alina (starkov) oretsev (sankta) wrote in thedisplaced, @ 2017-09-30 17:17:00 |
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Entry tags: | alina starkov |
WHO: Alina & Mal
WHAT: Alina gives Mal a protection object, they fight
WHEN: Backdated to earlier in the month
WHERE: "Their" room on the Volkvolny
WARNINGS: None
Mal stared at the object in his hand. It was a rock, but it wasn’t like any rock he had ever seen. It was pitch black, and somehow capable of dynamic movement without shifting in his palm. He thought he could have believed that it was able to absorb both light and shadow, even if Alina had not already demonstrated that ability. But when he ran his thumb over the surface of it, it just felt like smooth rock. It had the weight of a rock its size, which was basically just a large pebble.
And it was attached to a leather cord, which made it obvious that it was meant for him to wear it. As magical objects went, it seemed relatively harmless. It wasn’t absorbing all the light around him, for example, and sending him into darkness. It also didn’t seem to be affecting his own energy at all, so far as he could tell. He felt like there ought to be more questions for him to ask, but it was obvious that Alina had placed her faith in this object - or maybe in its creator, or both - and was willing to entrust Mal’s safety with them. If it had been tested to her satisfaction, Mal was sure he wouldn’t be able to do any better. If there was something wrong with it, it was because of some reason that neither of them had thought of yet.
What was even more troublesome was that this rock was, he suspected, also intended to fix their relationship. Maybe the only thing standing between them, for Alina, had been the possibility that she might be dangerous to Mal, but the way she had pushed him away had hurt. Mal hadn’t fully examined the depths of his internal response to that rejection. He was a little afraid of what he would find.
He knew that some part of him balked at having to be protected from Alina. He had never expected anything about this relationship to be safe for him, at least not for a very long time. She was incredibly powerful, and his only power was the amplification of hers. One day she would kill him for that. Nikolai had said he would survive it, but nevertheless, he hadn’t imagined that it would be pleasant or even painless.
As her friend or her lover, he didn’t like this. But as her soldier - which was the only way he had still been able to relate to her recently - he did his best to obey her, regardless of his own feelings.
So he pulled himself from his thoughts, glanced one more time up at Alina, and then, mutely, lifted his hands and put the cord around his neck. He felt the rock come to rest just below his collarbones, below the collar of his shirt.
At least, he supposed, it could be hidden under his collar when needed, but he left it outside his shirt for the moment. He lowered his hands to his sides, and looked to see if Alina was satisfied with it.
--
Alina wanted to be satisfied with it, but she wasn’t sure how she felt. Suddenly plucked into the ranks of the Grisha and away from Mal had been hard enough. Being here was hard in a different way. They still had so many problems but were unable to fight through most of them. The Darkling wasn’t here. They were suspended away from the war. Nobody cared that she was a Grisha, much less a Sun Summoner.
Things should have been easier here, Alina thought, at least for them. Instead, they were on this awkward footing now, where she wanted to let herself love him with every bit of herself, but she wanted to make sure that he was safe first, and for some reason, that wasn’t acceptable to him. And Alina wasn’t entirely sure why.
She didn’t know what to say either, so she worried at her lower lip.
…
She was clearly dissatisfied, but Mal couldn’t tell if that was because of the way he’d reacted, or because she had concerns of her own. He really couldn’t tell if it was his own cynicism that made him think she was expecting him to run back into her arms the moment he had put this strange pendant around his neck, or if that was an accurate assumption. She had certainly expected this to solve some part of their problems, or hoped that things between them would improve, and it hadn’t really.
All he knew was that she had made him safe from her magic, and if she had not pushed him away he might have been able to appreciate the gesture. But she had pushed him away, and he had been burnt too many times to be the one to try to close that distance again.
One of them had to speak, however, and Mal was tired of the silence already, so he broke it. “What now?”
--
Alina’s eyes darted back to his when he asked the question. She didn’t know the answer now. At the heart of her, she just wanted simple happiness with him. But she didn’t know how to achieve that. Everything was just so complicated now, and she was tired of it. She was tired of the way it wore on them and how they didn’t know how to react to it together.
Even though she had never expected his love, she had understood him up until she had become a Grisha. And it was almost worse, because she was perpetually aware that it wasn’t really him that had changed. It was her.
“I don’t know, Mal,” Alina answered, tired. She tugged at her hair.
…
Mal was angry at her, he realized. He had been trying to suppress it, but it apparently would be suppressed no longer. And unfortunately for both of them, his anger only seemed to get worse when it was suppressed instead of acknowledged, and her reticence was really starting to get on his nerves.
He could not stop himself from saying bitterly, “Let me guess. You need more space.”
--
Alina’s anger flared in return. She had thought that her days of missing him when he was right in front of her were over, and she was frustrated that they were back. After everything they had been through together, how was it that they couldn’t manage to make them work? It made her angry, because she wanted them to work, and it made her sad, because she was scared that maybe they just couldn’t.
“Why do you have to make everything so difficult?” she snapped back at him.
…
“I’m the one making this difficult?” Mal asked in disbelief - and no small amount of annoyance. “How many times do you expect to be able to push me away, Alina? I thought we had left that behind us, at home.”
Maybe that was why it smarted so much. Because it wasn’t about what needed to be done to save the country, about some higher purpose that she as Sun Summoner needed to fulfill. It was personal instead of political this time.
--
“You act as though my fears are so foolish!” Alina shot back, her voice wavering more than she would have liked, because she couldn’t help it.
She loved him. Maybe more than anything, and she needed him to be safe above her need for him to be with her. And the problem was that he didn’t hold the same priorities as she did. He would sacrifice himself if need be, and so Alina couldn’t trust him to keep himself safe.
…
“It’s not your fears that are foolish,” Mal said, his tone cold and furious. “It’s the way you behave because of them. If you’d really wanted me out of your reach so badly so that you couldn’t hurt me, you would have let me leave, for my safety. Instead, you expected me to stay here to watch you pretend that I didn’t exist. Did that actually make me safer from you? No.”
He was not pleased that her voice was wavering, that she seemed to be on the verge of crying or having some kind of breakdown. It tugged at his heartstrings, but he couldn’t let himself give in too easily this time. As her soldier, he obeyed her orders, but that was not how their relationship had worked here. He had allowed himself to want more than that, to think that he actually had more, and now he didn’t want to accept any less.
Another part of him thought that he was delusional for having expected so much in the first place. He had never had enough to offer her - no magic, no kingdom. But he really had thought that in this place neither of those things would matter. And he had even let himself believe, because Nikolai had told them so, that it wouldn’t matter in their future at home, either.
“You need to decide, once and for all,” he finished, “Am I your soldier, or your lover? You can either have my obedience or my heart, but not both.”
--
Everything inside of Alina recoiled at his tone and his answer. That he was telling her that her actions were foolish. It hurt and it stung, because she did love him, and he was all that she had here, and she was, once again, in very real danger of losing him.
And because, at least partially, she knew that he was right. The only way to entirely keep him safe from her was to send him away, and she couldn’t bear that. She just couldn’t. She was too selfish, and she knew that. So, she was trying to keep him as safe as he could be while he was near. Why couldn’t he see that?
Fury rose in equal measure inside of her as he mentioned the choice between soldier and lover, because that was a line that he had drawn that didn’t exist for her.
“I never asked for you to be my soldier, Mal,” she snapped. “That was your way of staying near but pretending I didn’t exist as anything but a Sun Summoner!”
...