Work Text:
In the future, when they write their story, they will cast him as the dark sorcerer, seducing and wounding the sweet saint; hounding her, trapping her, forcing her into bargains bad and worse to save herself, to preserve all that was light and good and filled with love.
They will not write about the part where the saint was willing, Alina knows; not the part where she went into his arms without thought of the consequence, not the parts where he lingered in her mind like smoke, not the nights when she longed for him in her bed, when he obliged, and came to her, and left her shaken.
They won’t write about the gift of his name, given over to her like a beating heart; they will only speak of the knife she took to it, and leave out the maimed soul it left her with; they will never know Aleksander existed at all, left to die within her.