Work Text:
Wake up.
Alina was born with words on her skin. They were beautiful. They looked like they had been written with a calligraphy pen. They looked nothing like her own handwriting.
Some of her earliest memories were of her parents telling her not to tell others about the words, that they were dangerous and could be used against her. It wasn’t until she got to Keramzin that she learned what they meant – that she had a soul mate, someone destined for her.
When Alina was young, she didn’t think very much about the words on her skin. Soul mates were for grander people, for fairy tales. Alina was just… Alina. A little girl. A girl so wispy and pale that the servants called her a ghost was not one who would be remembered for her grand love story. It didn't make any sense for Alina to have a soul mate, so her words were only that, just words.
When Alina was fifteen, she started thinking about the words more. Maybe she didn't need to have a grand love story to be happy. Maybe she did get a soulmate, and her words belonged to someone safe, who would make her laugh but also keep her calm. Her words weren't anything remarkable, after all. She could have a soulmate who said something to her many others had before. She would just have to make sure to say something clever back, something distinctive so they would know it was her.
Before, her soul mate hadn't meant very much to her. She had Mal, why would she ever need anyone else? But then Mal started having lots of other people, loud friends who took up his time and girls whom she only ever briefly met or saw, but were always with her whenever she was with Mal, in the spaces between his words. It went from she and Mal against the world, to Mal being incredibly successful in the world and Alina standing in his shadow, less vibrant, less smart, less everything. It went from them against the world to Alina being pathetic for not having any other friends. Pathetic was not who she wanted to be.
So she started thinking about the words.
When Alina was sixteen, she started imagining the person to whom the words would belong. Would it be one of the other orphans at Keramzin? There were newcomers occasionally, and those were mostly the only new people she met. Would they be the ones to tell her to wake up?
She was relatively sure that her soulmate was not Ana, despite the amount of times the woman had yelled Alina’s words at her, and Mal's words didn't match up to hers. (Much as she had wished for them to.)
When Alina was seventeen, she realized that it didn't matter if she would ever find the person who said her words, or if they even existed, because she was going to grow old with her best friend. How could some stranger ever add up to the boy she had grown up with? Who could ever be to her what Mal was?
When Alina was eighteen, she met the person she was supposed to love more than the boy she had loved her whole life. She was not impressed.
*****
“Wake up.” She doesn’t recognize the voice, but she recognizes the words. “Bring her out of it.”
Her eyes come open enough to see a boy leaning over the bed, a boy who reminds her of the too-clever fox.
Is this him? Why is he here? Where is here?
She tries to speak, to get out some of the questions that fill her head and try to fill her mouth, but the fox has already ordered her put back under.
*****
She watches the giant and the girl walk away across the deck. The words that want to spill out of her mouth are “Do you have my words? Why here, of all places? Is my soul mate really a privateer working against his own country?”
Her fifteen year old self is yelling at her to say something, anything distinctive, if not clever, so that he would instantly know it was her, something that deserved to be inked onto his skin forever. She needs to say something better than wake up. But she is on the deck of a ship occupied by the darkling, and if he has used Mal against her, then he would have no qualms about using her soul mate against her. It would put them both in danger.
“Are they related?” She winces internally. Surely there’s a better option than that.
She looks Sturmhond directly in the eyes, as if to garner something from his reaction, but his mask of good cheer and swash-buckling gallantry stays consistent, hiding whatever his reactions might be from prying eyes.
“Twins. Tolya and Tamar,” he answers her, simply.
“You were in my cabin.”
She hopes to get a reaction out of prompting the memory of him being there, the first time he spoke to her, but the mask stays on.
“Many women dream of me.” He says it lightly, but she thinks there might be an undertone to the words, a sort of subtext. It also might just be wishful thinking.
He is really denying it, she thinks. He is really denying me.
Later, after he has finished escorting her to her cabin, she sits, with her head in her hands, and thinks. It’s not fair to be mad at him for not acknowledging her, really. They’re in a dangerous situation. And he might not even be her soul mate. It could just be another person who has told her to wake up in her life. But there was something in his voice, when he denied it. Or was there?
The thoughts go in a circle in her mind until she is asleep on her bunk, facing the wall.
*****
Puppy, Alina thinks, watching Sturmhond at his work from across the deck. She was so certain that his was the voice that had bid her wake up, but she had seen no acknowledgement from him that the interaction had even happened, let alone that her words to him were on his skin. Many people had told her to wake up in her life, people who did not have her handwriting scrawled on their skin. The privateer could be just another one of them. Sturmhond was so hard to read - would she even be able to tell if he had been shaken to the core? He was so self-contained that he could be shocked and not show anything on the surface, but she would swear that there had been something in his eyes during that hurried conversation, something urgent and furtive.
He turns to look at her, and his eyes are clear, free of deception.
The cycle of thoughts starts again.
*****
In the chaos after the whaler is boarded, when the sea whip is being skinned and Alina can’t stand to watch, Sturmhond comes to her.
“Don’t judge them too harshly.”
“It’s not them I’m judging,” she says. “You’re the captain.” She’s judging him for more than one thing, now.
His answer rolls over her, except for the part where he calls her fetching. She wishes she could believe he meant it. She’s tired of playing pretend.
“What am I doing here? Why did you help us?”
“Are you so sure I have?”
“Answer the question, Sturmhond,” Mal says as he joins them. “Why hunt the sea whip if you only meant to turn it over to Alina?””
“I wasn’t hunting the sea whip. I was hunting you.”
Alina wishes she could take that only in the context it was meant, and not for something else entirely. But when she looks up at face, instead of staring down at the ocean, his eyes are on her.
“That’s why you raised a mutiny against the Darkling? To get at me?’
“You can’t very well mutiny on your own ship.”
“Call it what you like,” she says, exasperated.
Sturmhond negotiates with them to let him take them to his mysterious new client (for whom he betrayed the darkling, more fool he) in exchange for his dubious promise that he will take them wherever they wish to go after meeting the client.
After Sturmhond sends Mal off to room with Tolya, they’re mostly alone on the deck, without anyone in reasonable earshot of a quiet conversation. She doesn’t know if she feels strong enough to mention the words. Perhaps she doesn’t know what to do if he says no. He’s lied for his own purposes before. There’s no guarantee he wouldn’t lie about this.
“Will you keep your word? Will you help us escape?” She was unsure she wanted to hear his answer. Surely he wouldn’t say no even if he wouldn’t keep to his promise.
“Are you so eager to leave your country behind once again?”
“I want the choice,” she answers. It seems a safe answer.
“You’ll have it.” He starts to walk away but then turns around back to her. “You are right about one thing, Summoner. The Darkling is a powerful enemy. You might want to think about making some powerful friends.”
*****
When Sturmhond took of his coat and became Nikolai Lantsov, Alina thought she might scream. It was bad enough that her potential soul mate was a privateer with a big mouth, did he have to be the second prince of the realm?
No wonder she punched him in the face, really. Who wouldn’t’ve?
*****
When Nikolai Lantsov, second son to the king, proposed to her in the middle of explaining how exactly a man could be both a privateer and a prince, she nearly punched him again. It makes her feel a little sick that he would suggest a loveless marriage for the two of them.
When he says “It would be a marriage in name only,” a little ice dagger pierces her heart.
She decides she’s never going to be the one to bring up this whole soul mate nonsense again. If it’s going to be anything between the two of them, it has to go both ways. Either he’s not her soul mate, and she needs to lick her wounds and move on, or he is, in which case he is suggesting a loveless political marriage. She’s not going to put herself through this for someone suggesting a political marriage with their soul mate.
She decides to bury the knowledge of the words down deep. She’s only acknowledged them at all for three years of her life. She can live without a soul mate.
*****
When Mal stands before her, begging her to kill him, her heart breaks for the future they could have had.
When she stabs her dagger into his chest and he stops breathing, it feels as if her heart has stopped as surely as his. She tells the twins to get his heart pumping, because she is desperate for him to live.
When she stabs the Darkling in the heart and he dies on the ground before her, she is left with a hollow space in her heart.
I am ruination.
When Nikolai falls to the ground, his black wings dissolved, she can do nothing but laugh, desperately, surrounded by corpses, her power gone.
Of course her errant soul mate survived.
*****
She wakes up in Kribirsk, with Tamar at her bedside.
“How is he?” she asks. There’s no need to clarify. All her other he’s are dead.
Zoya steps in at the sound of her voice.
She pauses before replying. “Haunted. There’s a difference in him, though I’m not sure anyone else would notice.”
“Maybe,” Zoya objects, “But I’ve never seen anything like it. If he gets any more charming, men and women may start lying down in the street for the privilege of being stepped on by the new Ravkan king.”
Tamar and Tolya take her to see Nikolai. When he starts at the sound of the door closing, he stands and bows. “Forgive me, I was lost in thought. Unfamiliar territory.”
A remnant of his time as an evil creation of the Darkling. The Nikolai of before , Sturmhond, would never have jumped at a door.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“But I do.” He let his smile fall. “Join me?” He gestured to chairs by a fire.
If there was going to be a time to clear the air between the two of them, it was going to be now. In this quiet room with a fire, with both of them broken.
She takes a deep breath. “Nikolai,” she says, as gently as a breeze, “is this your handwriting?” She pulls her collar to the left side to show Nikolai two small words inscribed over her heart. It is placed lower than she would normally show in public, but there’s no point to modesty. It’s long past the time for something as simple as maidenly virtue to come between them now.
“Ah,” he breathed, almost silently. “Well, yes.” He stands again and pulls his pants down slightly to show her three small words inscribed on his hip bone, scrawled in her messiest handwriting. A year ago she would have felt ashamed to see how starkly mess your the words looked, stamped on his skin. Today, she is simply too tired to care.
He sits again, and they sit together in silence for a while. The ghosts of the dead sit with them.
“So.”
She looks up at him, not realizing she had lowered her head to the ground under the weight of all that was and all that could have been.
“You still have the ring, yes?”
She laughs, softly, like a sigh.
“Yes, I do,” she replies.
“You could stay. I still need a queen,” he tells her, solemnly.
She takes out the ring and puts it on her ring finger. It fits perfectly.
“Well, soul mate,” she says. It is potentially the first time she has ever said the word out loud. “Looks like it’s time to plan a wedding.”
He looks directly into her eyes as he says, “Looks like it’s time to rebuild a country.” And she feels very confident, in this moment, that there is no duplicity in his gaze.
She supposes it will be all right, in the end. He won’t expect her to give up her ghosts. They’re relatively friendly ghosts, and he has plenty of his own.
It will be okay, at least for today. And maybe for the next day.