There is some recognition here. Nikolai is not an orphan, but Vasily and the Ravkan court had taught him very well the importance of concealing misery and tears. Alina claws back control by degrees and Nikolai knows immediately the trick of it, what it is to crush an emotion so vast into your fist and keep hold of it lest it get away.
At her sides, Nikolai's hands run up her arms slowly, draw back down to the bend of her elbow. (This too, a luxury.) Her voice is a wreck, betraying the depth of the feeling. Fear. Nikolai recognizes this too.
"He knows?" is a prompt, quiet. He has drawn closer, stepped in as a shield. He is taller, makes a good screen should someone walk in behind them. So little of her is visible at a glance with his body planted protectively in front of her.
There is such little guesswork in the answer, though it might be a help for Alina to say it.
Nikolai had been naked. The wax Alina had drawn across his body had been very obvious, as had his send been on her kefta. The Darkling is not a fool.
"Last night." The recounting comes in fragments. She is not ready, yet, for full thoughts in more coherent sentences. Her voice stays low, like she thinks that the stove might run to tell Aleksander how scared he had made her, what a good job he'd done at disorienting her. How victorious he was. "We were in the library. He told me."
She shakes her head. She feels so stupid. She'd avoided telling anyone immediately particularly because she felt so stupid. Baghra is there in her mind, again—always. Telling her what a stupid little girl she is for ever believing she was anything at all.
There are the tears, again. She can barely hold them back. She brings the back of her hand to her mouth, knuckles brushing her nose. She looks anywhere but at Nikolai.
"He knew from the start. He just let me ..." She shakes her head. "Like it was a game."
So before dinner, they had spoken. Something that troubled her now, knowing he had seen them, knowing that he had taken her.
The sweep of his palms lengthens. Up over her shoulders, down her back, encouraging her a step closer. In against him, where she won't have to avoid his eye, where she might steady herself against him.
"Breathe," comes as a murmur. A suggestion. Not to stop the tears, but temper them when they come.
It was a game, Nikolai knows. Doesn't say as much, because Alina will perhaps come to that on her own and it will be too much of a cruelty to point it out to her.
"What does he know?"
Though this too is coming to Nikolai, understanding by degrees. Managing him, Alina had said. All the way back when Nikolai had been newly arrived and disoriented and Alina had looked at him without a trace of recognition. Her project. What Nikolai had promised her.
He is careful not to stop moving. The consoling strokes of his hand, always roaming, keep this from being a reassuring embrace. It's steadying, the movement. Unpatronizing. And yet some part of Alina wishes that he would just hold her, the way he hadn't been able to the night before, the way they'd both wanted him to. Even if she knows she wouldn't be able to accept it, she aches for it more in its nearness.
But she shuts her eyes. Breathes. Tries to use it to steady herself—in through the nose, out through the mouth. Like they'd taught her while running drills in the First Army.
She'd been sixteen, then. Just a child. She'd heard that they'd talked about lowering the draft age even below that. So many people fought against it, scorned the idea, but she thinks of herself and of Mal and of the other children who were tested in Keramzin when they were just children, children who would have been shipped off instead to the Second Army. Too young for the otkazat'sya, but not for the grisha. Not for Genya. Not for the King.
And then she realizes that Aleksander much have known then, too, when he'd told her about Genya. Pointing her at a different monster, waiting to see if it would redirect her anger, sowing discontent and mistrust between her and Nikolai (as if Aleksander's betrayal hadn't already made her untrusting, isolated).
She squeezes her eyes shut tighter. Pushes all this noise away so that she can answer.
"He knows that I've been lying. Pretending like I still trust him, like I don't know what he is. He knows his mother told me. He knows I ran." She stops for breath. "I don't know what else. I don't know how much he's ..."
If he knows what Alina knows, he could know much more than that. As much as Genya, Zoya, or Nikolai. And Alina was the only one left in the dust, stupid as ever.
By and by, Nikolai closes the slip of distance between them. The sweep of his hands is relegated to one palm, rubbing circles across her back. Maybe he'd be better suited to stillness had he not spent hours frozen, examining every impulse towards motion denied to him.
They haven't done this. He has never held her. He has wanted this, so badly that it makes him mistrust his intentions now. Does it come at the expense of her fear and pain?
When his opposite hand settles at her nape, it is a tentative thing. He had admired the dark gleam of her hair in its heavy updo, the glimpse of her nape above the collar of her kefta. There is a reverence in the way he sets his fingers there, edging just below her hairline.
This close, tucked in against his chest and the burns lingering beneath the fabric of his tunic, Alina can surely hear Nikolai thinking. The speed with which he is considering what she tells him, trying to calculate out the danger it poses to her. (To Genya. To Zoya. To the people in this boarding house, the grisha woman who shared his rooms.)
"We'll find out," becomes: "I'll find out. You won't have to face him alone."
He'd promised, only hours after he had arrived in this village. It's time for him to make good on it.
His palm feels warm, settled against the niez mark that she now knows is there, on the back of her neck. It's like he's covering it up, secreting her own monstrosity away from the two of them and everyone else. They're plotting against Aleksander Kirigan, not against grisha, not against her and what she might have to become in order to stop him.
She knows it's not true, what he says. That when the time comes, she's the only one who will be able to do anything about Aleksander. About the Fold. Because no one else can do what she can do, she is entirely alone in this.
Worse, she has seen what he'll do to others who try to help her, who get in his way, who betray him. It is written in Genya's skin.
"You're in more danger than anyone," she tells him. She straightens herself, steeling herself on that tactical acknowledgment and using it as an anchor to pull herself back from him. She's never led the Second Army, but Nikolai thinks she can, says she will. She'd better start thinking like someone who can, who recognizes that this is a battle, not mere subterfuge. "It's your throne he wants."
When she straightens, Nikolai can observe the damp tracks on her face. The way the toll this takes on her is written over her face still, even as she composes herself once more. His hand lingers at the nape of her neck, thumb soft at the hinge of her jaw. Stay he wants to tell her. As tired as he is, he would hold her for hours more.
It's a fine line to walk, reconciling a figurehead with a living, breathing person. Nikolai has had more practice at this too, at diminishing himself behind a mask. He sees the threads of it in Alina's face now, the beginnings of the woman he had come to know so well.
"I wouldn't deserve it if I cowered from him."
Alina has attempted to discourage him before.
"If he wanted to kill me, he could have," is only simple logic. "I wouldn't have been able to stop him last night. He's playing a game here, and we can beat him at it."
Would Nikolai have been able to stop him if he had movement? Maybe. The odds would be better. And Nikolai has always been able to trade on even the slightest chance of a victory.
"There'd be no advantage in it, for him. The Duchess would blame him for ruining the evening, and she'd resurrect you by the time the month is out." As painful as the resurrection process seemed, it would appear that merely inflicting pain was not part of Aleksander's interests.
Alina thinks on what he'd said to her that day in the library. Of his aims, the little admissions that slipped through. He thinks he's doing the hard thing, the necessary thing, to save Ravka from an inept ruler, and to save grisha from enslavement under him.
But Ravka as Nikolai and Genya have described it is already saved. No Fold, a Grisha queen, and the Lantsov crown on Nikolai's head. Aleksander might have rejoiced these things with the rest of them, had he not made a monster of himself to put them into motion, had he been able to accept that the one who should rule might not be him.
"Why kill you when he can get the same reaction just showing us that he can if he wants to?" She meets Nikolai's gaze finally. There's a raggedness about her. Something tired behind her eyes already. "And without sabotaging his chance to ally with her, besides."
For a long moment, Nikolai is quiet. His fingers trace a nonsense pattern at Alina's nape, his palm resting at the small of her back.
She's right. There is so little room in which to gain advantage in this place. All Kirigan has is the ability to flex his power, to hold it over their heads as a threat. It would only be as effective as they allowed it to be. Without the permanence of death, how much of a motivation could avoiding his power really be?
It occurs to him that it would be a very similar punishment as the Duchess meted out; if the Darkling killed him, it would be very likely an opportunity to teach Alina a lesson as much as to cow Nikolai.
"I owe her a favor," Nikolai admits. "He can't touch me without alienating her, I think."
At least, until the Duchess calls in her favor.
"And he doesn't know what I know. That's another card for us to play on."
"We don't even know the rules or what game we're playing." The reply is desolate. Aleksander would be able to inflict pain after pain upon them to twist them into doing as he wanted precisely as he had back in Ravka and for exactly the same reason: none of them knew what his end goal was.
Beyond the obvious, of course. "If his goal is to get back to Ravka, he'd have better luck working with us than against us. The fact that he's willing to give that up means it's a matter of the circumstances under which he wants us to return in, and making sure that those are settled first."
She draws away from him now, pacing as she thinks. It makes her queasy, realizing how well she can settle into thinking as he does. He has made her paranoid and power hungry and all the things that drive him, as well. It takes no effort at all to imagine the situation from his perspective: it's how she has been thinking all along.
"If it was me, I'd be trying to find a way to regain the kind of powerful allies I'll need back home. And I'd be trying to find a way to ensure we don't bring our problems back with us." She looks at Nikolai very pointedly. "It must have occurred to you, as it has to me, that we might return to Ravka without Kirigan. That means we have to assume it's also occurred to him to return without you."
There's a snarl of possibility here. Alina puts a finger on it, implication weighing heavily on Nikolai as potential outcomes spin out from the question she poses.
What does it mean, to be contained here? What would it mean if he recalls the Darkling scattered into dust and his own coronation? Can any of what he knows to be true be destabilized by what occurs here?
Alina paces and Nikolai leans back against the table, struck briefly silent before his gaze lifts to her once more.
"Are we certain he wants to give up the possibility of working together?"
Alina stops pacing and looks back at him, frozen a moment, disgust apparent in her expression. She may be approaching the pragmatic mindset needed to lead an army, but she's still no politician by any means. Her feelings are written there all over her face, as long as they aren't her pain.
"He destroyed Novokribirsk. He disfigured Genya." Even as she says these things, they feel ... foreign. Distant. Genya's scars are real and present in front of her, and yet she can't fully reconcile that Aleksander put them there because she hadn't seen that kind of violence in him firsthand. But she knows them to be true, speaks of them like they are, because it is enough to know he is the Black Heretic, who made the Fold, which killed her own parents. "You can't be serious."
The expression she wears is a guide, of a sort. A reminder: she is months behind him. They are not yet at a point where she knows him, can track the path his thoughts take.
Braced there against the table, his hands come back together. Watches her for a moment. Maybe thinking again of the library, and how easily she turned a true, painful thing back against him. Maybe thinking of her hands on him, or the press of her back against his stomach as she slept.
His sweet wife, sharp as a blade when she wishes to be.
"I loved my brother, you know," he tells her, because maybe she had never known this of him. Because it is a raw, painful thing to bare to her even now, after spending an evening naked, on display. "When I was little I was just...desperate for his attention. Trailed him everywhere he went. Tried to do everything he did. I thought if I could just master all that my brother did, the two of them would spare a second glance. But even after all my best efforts, and my father was barely interested, and my brother..."
A spreading of hands into that space between them. Her pacing has made him still, or near to it. Holding his ground.
"They were monsters, both of them. But I still had to watch the Darkling's nichevo'ya tear them apart while my mother screamed for them."
These are minor sins, Nikolai knows. What are two lives compared to Novokribirsk? Against Genya's suffering? There is the cynical, terrible truth that the best his father and brother could have done for Ravka was to die as they did.
But the purpose is this: it is personal for Nikolai too, in the way it is personal for Alina, and for Genya.
(He does not name the scar, twinging at his shoulder.)
"Know that I want nothing more than to see him stripped of his power and thrown down into the grave where he belongs. If I ask after his hopes of allegiance, it is only to the extent that it serves that purpose."
It feels like being scolded. Maybe she deserves that, a little. Maybe she should apologize for deliberately eliding the loss of King Pyotr, but she would never mourn him. Can't bring herself to.
In fact, she can't help a flare of defensive anger in her chest because she cannot think that watching the man who'd presumed she would only speak Shu die painfully could compare to what she's had taken from her, to the feeling of Aleksander's shadows crawling across her thighs and the knowledge that he'd known even then, when she was giving herself to him, and had made her twice the fool for it.
It shouldn't matter. She believes him. She believes that he is as serious as she is, as hateful, and that should be enough. It is easier to distract herself from this sense of competition, this notion that only one of them can be the most injured, can have authority over Aleksander's crimes, when she stops to realize—
"What is a nichevo'ya?" She shakes her head. "His 'nothing'?"
How can he expect Alina to mourn Pyotr, or Vasily? Nikolai himself had not.
There are moments when it feels like a failing. It feels like a failing now, speaking of it and realizing how little he had done to recognize their passing. How little he intends to do, knowing what he does now?
Alina's question brings Tamar to mind, her uneasy accounting of the creatures that had billowed into the ballroom. The things that had speared him through the chest, gave him his scar.
It brings to mind Genya, speaking of her fears for Alina behind a closed door.
"His shadows," Nikolai answers. True, on a technicality. "Made of nothing. Impossible to hit with a bullet or a knife, unless they've hold of something."
Or, she thinks she does. His shadows, his nothings, it's just his power. The same power that made the Fold. She'd hoped that her light would be able to fight it, but it's a stupid thought. Without an amplifier, of course they would be stronger.
If she could just get her hands on one... but there's no hope for that here. She rubs at her brow, sitting with that thought. Back to the question at hand.
"We can't be certain he's ruled out cooperation, no. But even if he hasn't, he doesn't want cooperation. He wants obedience." That had been clear to her in the library. "He doesn't want allies. He wants tools."
It isn't a surprise. Of course Kirigan wants tools. (Again he recalls his father, thinking no more of grisha than a man may think of a hammer in a toolbox, a holstered gun waiting to be fired.) He would make all of them subservient to him, if he could. Zoya back at his right hand, Alina at his left, Genya trailing after him, Nikolai—
Where? The picture doesn't immediately complete, though it does lend itself to the possibility of an early grave. It's hard to say what use Nikolai is here and now, and Alina is right: Nikolai occupies his throne. The saving grace is that no one has divulged that just yet.
"No alliance starts off that way," he muses. "We'll have time, to shape our approach as we please. And we outnumber him. That will make things easier, if it comes to that."
We'll have time, he says. Our approach. It's all together. The presumption of trust and their own cooperation, at the very least. The certainty that they can depend on one another.
It has that feeling of something that ought to be familiar to her. Something that must be familiar to him.
"Is this it, then?" She asks, amused rather than cynical. "The political alliance of legend?"
How differently they've come to it here, their understanding of each other. He can feel the lingering warmth from the wax burns she'd left on him still. The sense memories from the night before come back to him now, sudden awareness as he looks at her, expression softening into a smile.
"I made you a more attractive proposal then," he admits. "There was a ring involved."
As he speaks, he leans forward, seeking to catch her hand up in his own.
"Mm," she hedges, allowing him to catch her hand all the same. She draws nearer to him, turning his hand over in turn to study them. The rough callouses that suit a privateer and not a prince. He may have idolized Prince Vasily, but she knows he wouldn't have been able to say the same.
It is an attractive proposal all its own. She won't tell him this. It would give him a power over her that she doesn't want anyone to have, anymore. But if this is what some other Alina had signed up for, then maybe she was starting to see how, and why.
"You're not the first powerful man to tell me we could change the world together." This is a warning of her skepticism, the same skepticism that makes her wonder, privately, what becomes of a political alliance when it no longer has a cause. She wants to trust him, but when Aleksander is dead, what then?
"To fix Ravka together," has the cadence of a correction, gentle as his fingers go loose in her grasp. Yielding to this inspection, content with the contact it brings with it.
Change the world? It would be a lie to say Nikolai doesn't have some appetite for it. But Ravka—
There is no greater calling than Ravka, the grasping, drowning, fractured wreck of a country. He has served her since he was twelve.
"There is so much that is broken in our country," he says, quieter, looking at their hands. "I have been seeking ways to repair it since I was a boy."
And now, after all his roundabouts and sideways approaches, he has been saddled with the power to address all these problems plaguing Ravka directly. It is overwhelming. He had stumbled over that, when he'd tried to express that to her, straying into her rooms just to see her turn towards him with a smile and ward off that sense of isolation.
"Alina Starkov," is very fond, his eyes lifting from their hands. "I would be so...incredibly alone in this task if it weren't for you."
She recalls finding Aleksander in his war room, late in the night. The way the shadows had crawled from the corners of the room as he admitted his own failings, his own sense of powerlessness at not being able to turn the tides of the war and fix this country. How her hand had slipped into his not unlike the way she holds Nikolai's hand now, how she had reassured him against the tide of his loneliness.
She wants, desperately, to believe that this is different. That Nikolai will not use her as a tool to make the country that he wants. That he wants her, and does not merely want to control her power.
Because he's right, of course. He is terribly alone. She can see it in what he's said already. The loss of his father, his brother, worthless as they were, has assured that. And his mother has always been a vain idiot more than a ruler, sitting by while Pyotr and Vasily let the country dissemble into something weak and atrophied.
She squeezes his hand, reaffirming for him as she had for Aleksander before, "You're not alone."
She is, though. She can see it now. The long life of a grisha, especially one with her power, made more powerful still by the amplifiers she will need to destroy the Fold and Aleksander, to ensure that she is really alone, utterly. It is several lifetimes away, and she still can't help but wonder how the people will look at her when the last otkazat'sya king is in his grave and she still sits in the Grand Palace, alone.
But she smiles at Nikolai. A fluttering thing, determined to comfort the boy who just wants to fill the role given to him. She had fallen down on her job of protecting him when she'd fallen asleep; at least she can do a better job of it now, here.
"But we can't fix it from here." So all of this is very far off. She draws a deep breath, shuttering away those dark feelings, those doubts. "One thing at a time."
On the table behind them, his porridge must have cooled completely by now. Alina is steadier; the fear has left her voice. Nikolai reels her a step closer, off hand lifting to tuck a stray wisp of hair back behind her ear.
"One thing at a time," he agrees, though Nikolai's perception of one thing is liable to stretch to include all of what happens around them within this boarding house, the village, the woods and the void and the Duchess in her castle. All pieces to draw together to bring them closer to their return home.
There are things he could say here. They catch at the back of his throat, sentiments so close to hand that it would take no thought at all to simply tell her.
Instead, he turns the link of their hands so that he might put a soft kiss to her knuckles. A wordless, stall of a gesture, meant to stand in for things unsaid while Nikolai tells her, "I'll make you a proper proposal. I can owe it to you, along with all the rest I've promised. You might collect on those while I prepare."
A number of promises, as yet unfulfilled. As light as his tone is, the offer is no less sincere for it.
"You're accruing quite the debt," she remarks, unable to stop herself from smiling when his lips brush her hand. There is something gentle about it. A kind of gentleness that she had not seen enough of in her life, and a kind that she wants to believe isn't entirely out of reach.
It does its job, fishing her out of the depths of her own self-pity and pessimism regarding Aleksander's plans and reach. These things are set aside in acknowledgment of the more immediate, pressing issue — their mutual confinement.
She takes her hand back reluctantly, looking past him to the table with a sigh. "I ruined your breakfast."
So the porridge is cold, and she made off with the cheese and toast. He had enough to break his fast; if he is hungry again in a few hours, he will square with it then.
For the moment, he must relinquish his grip on her hand. Return her smile, with one hand lifting to his heart. Quite the debt indeed. A relatively small stack of favors, when set against what he already intends to give over to her.
"Can I beg your company while I clear the dishes?" is just a stopgap measure against their parting of ways.
He has put certain aspects of their acquaintance into her hands. Given Alina the excuses and power with which to fall back into each other, made clear to her his own willingness. The choice of it, he gives to her, to do with what she will.
But even now, exhaustion held so carefully in check, Nikolai would be content to simply lay down alongside her to sleep properly, make a re-attempt at the most benign of what they attempted last night.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cw ref to waxplay.
At her sides, Nikolai's hands run up her arms slowly, draw back down to the bend of her elbow. (This too, a luxury.) Her voice is a wreck, betraying the depth of the feeling. Fear. Nikolai recognizes this too.
"He knows?" is a prompt, quiet. He has drawn closer, stepped in as a shield. He is taller, makes a good screen should someone walk in behind them. So little of her is visible at a glance with his body planted protectively in front of her.
There is such little guesswork in the answer, though it might be a help for Alina to say it.
Nikolai had been naked. The wax Alina had drawn across his body had been very obvious, as had his send been on her kefta. The Darkling is not a fool.
And Alina's reaction to that—
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She shakes her head. She feels so stupid. She'd avoided telling anyone immediately particularly because she felt so stupid. Baghra is there in her mind, again—always. Telling her what a stupid little girl she is for ever believing she was anything at all.
There are the tears, again. She can barely hold them back. She brings the back of her hand to her mouth, knuckles brushing her nose. She looks anywhere but at Nikolai.
"He knew from the start. He just let me ..." She shakes her head. "Like it was a game."
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The sweep of his palms lengthens. Up over her shoulders, down her back, encouraging her a step closer. In against him, where she won't have to avoid his eye, where she might steady herself against him.
"Breathe," comes as a murmur. A suggestion. Not to stop the tears, but temper them when they come.
It was a game, Nikolai knows. Doesn't say as much, because Alina will perhaps come to that on her own and it will be too much of a cruelty to point it out to her.
"What does he know?"
Though this too is coming to Nikolai, understanding by degrees. Managing him, Alina had said. All the way back when Nikolai had been newly arrived and disoriented and Alina had looked at him without a trace of recognition. Her project. What Nikolai had promised her.
He knows, Alina had said. Is this what he knows?
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But she shuts her eyes. Breathes. Tries to use it to steady herself—in through the nose, out through the mouth. Like they'd taught her while running drills in the First Army.
She'd been sixteen, then. Just a child. She'd heard that they'd talked about lowering the draft age even below that. So many people fought against it, scorned the idea, but she thinks of herself and of Mal and of the other children who were tested in Keramzin when they were just children, children who would have been shipped off instead to the Second Army. Too young for the otkazat'sya, but not for the grisha. Not for Genya. Not for the King.
And then she realizes that Aleksander much have known then, too, when he'd told her about Genya. Pointing her at a different monster, waiting to see if it would redirect her anger, sowing discontent and mistrust between her and Nikolai (as if Aleksander's betrayal hadn't already made her untrusting, isolated).
She squeezes her eyes shut tighter. Pushes all this noise away so that she can answer.
"He knows that I've been lying. Pretending like I still trust him, like I don't know what he is. He knows his mother told me. He knows I ran." She stops for breath. "I don't know what else. I don't know how much he's ..."
If he knows what Alina knows, he could know much more than that. As much as Genya, Zoya, or Nikolai. And Alina was the only one left in the dust, stupid as ever.
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They haven't done this. He has never held her. He has wanted this, so badly that it makes him mistrust his intentions now. Does it come at the expense of her fear and pain?
When his opposite hand settles at her nape, it is a tentative thing. He had admired the dark gleam of her hair in its heavy updo, the glimpse of her nape above the collar of her kefta. There is a reverence in the way he sets his fingers there, edging just below her hairline.
This close, tucked in against his chest and the burns lingering beneath the fabric of his tunic, Alina can surely hear Nikolai thinking. The speed with which he is considering what she tells him, trying to calculate out the danger it poses to her. (To Genya. To Zoya. To the people in this boarding house, the grisha woman who shared his rooms.)
"We'll find out," becomes: "I'll find out. You won't have to face him alone."
He'd promised, only hours after he had arrived in this village. It's time for him to make good on it.
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She knows it's not true, what he says. That when the time comes, she's the only one who will be able to do anything about Aleksander. About the Fold. Because no one else can do what she can do, she is entirely alone in this.
Worse, she has seen what he'll do to others who try to help her, who get in his way, who betray him. It is written in Genya's skin.
"You're in more danger than anyone," she tells him. She straightens herself, steeling herself on that tactical acknowledgment and using it as an anchor to pull herself back from him. She's never led the Second Army, but Nikolai thinks she can, says she will. She'd better start thinking like someone who can, who recognizes that this is a battle, not mere subterfuge. "It's your throne he wants."
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It's a fine line to walk, reconciling a figurehead with a living, breathing person. Nikolai has had more practice at this too, at diminishing himself behind a mask. He sees the threads of it in Alina's face now, the beginnings of the woman he had come to know so well.
"I wouldn't deserve it if I cowered from him."
Alina has attempted to discourage him before.
"If he wanted to kill me, he could have," is only simple logic. "I wouldn't have been able to stop him last night. He's playing a game here, and we can beat him at it."
Would Nikolai have been able to stop him if he had movement? Maybe. The odds would be better. And Nikolai has always been able to trade on even the slightest chance of a victory.
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"There'd be no advantage in it, for him. The Duchess would blame him for ruining the evening, and she'd resurrect you by the time the month is out." As painful as the resurrection process seemed, it would appear that merely inflicting pain was not part of Aleksander's interests.
Alina thinks on what he'd said to her that day in the library. Of his aims, the little admissions that slipped through. He thinks he's doing the hard thing, the necessary thing, to save Ravka from an inept ruler, and to save grisha from enslavement under him.
But Ravka as Nikolai and Genya have described it is already saved. No Fold, a Grisha queen, and the Lantsov crown on Nikolai's head. Aleksander might have rejoiced these things with the rest of them, had he not made a monster of himself to put them into motion, had he been able to accept that the one who should rule might not be him.
"Why kill you when he can get the same reaction just showing us that he can if he wants to?" She meets Nikolai's gaze finally. There's a raggedness about her. Something tired behind her eyes already. "And without sabotaging his chance to ally with her, besides."
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She's right. There is so little room in which to gain advantage in this place. All Kirigan has is the ability to flex his power, to hold it over their heads as a threat. It would only be as effective as they allowed it to be. Without the permanence of death, how much of a motivation could avoiding his power really be?
It occurs to him that it would be a very similar punishment as the Duchess meted out; if the Darkling killed him, it would be very likely an opportunity to teach Alina a lesson as much as to cow Nikolai.
"I owe her a favor," Nikolai admits. "He can't touch me without alienating her, I think."
At least, until the Duchess calls in her favor.
"And he doesn't know what I know. That's another card for us to play on."
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Beyond the obvious, of course. "If his goal is to get back to Ravka, he'd have better luck working with us than against us. The fact that he's willing to give that up means it's a matter of the circumstances under which he wants us to return in, and making sure that those are settled first."
She draws away from him now, pacing as she thinks. It makes her queasy, realizing how well she can settle into thinking as he does. He has made her paranoid and power hungry and all the things that drive him, as well. It takes no effort at all to imagine the situation from his perspective: it's how she has been thinking all along.
"If it was me, I'd be trying to find a way to regain the kind of powerful allies I'll need back home. And I'd be trying to find a way to ensure we don't bring our problems back with us." She looks at Nikolai very pointedly. "It must have occurred to you, as it has to me, that we might return to Ravka without Kirigan. That means we have to assume it's also occurred to him to return without you."
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There's a snarl of possibility here. Alina puts a finger on it, implication weighing heavily on Nikolai as potential outcomes spin out from the question she poses.
What does it mean, to be contained here? What would it mean if he recalls the Darkling scattered into dust and his own coronation? Can any of what he knows to be true be destabilized by what occurs here?
Alina paces and Nikolai leans back against the table, struck briefly silent before his gaze lifts to her once more.
"Are we certain he wants to give up the possibility of working together?"
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"He destroyed Novokribirsk. He disfigured Genya." Even as she says these things, they feel ... foreign. Distant. Genya's scars are real and present in front of her, and yet she can't fully reconcile that Aleksander put them there because she hadn't seen that kind of violence in him firsthand. But she knows them to be true, speaks of them like they are, because it is enough to know he is the Black Heretic, who made the Fold, which killed her own parents. "You can't be serious."
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Braced there against the table, his hands come back together. Watches her for a moment. Maybe thinking again of the library, and how easily she turned a true, painful thing back against him. Maybe thinking of her hands on him, or the press of her back against his stomach as she slept.
His sweet wife, sharp as a blade when she wishes to be.
"I loved my brother, you know," he tells her, because maybe she had never known this of him. Because it is a raw, painful thing to bare to her even now, after spending an evening naked, on display. "When I was little I was just...desperate for his attention. Trailed him everywhere he went. Tried to do everything he did. I thought if I could just master all that my brother did, the two of them would spare a second glance. But even after all my best efforts, and my father was barely interested, and my brother..."
A spreading of hands into that space between them. Her pacing has made him still, or near to it. Holding his ground.
"They were monsters, both of them. But I still had to watch the Darkling's nichevo'ya tear them apart while my mother screamed for them."
These are minor sins, Nikolai knows. What are two lives compared to Novokribirsk? Against Genya's suffering? There is the cynical, terrible truth that the best his father and brother could have done for Ravka was to die as they did.
But the purpose is this: it is personal for Nikolai too, in the way it is personal for Alina, and for Genya.
(He does not name the scar, twinging at his shoulder.)
"Know that I want nothing more than to see him stripped of his power and thrown down into the grave where he belongs. If I ask after his hopes of allegiance, it is only to the extent that it serves that purpose."
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In fact, she can't help a flare of defensive anger in her chest because she cannot think that watching the man who'd presumed she would only speak Shu die painfully could compare to what she's had taken from her, to the feeling of Aleksander's shadows crawling across her thighs and the knowledge that he'd known even then, when she was giving herself to him, and had made her twice the fool for it.
It shouldn't matter. She believes him. She believes that he is as serious as she is, as hateful, and that should be enough. It is easier to distract herself from this sense of competition, this notion that only one of them can be the most injured, can have authority over Aleksander's crimes, when she stops to realize—
"What is a nichevo'ya?" She shakes her head. "His 'nothing'?"
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There are moments when it feels like a failing. It feels like a failing now, speaking of it and realizing how little he had done to recognize their passing. How little he intends to do, knowing what he does now?
Alina's question brings Tamar to mind, her uneasy accounting of the creatures that had billowed into the ballroom. The things that had speared him through the chest, gave him his scar.
It brings to mind Genya, speaking of her fears for Alina behind a closed door.
"His shadows," Nikolai answers. True, on a technicality. "Made of nothing. Impossible to hit with a bullet or a knife, unless they've hold of something."
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Or, she thinks she does. His shadows, his nothings, it's just his power. The same power that made the Fold. She'd hoped that her light would be able to fight it, but it's a stupid thought. Without an amplifier, of course they would be stronger.
If she could just get her hands on one... but there's no hope for that here. She rubs at her brow, sitting with that thought. Back to the question at hand.
"We can't be certain he's ruled out cooperation, no. But even if he hasn't, he doesn't want cooperation. He wants obedience." That had been clear to her in the library. "He doesn't want allies. He wants tools."
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It isn't a surprise. Of course Kirigan wants tools. (Again he recalls his father, thinking no more of grisha than a man may think of a hammer in a toolbox, a holstered gun waiting to be fired.) He would make all of them subservient to him, if he could. Zoya back at his right hand, Alina at his left, Genya trailing after him, Nikolai—
Where? The picture doesn't immediately complete, though it does lend itself to the possibility of an early grave. It's hard to say what use Nikolai is here and now, and Alina is right: Nikolai occupies his throne. The saving grace is that no one has divulged that just yet.
"No alliance starts off that way," he muses. "We'll have time, to shape our approach as we please. And we outnumber him. That will make things easier, if it comes to that."
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It has that feeling of something that ought to be familiar to her. Something that must be familiar to him.
"Is this it, then?" She asks, amused rather than cynical. "The political alliance of legend?"
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How differently they've come to it here, their understanding of each other. He can feel the lingering warmth from the wax burns she'd left on him still. The sense memories from the night before come back to him now, sudden awareness as he looks at her, expression softening into a smile.
"I made you a more attractive proposal then," he admits. "There was a ring involved."
As he speaks, he leans forward, seeking to catch her hand up in his own.
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It is an attractive proposal all its own. She won't tell him this. It would give him a power over her that she doesn't want anyone to have, anymore. But if this is what some other Alina had signed up for, then maybe she was starting to see how, and why.
"You're not the first powerful man to tell me we could change the world together." This is a warning of her skepticism, the same skepticism that makes her wonder, privately, what becomes of a political alliance when it no longer has a cause. She wants to trust him, but when Aleksander is dead, what then?
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Change the world? It would be a lie to say Nikolai doesn't have some appetite for it. But Ravka—
There is no greater calling than Ravka, the grasping, drowning, fractured wreck of a country. He has served her since he was twelve.
"There is so much that is broken in our country," he says, quieter, looking at their hands. "I have been seeking ways to repair it since I was a boy."
And now, after all his roundabouts and sideways approaches, he has been saddled with the power to address all these problems plaguing Ravka directly. It is overwhelming. He had stumbled over that, when he'd tried to express that to her, straying into her rooms just to see her turn towards him with a smile and ward off that sense of isolation.
"Alina Starkov," is very fond, his eyes lifting from their hands. "I would be so...incredibly alone in this task if it weren't for you."
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She wants, desperately, to believe that this is different. That Nikolai will not use her as a tool to make the country that he wants. That he wants her, and does not merely want to control her power.
Because he's right, of course. He is terribly alone. She can see it in what he's said already. The loss of his father, his brother, worthless as they were, has assured that. And his mother has always been a vain idiot more than a ruler, sitting by while Pyotr and Vasily let the country dissemble into something weak and atrophied.
She squeezes his hand, reaffirming for him as she had for Aleksander before, "You're not alone."
She is, though. She can see it now. The long life of a grisha, especially one with her power, made more powerful still by the amplifiers she will need to destroy the Fold and Aleksander, to ensure that she is really alone, utterly. It is several lifetimes away, and she still can't help but wonder how the people will look at her when the last otkazat'sya king is in his grave and she still sits in the Grand Palace, alone.
But she smiles at Nikolai. A fluttering thing, determined to comfort the boy who just wants to fill the role given to him. She had fallen down on her job of protecting him when she'd fallen asleep; at least she can do a better job of it now, here.
"But we can't fix it from here." So all of this is very far off. She draws a deep breath, shuttering away those dark feelings, those doubts. "One thing at a time."
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"One thing at a time," he agrees, though Nikolai's perception of one thing is liable to stretch to include all of what happens around them within this boarding house, the village, the woods and the void and the Duchess in her castle. All pieces to draw together to bring them closer to their return home.
There are things he could say here. They catch at the back of his throat, sentiments so close to hand that it would take no thought at all to simply tell her.
Instead, he turns the link of their hands so that he might put a soft kiss to her knuckles. A wordless, stall of a gesture, meant to stand in for things unsaid while Nikolai tells her, "I'll make you a proper proposal. I can owe it to you, along with all the rest I've promised. You might collect on those while I prepare."
A number of promises, as yet unfulfilled. As light as his tone is, the offer is no less sincere for it.
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It does its job, fishing her out of the depths of her own self-pity and pessimism regarding Aleksander's plans and reach. These things are set aside in acknowledgment of the more immediate, pressing issue — their mutual confinement.
She takes her hand back reluctantly, looking past him to the table with a sigh. "I ruined your breakfast."
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So the porridge is cold, and she made off with the cheese and toast. He had enough to break his fast; if he is hungry again in a few hours, he will square with it then.
For the moment, he must relinquish his grip on her hand. Return her smile, with one hand lifting to his heart. Quite the debt indeed. A relatively small stack of favors, when set against what he already intends to give over to her.
"Can I beg your company while I clear the dishes?" is just a stopgap measure against their parting of ways.
He has put certain aspects of their acquaintance into her hands. Given Alina the excuses and power with which to fall back into each other, made clear to her his own willingness. The choice of it, he gives to her, to do with what she will.
But even now, exhaustion held so carefully in check, Nikolai would be content to simply lay down alongside her to sleep properly, make a re-attempt at the most benign of what they attempted last night.
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(cw: dubcon, risk of pregnancy, magic plan b)
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cw forced restraint, humiliation
cw: body shaming
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cw unplanned pregnancy contemplations
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