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This Alina is different, Mal thinks, sat across from her, bathed in that mythic golden light borne from her fingertips.
In the obvious ways, Alina is different; for one, she’s clean. Prim and groomed in ways that neither the orphanage, nor the First Army would ever allow for. The layer of grit and kohl that she could never quite scrub from her hands was presently absent. These were no longer the hands of a cartographer, or of a desperate and starving little girl, but of a Grisha. Her hair is longer, marking the passage of time—but not only that, it looks so soft as it falls in waves passed her shoulders, loose and full, bearing a sheen only good health and hygiene could provide.
And good health, it seemed, the Little Palace gifted onto her in spades. For, clearly, she did not want for food there, being part Shu hardly mattered inside those walls when she was the Sun Summoner. Her skin glowed, not just due to the light streaming from her hands like a miracle, like she held the sun itself betwixt her palms, but because of continual good nights rests, cool and clean water on-demand, and phials of fancy oils and ointments and soaps.
Her smell was different too, sweat and musk and pencil and parchment no longer clung to her skin. She smelled of something strongly floral and feminine—her clothes were probably specially laundered, he surmised—but every so often, when the wind changed just so, or she turned her head wrong, something sharp and earthy would fill the air that was distinctly not Alina. Not new Alina or old Alina. But Mal couldn’t place it.
Or didn’t want to.
It would be a lie to say that the girl sitting before him had ever been analyzed this way before. The Alina Starkov who’s hand he held in the meadow, or even the one who was nearly ripped from his arms by the Volcra, had always been under his care, had always had his loyalty, but his eye? Only this Alina had caught it.
And, though it filled him with a sense of guilt and ungratefulness now, it was no less true. His Alina was little and plain, but this one had bloomed in such a way that he simultaneously couldn’t look but was powerless to tear his gaze away from her.
Mal had always been by her side, had always seen himself by her side—but now, now he wished to always be there, prayed that there was still a place there.
It was clear that she hadn’t changed entirely on her own, that her Black General had had something to do with the new way she carried herself and this new air about her. Even though Mal had quickly soothed her fretting when Alina began apologizing about relations with the older man, telling her it didn’t matter what transpired at the Little Palace as long as she was here now and safe, Mal still felt the blackness of jealousy curling at the edge of his mind.
Breaking eye contact every so often, Mal’s stare returned to her hands and he couldn’t help but note the way her palm no longer bore that silver bitemark; the jagged scar left behind by broken ceramic. From the day of the test… The realization tugged at something in his chest, made each breath that much sharper in the already painfully frigid air.
“We have to find the stag before he does,” Alina looked determined, jaw set and eyes hard. A look that was entirely foreign to him, but looked entirely natural, nonetheless. This sense of authority, of sureness looked right on her face.
And the tug in his chest then, turned into something else that made his pulse jump, made redness blossom across his cheeks. The impulse to prove that he still had a place with her, to prove his loyalty. To kiss her.
Mal was moving before he could stop himself, before he could register the shifting landscape of Alina’s expression from stern and urgent to something more infinitely alien than he’d ever seen and altogether more… soft. Her eyes closed in a flutter of dark lashes and then he was too close to her face to see anything else, could only feel the glare of her power beneath their faces as he joined their lips.
It was dry, her mouth was just as cold and hard as his from the elements, but it was like everything had led up to this. To this moment. To this kiss.
Consciously, Mal raised his hands to cradle her head, fingers twining longingly in her black tresses, his icy palms burning against her warm and flushing face.
“I love you,” he wanted to say, but their mouths stayed put, as though they had frozen together like that. Like statues erected to some great lovers’ legend.
If only she had gotten his letters, Alina would know what this kiss truly meant. Would know the hell he’d gone through to find his way back to her, to his True North. If only he had gotten Alina’s letters, so that he could know where her heart was.
One of her hands rested itself gently on his chest, over his wildly beating heart, and Mal felt his stomach flip as Alina pulled away to look into his eyes. Her eyes were brimming with tears and confusion hit him, then realization—a memory of the night before the expedition that changed everything, when he’d brought her that fruit, the way she had leaned into him…
Mal swiped his thumb across her pinkened cheek, “I’m so sorry, Alina,” and he didn’t know why, but he laughed, perhaps at the incredulity of the situation, and it was a dry bark that startled him as it rattled from his chest.
Alina laughed too, a thin and almost hysterical sound, and the hand on his chest balled into a fist that she used to hit him. “I might be a terrible shot,” she huffed, moving back into his breathing space, preparing to rejoin their mouths, “but you are all brawn and no brain.”
“I never said I was smart,” he countered, letting himself be kissed.
This Alina might be different, but she was also very much the same.
She was still home.