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“Begone, evil summoner of shadows! And never come back, villain!” the Sun Saint’s shrill voice shouted just as a beam of light shot out of her round hands.
“Aaaaarghuablarguaaaaaargh!” eloquently screamed the Darkling, shaking all over as black ribbons were thrown all around him.
Nikolai pinched the bridge of his nose, unable to even bring himself to look at Alina’s no doubt profoundly drained expression. The two puppeteers popped out from behind their ornate cardboard miniature theater, having at least the good sense to look contrite and sheepish.
“And that’s when the Tsarevich left the room, moi Tsar, moi Tsaritsa,” the man concluded with an unnecessary amount of bowing.
“We realised the matter might be sensitive which is why we sought to approach it in the most considerate way,” his partner added earnestly.
Alina looked down at the two now inert puppets. Her, she supposed, with hair made of white yarn, a benevolent smiling face and little mirrors sewn into her hands to allow the puppeteers to redirect light and create the illusion that she was creating it. And the Darkling… With three black scars embroidered across his frowning face and a mechanism allowing him to have black ribbons shooting out of his stomach for his death scene.
“What was the less considerate approach?” she asked machinally and felt Nikolai’s hand on her forearm.
“Thank you for your time, I will leave the intendant to inform you of any further need for your services at the Grand Palace,”
He just needed to swing by the intendant’s office first to make sure this further need would be ‘never’. And to find out who exactly approved of this performance in the first place.
Alina and him had been enjoying the reception organised in honor of the fourth anniversary of the Ravkan-Shu peace treaty, and by “enjoying” he meant he had been watching with morbid fascination the way Alina absolutely demolished the bowl of tangyuan, which apparently soothed whatever new insane pregnancy craving had wormed its way in her brain. He thought he could remember one of his chefs proudly saying he couldn’t wait to hear what the Shu guests had thought of his attempt at their cuisine. Ah. Well.
Then one of the guards assigned to the protection of the Crown Prince had found him to discreetly inform him his son had just stormed out of the Sankt Vladimir salon where entertainment for the children had been set up.
Knowing Tolya had been hot on his heels, and that he wouldn’t lose him no matter what obscure shortcuts and hideouts Viktor would find, Nikolai and Alina had decided to first stop by the Sankt Vladimir salon to find out the source of his upset.
“It’s not even accurate,” Alina grumbled once they were out of the room, leaning more on Nikolai than she would care to admit.
Viktor had been an extremely pleasant pregnancy, all things (the father, the civil war, the existential dread) considered. Whatever they were going to name that second little one, it was already not a little one but an enormous hyperactive behemoth that tormented her so badly she had started having recurring dreams of the day she punched Nikolai in the face.
He had been very gracious about it when she told him, too.
“I suppose details are bound to get lost after eight years,” Nikolai sighed.
Or maybe replacing the stabbing with a beam of light and an explosion of shadows had actually been the ‘considerate approach’ the puppeteers told them about.
Instead of returning to the reception, considering they had spent enough time there that it wouldn’t be seen as a mortal offense if the royal couple dared to dip for a bit, they headed towards the Little Palace instead. Although Viktor regularly found new hiding spots, they kept a pretty accurate mental list of all of them. Around that time of the year, they knew he favoured the forest, especially on such an evening crawling with guests and servants. It wasn’t long before they spotted Tolya, dutifully standing at the foot of a tree. Nikolai gave him a silent and questioning nod, to which he replied with an apologetic expression.
“Vityenka,” Alina called, spotting a hint of cream clothes through the leaves. He wasn’t using his shadows to conceal himself, she noted. If those idiot puppeteers drove her son right into another long phase of repressing his powers—
“I’m fine, madraya,” came his small voice, muffled from his face being buried in his arms.
Alina and Nikolai exchanged a look before the Tsar got rid of his jacket, unceremoniously dropping it to the ground (and Alina wasn’t going to pick it up, she was past the point where such a thing was possible). He grabbed the highest branch he could reach and heaved himself up, ignoring the ominous cracking of the tree which had really only volunteered to host a scrawny eight years old child. He settled himself on the branch nearest his son’s, his bigger body allowing them to be at the same level even though his branch was lower.
Viktor looked up at the noise. In the dim light of the late afternoon, his grey eyes seemed even paler than usual, rimmed in red from tears. Leaves stuck out from his ink black hair, strands falling messily over his forehead.
It wasn’t like they could have lied. Pretended Viktor had been a happy pre-marriage accident, never told him of his relation with the one Ravka had already turned into a fairytale villain. Even before shadows started spilling from his fingers he had always been unmistakably the Darkling’s.
Yet couldn’t the world see all the ways he was unmistakably Nikolai’s? When indelicate nobles pointed out the grey eyes, how could they miss the delightful crescents they turned into when Viktor smiled, all dimples and teeth?
Listening to the whispers down the corridors, one might also think the Darkling had immaculately conceived the boy as well. His scrawny build was quickly attributed to his father, like Alina hadn’t blamed herself and her own constitution for it.
“Not nice to hide in trees when you know your mother can’t follow you there anymore,” Nikolai teased him, pulling a handkerchief out of his pocket.
Viktor guiltily looked down and allowed him to wipe the tear stains off his cheeks.
“I’m fine… I don’t need you to be here…” he mumbled.
“Well, maybe we need to be here, maybe the reception was dreadfully boring and we needed an excuse to flee. Come here, lisichka,”
In spite of his words, Viktor opposed no resistance to being pulled in Nikolai’s arms, his small body limp and his hands already curling into the fabric of his shirt. As carefully as he could, Nikolai climbed down the tree, one arm around his son and the other guiding himself so he wouldn’t drop the two of them at Alina’s feet.
Alina who had decided to sit down while waiting for them, apparently, leaning her back against the trunk of the tree. Nikolai dropped next to her, knowing Tolya would keep watch so no one would stumble upon this heap of a royal family staining their white clothes in the grass..
“Bold of you to sit on the ground,” he remarked.
“Mmh, Vitya will help me get back up,” she smiled, holding out her arm so Viktor could come snuggle to her. Nikolai scooted closer as well, placing a hand over her round belly to fully bracket their son between them.
Alina carefully took one of Viktor’s hands in her own, marvelling at how easily it fit into her own.
“Show me your pretty shadows, malysh,”
He immediately withdrew his hand and buried his face against her shoulder. In such moments, she wished she had kept the wisp of shadows she had once been able to manipulate. Unfortunately, Aleksander had taken that to the grave with him. With a flip of her hand, she created a small rabbit out of pure sunlight, making it gallop up and down Nikolai’s arm, who could only watch fondly.
“Come on, malysh, will you leave my little rabbit alone? He is looking for his friend,”
“Oh nooo, where is my friend?” Nikolai sung-sang in a high-pitched voice. “With whom will I cause mischief, now? Is he here?” he poked Viktor’s side. “Or here?” he tickled his neck, making him squeal in spite of himself and squash his head to his shoulder. “Where is my little shadow friend?”
They slowly coaxed Viktor to stop hiding his face, his eyes still wet as he looked at the rabbit running circles in Nikolai’s palm. He chewed on his lip —Alina’s tic, Nikolai couldn’t help but think— before bringing his hands together. He scrunched his little face in focus as he had to almost physically mold the shadows into a wobbly rabbit shape, presenting it to his parents in his pudgy hand.
“Yaaay, my friend!” Nikolai cheered as Alina had her own rabbit hop off his palm and onto Viktor’s.
He pressed a kiss to the crown of the boy’s head, exchanging a relieved look with Alina. Viktor’s powers had been hard enough to coax out of him the first time, signs of wasting sickness appearing first as a part of him kept suppressing the shadows within him. Even after that, it never took a lot for them to retreat back into the depths of his mind. The scared squealing of other children calling him a Darkling, a tactless question from an ambassador— an infinity of small things here and there that they simply could not prevent, that they could only try to drown with their own love. And Viktor would never need to know they had to rip their own flinching reflexes out of themselves. He would only ever know Alina’s hands braiding her sunlight with his shadows, Nikolai’s stained fingers encouraging him to create fantastical creatures and flying ships.
Viktor’s flimsy control did not allow his rabbit to last long, and Alina made hers nuzzle it while they both fizzled into nothingness. Seeking a new distraction, the boy placed a hand on top of Alina’s belly, feeling the roundness and curiously seeking the kicks he had sometimes felt before.
“Just three weeks left and you’ll be a big brother, are you ready?” she asked and he vehemently shook his head.
“You’ll do great,” Nikolai laughed. “You’ll be the best,”
“The other children don’t like me,” he muttered. “He won’t like me either,”
Viktor had, in fact, already decided he was having a little brother. Whether that came to pass or not remained to be seen.
“Little siblings always love their big brother, it’s the rule,”
“Even if they are bad at being big brothers?” Viktor asked skeptically.
“They sure do,” Nikolai hummed wistfully. “But I know you won’t be bad at it,”
Alina ruffled his hair, then indulged in doing the same to Nikolai, earning a dimpled smile in return.
“You’ll make shadow rabbits for them,” she encouraged. “Teach them all the things you know. Protect them. They’ll be so lucky to have you,”
“Protect them…”
In his head, the baby would be small as the rabbits he summoned, tiny enough to fit in the palm of one hand. He could keep his brother in one hand and blast shadows with the other, that could work. He needed to be good, to keep practicing. And then maybe he would teach him how to use his own powers…
“Will he be grisha?”
“We can’t know yet. Maybe,”
“But he won’t be a shadow summoner,” he added ruefully.
“Could be,” Nikolai shrugged.
The nichevo’ya the Darkling had infected him still rested within him, after all, tamed but not gone. Saints only knew what that might mean for any material he brought to the conception of a baby. Their first successful pregnancy —the first that came as far as this one— since their marriage. Saints knew he had cursed and blamed the nichevo’ya for every single thing that went wrong with the previous ones.
Saints knew that another little shadow summoner wasn’t even the worse case scenario.
Wasn’t even a bad case scenario , he found. Maybe it would help Viktor dissociate his own shadows from their historical legacy. Alleviating an ounce of his son’s pain would be worth all the gossip that would follow, even eight years after the Darkling’s death.
“He will look like you,” Viktor added, pointedly looking at his father.
“They might just be a little Alina,”
“I deserve it, after all they put me through,” she leaned down, kissing Viktor’s face. “They’ll look like you , malych. You are perfect, and they’ll be perfect as well. I’d be happy with ten of you. Can you even imagine one that’s like your paposhka? Saints, you’ll be exhausted from running after them all the time,”
“I will have you two know I was a saintly child,”
“Which saint are we talking about, exactly?”
At that point she would be happy just to finally hold that child in her arms and no longer in her body. They might just be a little Nikolai, honestly, with how lively they were in there. Her poor little calm-loving and peaceful Viktor, maybe his quiet days were over for good. No, they’d have Nikolai go and exhaust the little imp, while Viktor and her would take naps in the sun.
“Am I like…my…” he trailed off, staring down at his feet.
Physically? Alina thought. You are such a little clone you would have probably sent Baghra into cardiac arrest if she had still been alive and I had been insane enough to let her within five feet of you.
“You have his best traits,” Nikolai answered for her. “Very focused. Proud. But you also have your mother’s best traits. Stubborn. Inquisitive. And you have my best traits, of course, mh? Brilliant, handsome, cunning, generous…”
“...Modest, humble…” Alina kept going for him as Viktor’s laughter rang out.
That’s hers , Nikolai thought. Or is it mine, actually? He tickled the boy’s sides playfully, to keep the brilliant sound going for a bit more. Ours.
Somewhere in the distance, the reception started to near its end, guests dwindling down and servants starting to clean up. Children left the Sankt Vladimir room, eager to tell their tired parents all about the puppet show they had seen.
Cosied between both his parents, sprawled without dignity on the grass, summoning tendril of shadows to desperately try to keep them away from each other so they wouldn’t kiss above his head, Viktor had already forgotten about it.