Chapter Text
The Druskëlle camp is easy to raid. They are unprepared for the attack, so late at night, on such a cold winter evening. Aleksander kills a dozen of the men himself, but they are little more than scared boys with instincts dulled by panic, and he is vaguely disappointed. It is rare, these days, that the Darkling goes on such missions— he trusts the men he delegates command to, has two armies to do his dirty work, and has plenty to keep him busy and almost content in Os Alta. And he is so very old, and he tires of spending his days on horseback and his nights in a tent. But old habits die hard, and every so often he finds himself itching for the fight, the blood, the satisfaction of punishment and justice, and that itch had led him to this miserable corner of Fjerda.
The camp isn’t significantly large; a few dozen tents and a single building of weathered wood planks and a tin roof. His soldiers move systematically through the smoke, searching tents, burning what’s left of this miserable place, but Aleksander ignores them. The Druskëlle are dead, and his itch for violence has nearly been scratched. Instead, he goes to the building. A soldier meets him at the door. “There were four Grisha being kept alive, moi soverenyi,” says the man. “The rest long dead.” Aleksander nods, brushing past him into the dim corridor. The place reeks of blood, and filth, and the sickly sweet scent of animal fear. A prison, a torture chamber for his kind. Aleksander’s fury has dulled over these long, long centuries— now he only wishes there were more monsters to kill.
Something tingles at the edge of his senses, though, and he follows the urge deeper into the building, past soldiers doing their final sweep of the place before they light it aflame like the rest of the camp. Aleksander pauses at the end of the corridor, stands very still and listens. There is a faint, muffled, scraping sound, metal against stone. A few tendrils of shadow creep from the corners of the hall, pressing against the walls and moving along baseboards until one finds a little gap between wall and floor— a door, perhaps, hidden from sight. Aleksander leans his shoulder against it and shoves, and with a rather dreadful squeal, the wall gives way.
The room before him is small, more closet than cell, crammed with crates and barrels and unused chairs. Pressed against the back wall is a rusty wire cage, only big enough for a few chickens, or maybe a small goat. Inside the cage is a child.
A tiny little thing, barely more than a babe. The child is covered in dirt and grime and likely bruises and blood, skinny legs bare to the cold, pale cropped hair gone tangled and wild. She wears a ratty little nightgown that seems to have once been pink. The cage is small enough that she can barely sit up. She snarls when she sees him, nose scrunched and teeth bared like she really is an animal to be caged. Aleksander closes the door behind him.
“Hello, small one.” He says, voice quiet and level. He has never found a child so young in a place such as this. She can’t be more than three or four, far too young to have shown any Grisha abilities. Stranger still, that she has been kept alive, if deemed an enemy by the Druskëlle. He takes a step forward. The child lets out a little cry— anger, not fear, and slams her tiny palms against the wire of the cage, rattling the whole thing against the floor. “Easy,” he murmurs. “I am not here to hurt you.” She isn’t comforted. Obviously.
Aleksander steps closer, ignores her angry noises and crouches before the cage, reaching out to turn the metal tag nailed to the wire towards him. When his fingers touch the tag, a jolt goes through him, like a spark of static. The child yelps like she felt it, too.
“Ah,” says Aleksander. “You’re a powerful little thing, are you?” His voice is even, quiet, but there is a feeling rising in his chest that he does not wish to name. The tag reads BITES in Fjerdan, and Aleksander hums. “You look like you do,” he tells her. “Let’s get you out of there.”
The child bunches herself against the farthest wall of the cage, huffing heavy panicked breaths through her nose, her eyes wild and dark and shining. The latch is easy to dislodge, but she will not come towards him, clever thing she is. Aleksander reaches in and grabs a fistful of her little shift, the fabric thin and threadbare. With a little howl, the girl leans forward and bites down on his finger as hard as she can, gapped baby teeth sharp as a puppy’s. He hisses, but it’s almost a laugh.
“Of course,” he says, and hauls her out anyway. She panics in his arms, flails and kicks and scratches, biting at nothing, making a sound somewhere between a whine and a scream. Aleksander hears his men outside the door, calling out his titles, but he is focused only on the tiny monster in his lap. Every time their skin touches it feels like something snaps between them, like something is humming inside of her, and he has to know what it is. He holds her still with one arm banded across her middle, drives the What if-? thoughts out of his mind. He refuses to hope for the thing that’s absence he had forced himself to accept so long ago, after endless, endless disappointment. But he has to know. He slides the claw ring down his finger, grasps her forearm in his other hand. “Be still,” Aleksander murmurs, knowing she won’t. She wails when the claw punctures her pale skin, but the sound is lost in the glory of the sunlight that blooms from her.
It is blinding, hot and bright and enormous, like they are in the center of a star instead of a closet. The men in the hallway shout in confusion and terror as the light seeps under the door, between hastily nailed boards, like it wants to escape as much as she does.
Aleksander does not get surprised anymore. There is not a word he hasn’t heard, a betrayal he hasn’t foreseen, a face that he hasn’t seen in an ancestor lifetimes ago. He is never lost for words, never lost on what to do. But in this moment, his mind ceases to work, absolutely refuses to put an order to the thoughts that come all at once. The only one he can pin down is the title echoing endlessly in his head— sun summoner, sun summoner, sun summoner. And then, another word— Mine.
The child is crying, howling and thrashing, afraid of the light, or the pain, or Aleksander. He wraps his arms around her more fully as the light fades, and hushes her, presses a kiss to her hair, because he cannot form words. His soldiers pound on the door, calling out his name, and he thinks fleetingly that he should kill them, just step out and put an end to the noise. Their lives are so irrelevant, so minuscule when compared to this being of light in his arms. But the child is weeping, and this is a far more pressing concern than their noise. He rocks her.
“Shhh. You’re alright,” he murmurs, soft and slow to temper the pounding of his heart, of hers. “I’ve got you now, my girl. My little saint,” she quiets by just a fraction, exhausted by all her valiant fighting. He kisses her head again. “You are safe now. We’ve found each other. Now everything is right.”
Aleksander tucks the child against his chest, wrapping his kefta about her tiny body, shivering from anger and terror, and he stands. He shoulders through the door, soldiers startled and stumbling back as he breezes past them.
“I’m keeping this one,” he tells them, simply. “Have a healer in my tent when we return to camp.”
Aleksander carries her out of the building and leaves them dumbfounded. The child goes still when the cold night air hits them, and her weight is so insignificant that for a terrible second he wonders if she even exists at all. Perhaps he has finally gone mad, and she’s just some phantom he’s dreamed up to keep him company. But he looks down and she is still there, blinking into the darkness at the smoke rising from the ruins of her prison. How long had it been since she had seen the outside world? The thought makes him sick for only a moment. She is his now, and he will fix her, will do anything to repair what was broken inside her, because the world has finally shown him a single mercy after all his centuries of pain.
“We will fix everything,” he whispers into her hair. “You and I will make everything right.”