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The black kefta slipped to the ground, blending seamlessly with the rocks in the pitch black night. Boots, shirt and pants followed and the Darkling bent over to collect his clothes, folding them roughly so they wouldn't be rumpled once he would put them back on. The chill of the night raised his skin in goosebumps, and he let out a low hiss as he dipped his foot into the ice cold water of the stream. The feeling almost hurt him but it was what he needed now. For all his appreciation of the convenience of modern baths, being confined in a tub of warm water never quite worked as well as a dip in a spring to clear his head. He had always ferociously opposed any construction project in the forest adjoining the Little Palace, for he found solace in the cascading source of the river running down it and feeding into the lake, far from prying eyes and politics.
And, tonight, far from Alina.
His sun summoner was nothing like he expected, and after years of awaiting her, he found himself constantly wrong-footed around her. It did not help that she had a talent for running into him at the worst moments, notably when he was around his mother.
He blew out an annoyed breath at the thought, and it crystallised into a small puff of condensation. He immersed himself fully in the water, giving a few breast strokes to keep his body moving and not seize up in the cold. Of course going after legendary amplifiers was the last thing he wanted right now, the Tsar would give him grief for allocating resources to what might amount to a goose chase, based on nothing else but his deep conviction that they existed.
He had felt the same about the sun summoner and he had been right, eventually.
But what else could he do for Alina?
Twenty years of wasting sickness was simply unheard of. Children died before reaching ten. Some of them didn’t even make it after managing to summon, the existent decay already running too deep, and taking them even as their hopes of survival grew. Others survived, but their abilities with the small science never quite reached their peers’. Alina’s natural lifespan would be beyond any normal scale, like his, so perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that she could survive wasting sickness for so long, but it still left them without any frame of reference for how soon she would be able to wield her powers to a satisfactory standard.
Let alone be able to counter his own merzost creation, enough so that he could control it from the inside.
It could be years. It could be decades. It could be centuries. All the Saints damn it, he would give her all the time she needed if he could. It would happen, eventually. She was the sun summoner, she would be his equal, and time would mean little to either of them.
But Ravka didn’t have years. The grishas didn’t have decades. And with the Fold expanding every second of every minute of every day, with the never stopping advance of progress and the arms race of Ravka’s enemies, time meant everything.
A sigh slipped past his lips and he settled against a rock, preventing the weak current from carrying him away, yet allowing him to float in peace. He closed his eyes, and he saw hers.
Her laughter still rang out in his ears. She had called him ruffled. He supposed he was, he usually was ruffled after interacting with his mother in any way. It had been a long time since anybody ever dared to call him anything like that (his aforementioned mother aside). She was so irreverent. Rude and blunt, saying whatever her heart desired, sometimes clearly before it reached her mind.
“You’re the Darkling. I’m not saying you would throw me in a ditch or ship me off to Tsibeya, but you certainly could. You can cut people in half. I think it’s fair to be a little intimidated.”
The vast majority of people thought the same as she did, but they usually kept it to themselves. Their skittish ways around him usually were enough to tell him what they thought.
But she wasn’t skittish. She looked like she wanted to swallow her own tongue half the times she blurted something like that to him, which was thoroughly amusing at her expense from his end, but she did not grovel or plead for forgiveness. And Saints knew she told him what she wanted. A blue kefta, to belong among the other summoners. An amplifier, to feel like a real Grisha and match her peers’ prowesses.
She had once said she wished he could just take her powers away and give them to someone else. That hadn’t lasted long. He hadn’t comprehended it then, he knew now that she already wanted to belong then, so much that she had wished to avoid rejection altogether by outcasting herself.
He pushed away from the rock to swim around the spring on his back, feeling his body temperature drop from his immobility. The gentle waterfall and the movement it created kept pushing him away, rumbling in the otherwise silent night. His pale gaze ran upstream, mentally climbing up the rocks and standing at the top, like a child about to dive.
Alina would hate him once she would realise what the amplifier might mean.
He could take her hatred and her resentment. Perhaps, even, it would be easier to handle than the odd things on her face, in her laugh, in her eyes, when they walked together along the lake.
Perhaps, later, they would have time for this again. Once the Fold would be in his hands, his mistake useful at last, and their enemies forced to retreat to their dens, once safety for the grishas would no longer be a daily hypothetical balanced against military budgets and noble whims—
He took in a sharp breath. That was enough , his teeth starting to chatter. So much for clearing his mind, he thought resentfully as he swam his way back to the bank, hauling himself up. He welcomed the harsh wind on his wet skin and squeezed most of the water out of his dark locks.
Senseless musings. He could mourn the timing of it all he wanted, wish they had met earlier. Alina could have met a wandering Grisha on the road seeking others like him, not yet a Black heretic, not yet a General, but that time was past, the opportunity gone. It would not come back. She would know the Darkling, he would accept her hatred once the time would come. She was his equal, and she too would be able to handle all that the Darkling was.
And if he fostered in him the hope for a time where Alina and Aleksander would meet at last, he would shelter those words in his heart, and he wouldn’t let anyone read it.