and goes down the stairs slower than she wants, although faster than her knee would like.
Across the churchyard there's a tree. A grand old spruce, safely upwind of the fire. She aims for that, one dragging step at a time.
Something large crashes to the floor inside the church.
Another step. One more, and her knee buckles and she collapses to the ground by the tree, trying to shield Alek from the worst of the jarring.
They lay like that for a moment, just breathing, her half on her stomach, him a warm heaviness atop her back. Then he shifts, and she wriggles out from under him, sitting up to check the churchyard.
Empty.
"No sign of those German bum-rags," she reports, and lets herself flop back to the dirt.
"Thank God," he says under his breath. He's lying on his back now, too, beside her. Despite his own wounds, he asks, "Are you all right? Your knee?"
"Right as rain," she says, although she has serious doubts about her knee. It's aching fiercely, in throbbing waves.
Worth it.
His hand finds hers, and he squeezes it tightly before drawing it up closer and kissing the back of it. "Liebchen. You're amazing."
"Aye," she says, suddenly exhausted, closing her eyes to the sight of the church roof going up in flames, painfully bright against the night sky. There's no blotting out the sound, though. The roar of it, like an angry beastie. She holds fast to his hand, anchoring her to the earth. "I know."
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3. for tradition
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"Dummkopf," Deryn says, laughing at him. They're standing in the hallway outside their London flat, bearing the usual souvenirs of a diplomatic mission with Dr. Barlow: new scars, fading bruises, and a loris that's learned to curse in another language. They're also bearing a certificate of marriage, tucked safely into his jacket pocket, which is a first. "We've lived here a year already. There's no reason to do this now."
"No," Alek says firmly. He unlocks the flat's door, but doesn't open it yet. "We were married inside a walker in the middle of a war, and our 'honeymoon' was spent navigating out of that war. I want to do at least one traditional thing."
She makes a face. "The wedding was your idea."
That idea had possibly been the most reckless of his entire life. He regrets nothing, including the second ceremony they'd had conducted by the Pegasus' captain once they were aboard the airbeast. The American preacher had been a bit of a crack-brain, as Deryn would say, and Alek wanted to be certain everything had been done properly.
He stiffens his spine, lifts his chin, and gives her a cool stare. "Yes. And my current idea is to carry my bride over the threshold of our home."
From Deryn's shoulder, Bovril says, "An inspiring story."
"Hush, beastie," she says, returning Alek's stare with a narrow-eyed glare of her own.
Bovril cackles.
Alek says nothing. He waits, their valises sitting at his feet. This is not the first battle of wills between them, and he's confident that in this instance he wants victory more than she does.
Deryn sighs and tosses up her hands. "Oh, all right. Go ahead."
He can't help it; he breaks into a broad smile and leans forward to press a swift, hard kiss to her cheek. "Danke, Liebling."
She sighs again, more dramatically - but she's also smiling.
He wastes no time in putting one hand around her shoulders, before bending and catching her behind her knees with the other. For half a moment, he wonders what will happen if he can't actually pick her up; they are very nearly the same size, after all.
Then he straightens again, sweeping her off her feet. It is, in fact, more difficult than he supposed, and he certainly isn't going to be able to carry her like this for any considerable distance. Thankfully, the span involved is negligible.
She clutches at his shoulder and laughs; he grins.
"Splendid, splendid," Bovril says, scuttling from Deryn's shoulder to Alek's. "Felix Austria. Splendid."
Austria is quite felix, indeed. Austria also neglected to open the door. "Can you…?" he asks, tilting her in that direction.
She laughs again. "Aye, love."
Once they're over the threshold, he sets her carefully on her feet again. No sooner has he done so than she is kissing him. It's not a peck on the cheek, either. It's long and deep and heats his blood even as it lights his soul with joy.
"Careful," he says when they separate. "I may have to carry you to the bedroom."
She brushes her hair off her forehead and winks. "Sounds brilliant, but first you'd better feed me, Your Princeliness."
He smiles. "Always."
"Strawberries and cream!" Bovril says, excited.
"Not for dinner," Deryn tells the loris, scratching it under its chin. It chitters happily.
Alek fetches their luggage and takes it into the bedroom, calling back, "Are we getting something from the chip shop?"
On his shoulder, Bovril says, "We are rather short of manna," in a fair approximation of Dr. Barlow's polished tones.
The loris isn't wrong. No sensible person leaves the country for an undetermined amount of time with perishable food waiting at home. There are some tinned foodstuffs in the pantry, although, considering they've been there for most of a year, Alek would only consider eating them in the direst emergency.
Deryn is moving around the flat as he rejoins her, blowing dust off their gramophone (a gift from the Austro-Hungarian ambassador), smoothing the lace-work antimacassars (a gift from her aunts), plumping the pillow Bovril likes to sleep on (a gift from, of all people, Count Volger).
The last of the afternoon sun slants in through the curtains over the window, gilding her hair and their furniture and the pictures hanging on the walls. It's not a palace, nor even a house.
But it is a home.
She straightens and brushes off her hands. "Or we could go 'round to the pub."
"Yes, but you have to be Dylan there." Their local pub is terribly old-fashioned and doesn't admit women, even accompanied ones. He suspects she likes to frequent it precisely because of that fact - or rather, to secretly thumb her nose at the publican. "I can't canoodle you properly."
"Oh, we're canoodling, then?" she asks, alight with mischief, reaching out to fiddle with his tie.
He traps her hand in his against his collarbone. "Until death do us part."
They smile at each other. Peace settles over him like a soft, warm blanket, and he puts his arms around her. Holds her close as she holds him. Breathes her in.
His friend; his ally; and, God be praised, his wife.
"I shouldn't have gone on that mission," she says quietly after a long moment. "Not thinking I was... Well."
"Up the kyte," the loris whispers, not entirely helpfully. "Gravida."
She isn't, as it transpires. In the middle of their time on the Pegasus, her woman's courses had unexpectedly appeared, ruining her only pair of underthings as well as the more carnal aspects of a honeymoon, and putting paid to any notions of pregnancy.
Alek had been disappointed - he had been surprised at just how disappointed - but he hadn't said anything, because Deryn had so obviously been relieved.
Now he holds her more tightly and says, "Leibchen. I'm glad you were there. And you know I would never try to stop you from doing anything you felt necessary, regardless of, ah, your condition."
"Aye, I know." She exhales, and he feels some of the tension leave her shoulders. "Just the same - maybe we ought to be more careful about all that canoodling. At least for a while."
"As long as you want."
She draws back and studies him, brow furrowed. "You're not disappointed…?"
He takes a breath. Hesitates. Honesty, in all their dealings. It's a damned difficult pledge, at times. "Yes. Or rather, I was. Right now, though, I have everything I could want."
"Me too, love." Deryn smacks a kiss to his mouth and steps away, grinning at him. "Except dinner."
"Heaven forfend we neglect that," he says, dry.
Bovril cackles and begins whispering forfend to itself.
Alek locks the door behind them, and holds his wife's hand as they go.
