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Chapter Text

Nikolai meets the sun summoner in Ketterdam, the first time.

He's been at university over there for a few years, improving his Kerch and himself; cramming his skull with military history and political science which will make him useful to his brother when he takes the throne. Drinking and gambling and sleeping around with the best of the Lantsovs in his downtime, in a attempt to take his mind off the gaping hole in his life where Dominik ought to be, and the faint tremors which sometimes seize his fingers when he thinks too much about Halmhend.

It's during a card game in one of the less respectable establishments on the docks that he hears a commotion outside, and emerges to see the Stadwatch trying to apprehend a young man and woman who are shouting in Ravkan. One of them lifts a baton at the man, and the woman's hands light up as intensely as her expression, as she warns them all to step back. The illustrations of the saints in the Istoryii Sankt'ya look so stoic and serene, but this woman looks like Nikolai thinks they must have in real life. Frantic, fierce, and powerful.

He'd heard the news from home, third-hand, that a sun summoner had been found at last. But he'd assumed that they meant a child: someone he'd next hear about in a decade or so when she'd been trained up enough to tackle the Fold. Has the Darkling been hiding her, all this time? From the scrappy way she's glaring at the guard, he'd guess not. He steps in before this can escalate to violence, speaking to the captain in Kerch.

"I'll take these two off your hands."

The Captain's head snaps round. "Who the fuck are you?"

One of the underlings elbows his superior in the side and mutters 'That's the second prince of Ravka, he's at university here.'

"Your colleague is right," Nikolai says. "I can list my titles if you really need me to, but we'd be here all day. This woman is clearly Ravkan, and Grisha. Ravkan Grisha belong to the Ravkan crown, and as such, I'm taking custody of her to ensure she's returned to us safely."

The captain visibly weighs which course of action will result in less hassle for him personally, and then calls his men away. The sun summoner watches him suspiciously as he approaches, arms holding her elbows in tight to her chest.

"What did you say to them? What do you want?"

"I just stopped you being sold into servitude," he tells her. "A little gratitude wouldn't go amiss."

It's probably one of the more deserved punches she gives him, over the years.

It's fair to say that their first confrontation with the Darkling, in the throne room of the Grand Palace he's claimed as his own, goes poorly. The Darkling focuses in on Alina like a cat with a bird, toying with her at first. When she calls light to her palms to flash at him, his aloof tolerance dissipates. The thunderclap of his palms connecting pulls shadows from every corner of the room, scything through every ally Alina brought with her like so much wheat. Nikolai topples to his knees, and then to the floor, holding at the gash in his side with dizzying disbelief. Blood pours slippery and warm over his fingers. The pain hasn't even caught up yet.

For a second Alina stands alone, stunned into stillness amid the corpses and soon-to-be-corpses strewn across the rest of room. Then a pained moan at her feet sends her dropping to her knees, so rapidly the floor must have cracked her kneecaps. She scrabbles desperately, ineffectually, at Mal's blood soaked torso, weeping.

"I'll let you keep his body to bury," the Darkling says, glancing down at her dispassionately. "I am, after all, merciful. The prince, on the other hand, I might keep as an example to anyone who might be tempted to want the Lantsovs back."

Nikolai can't really find the idea threatening. He's so cold he's shaking, the marble smooth and comforting under his cheek. He closes his eyes, and regrets it when the room spins around him, but can't open them again. Even Halmhend hadn't been enough to shift Nikolai's belief in his own immortality—the conviction common to all young men that death is something which only happens to other people—but it's deserted him now, along with the contents of his veins and the colors of his vision. The Darkling will find it hard to make much of an example from a corpse.

There's a click of approaching boots. "Did you really think I was done with you, Sobachka?" The Darkling laughs softly, seemingly plucking his thoughts straight from his mind. "You don't get to die yet, I'm afraid. I have much better plans for you."

He lifts one leaden eyelid to see shadows race towards him with the merest flick of the Darkling's fingers. He gags as it forces its way down his throat, curling further into himself, weakly trying to cough up the cold-smoke-slither feeling. Black is creeping up his arms, burning like acid in his veins. Some dark creature stirs within him. When it reaches his chin he bares his teeth, letting out a cry that's more of a hiss.

Behind the Darkling, Alina lets out a wail as Mal exhales his last. Then she's glowing, head thrown back as light explodes from her, taking out all the windows in a dramatic spray of glass. Cracks race through the walls, the ceiling, the floor, outward from the pillar of light that used to be the sun summoner. Nikolai reaches toward her, uselessly. And then the ceiling comes down.

He blinks away the after-images. Slowly, his eyes register that there's light in his peripheral vision, and only in front of his face is there impenetrable blackness. He's... at the edge of the Fold? One outstretched hand rests just inside it, only the tips of his fingers immersed in the cold, swirling shadow. He pulls it out, looking at it curiously. His fingers remain black-dipped, as though the Fold is made of ink, not shadow.

That's strange, isn't it? It never did that before. Because he did this before, didn't he? Just before his first crossing, on his way to Ketterdam for university. Three years ago. The throne room lurches to the front of his memory. Choking on shadows. Alina burning up like the sun. The Darkling. He pats frantically down at his side, and finds only dry, unmarred cloth. He tugs his shirt urgently out of his trousers anyway, running his black-tipped fingers over his torso until he's convinced himself that he's whole and safe.

What happened? How is he here?

He looks around at Kribirsk, which looks exactly as it did in his every memory of the place. Dawn light is creeping between the tents and huts of the encampment. Beyond that, he can see the roof line of the town. A little distance away the skiff he should soon be boarding bustles with Grisha, loading up. He remembers those faces. The pretty young Squaller out on her first test run. The lanky Inferni she'd batted aside with a gust of wind when he hit on her.

He's been sent back. He can warn everyone. Save everyone. He commandeers a horse before reality can realize its mistake, and heads back to Os Alta as though the volcra are at his heels.

His parents are remarkably unperturbed by the news that their most senior Grisha officer is conspiring to overthrow them. Nikolai is waved aside like some kind of child, or like great-aunt Evgeniya on a drunken ramble after her third bottle of wine. He's told in no uncertain terms to stop indulging his imagination and find some occupation to put himself to, if he's decided not to bother with university. The Darkling has decades of spotless service, and they won't hear baseless speculation. But there will be proof, somewhere. He'll uncover it. He has years yet until the sun summoner will emerge, after all.

He doesn't have years. He's rudely awoken and pulled out of bed by charcoal-clad oprichniki in the middle of the night just a few days later; shoved and pushed through the corridors barefoot to the throne room where his mother and father and brother already wait, kneeling on the hard floor and shivering. From fear, or from cold, he couldn't say. They're sobbing and pleading and raging respectively as he enters, until the stone-faced Grisha standing guard by them lift their hands ready to gesture. All three lapse into quivering, wretched silence.

And in the middle of the room with hands tucked behind his back is the Darkling, with the white-garbed and red-haired figure of the Queen's Tailor at his side. Ah, that will be how he found out that he'd been found out, then. He looks around at Nikolai's entrance, and meets his gaze evenly.

"The puppy prince. I have to say I'm surprised, that you're the one who worked it out. I underestimated you, it seems."

"Not as much as I misjudged you." That's almost the worst part of this. He'd been so damn impressed by the commander of the Second Army, as a teen. By his calm and decisive style of command, his extensive experience, his effortless mastery of his power. "I won't be making that mistake again."

An almost amused smile stretches across the Darkling's face. "No, indeed you won't."

Dying still has little to recommend it. But Heartrender induced cardiac arrest is at least less painful than being killed by falling masonry.

When he blinks back to awareness at the Fold's edge this time, he takes the time to center himself, before he breaks his teeth from clenching them too hard. Then he calmly heads to the gigantic central tent of the Grisha encampment, and politely requests an audience with the Darkling. He's led through to what seems to be the Ops room, where the Darkling is listening intently to a report from one of the skiff captains with his arms crossed over his chest. He glances over when Nikolai is announced, a look of absolute disdain on his face at the interruption. It's a look intended to convey just how little the great shadow summoner cares for whatever petty concerns you've brought before him.

Unfortunately for the Darkling, Nikolai grew up with Vasily, and is thus entirely immune to this effect. Even more unfortunately for the Darkling, Nikolai can—just barely—draw and shoot faster than the assorted guards can stop him. The gun tumbles from his hand a second later as every Heartrender in the tent seizes his heart at the same time, but the look of almost comical surprise on the Darkling's face as Nikolai shot him point blank in it was more than worth dying again to see.

When he returns to Os Alta this time, he has Genya brought before his parents, and drags a confession out of her about the Darkling's plans. All the saints be thanked, his parents listen this time. When the Darkling returns to Os Alta he's arrested; set upon with such excess of force that even he is subdued. The sentence is carried out right then and there. No one, it seems, is confident in their ability to hold the shadow summoner in a cell.

Genya's eyes burn so hot with anger as she stands on the gallows that it's a wonder his father, whom she's aiming it at, hasn't spontaneously set ablaze. The Darkling, though, looks at him, as if he knows full well who it was that brought about his downfall, and there is only cold hatred in his eyes. No fear, no bargaining. His stance is proud and defiant right to the end; a sharp contrast to the royal family's sniveling last go around. He speaks only once, as the rope is looped over his head, still holding Nikolai's gaze.

"Everything I did, I did for Ravka."

Nikolai, perhaps stupidly, expects that to be the end of it. It isn't. The Tsar, encouraged by Vasily, has signed a decree declaring the Second Army as traitors alongside their commander. The First Army is sent immediately to storm the Little Palace, and they leave nothing but a smoking ruin behind. There is nothing Nikolai can do to stop it. Afterward, he picks his way numbly through the wreckage, aghast at the slaughter. Many of the corpses are children, their bodies huddled together behind adult ones who died trying to protect them. He stands in the dust, at a complete loss, blind to everything but the smears of blood over every surface around him; deaf to everything but the ringing in his ears.

A crunch of rubble underfoot draws his attention just in time to register the approach of a shabby-looking woman in what might once have been a kefta, before the blades of shadow she summons in the air slice through him like cheese wire.

Ash still coats his tongue when he stands once again before the Fold. A shiver courses though him, and he sinks to the sandy ground until the urge to scream finally subsides. Right. Not that then. He's never trying that again. He needs to think more strategically about this. Confronting the Darkling directly doesn't seem to be working, but maybe he can get Alina lined up to take down the Fold and take her there without the Darkling losing his fucking mind about it. He heads back home at a more sedate pace this time, casually dismissing the idea of university after all. Then he pens a letter to Keramzin, and settles in to wait for the sun summoner's arrival.

If anything, spending more time in Os Alta only makes Nikolai wonder how the Darkling made it as long as he did before cracking and murdering everyone. He grits his teeth through council sessions in which his father is physically present but mentally entirely checked out, and fights hard to keep his composure whenever the Darkling is in the capital to attend too. How can this man who makes measured, sensible suggestions (which his father blithely ignores or agrees with seemingly at random) be the same man who made such an abrupt break from rationality and slaughtered their own people? Nikolai watches him as closely as he dares without drawing attention, and yet he can't resolve that question.

He attends salons and hunting trips and avoids Genya. And finally, Alina arrives, wide-eyed and overwhelmed, painfully young and painfully skinny. Nikolai instantly sets himself to becoming her friend, and she turns into the attention and warmth—or, to be honest, probably mostly the buffer he offers between her and the rest of court—like a flower to the sun.

"What do you think of the Darkling?" he asks her, as casually as he can, on a crisp autumnal day. There are guards following at a discreet distance, but for all intents and purposes they're alone.

"I haven't really seen him much. But he's..." she trails off, burying her nose further into her scarf, the hint of a blush pinking her cheeks. "Intense?"

The fact that Alina isn't old enough yet to hold the Darkling's interest in any way beyond her role as the sun summoner doesn't particularly reassure him. Nikolai remembers being fifteen. Even the most hopeless crush can still blind you to someone's flaws.

"I know he's... alluring," is what he eventually says. And what he intends to say next is 'but you should be careful around him. There are sides of him you've never seen. Sides I hope you never see.' But the delighted noise of amusement Alina makes at his side thoroughly interrupts him.

"Alluring?" she snickers. "You mean you think he's hot?"

Fifteen-year-old Nikolai had, regrettably, agreed wholeheartedly with that assessment. Nineteen (twenty-four?) year old Nikolai still agrees with it, if he's going to be totally honest, but he's also capable of thinking with his actual head rather than his dick. Plus, the murder attempts (successes?) more than balance out any appeal of good cheekbones.

"You know he's really old, right?" Alina continues. "Do you want to kiss him? Do you think he does kiss people?"

The answer to that question is a resounding 'yes', according to Alina herself, but he's certainly not going to tell her that. "I wouldn't want to speculate. Want to head down to the summoners' pavilion to watch the practice sessions?" It's a blatant piece of deflection, which she nevertheless allows.

She pretends to think it over for a second, then nods. "Zoya always gets so mad when I watch her, she says I'm distracting. Let's do it."

"You're still just as bad as ever, I see," Vasily says, apropos of nothing over a game of cards a few days later. He's been losing steadily, so it's probably a distraction tactic.

Nikolai, who was halfway through lifting his brandy glass to his mouth, takes a deliberate swallow, replacing the glass with a faint click. And then, purely to irritate Vasily, pulls out his handkerchief to dab at his mouth before replying. "How so?"

Vasily smirks at him. "You always did like peasants. But no matter how well you scrub the dirt off this one, no matter how much you train her up to know what knife to use and when to curtsy and how to address her betters, she'll always be Grisha."

"Your powers of observation are as keen as ever." Nikolai picks up another card to slot into his hand, considers its value, and discards one he already held. "That is why we're keeping her around, you know. It will take a Grisha to deal with the Fold. A well-trained sun summoner, in fact."

"That's why father lets her in the palace. It's not why you're trailing her around like a puppy, trying to cram etiquette and politics into her little peasant head. A glorified flash grenade doesn't need to know how to rule. A queen does."

Alarm bells ring in his head as he meets Vasily's gaze, pulling up a glib response to deflect from the line of reasoning his brother is meandering down. But when he opens his mouth nothing comes out; his throat is swelling up, the words trapped within. He can't breathe. He can't breathe. His eyes widen as the realization hits. His chest spasms with the effort of trying to draw air. He's dizzy already, black encroaching on the edges of his vision.

"Only a king can make a queen, Sobachka," Vasily says, leaning in over the table. "And you will never be king."

He heaves a breath as his vision clears to show the familiar sight of the Fold looming over him. Then he sinks to his knees to gulp down lungfuls of fresh clean air, hands pressed against his thighs.

Fucking Vasya. He really has been showing his true colors all over the place lately, as though he's on a mission to beat the Darkling for the 'worst person in Ravka' award. But beneath Nikolai's anger towards his brother there burns an undercurrent of shame. Vasily already tried and failed once with this exact gambit, when he was twelve. He really ought to have known better than to let his guard down.

Poisoning aside though, Vasily may have managed to stumble across a good idea for once in his life. Nikolai had only been thinking of the need to eventually replace the Darkling as head of the Second Army, when he'd been trying to give Alina the crash course in life at court. She could make a good queen though, eventually. If she banishes the Fold she'll be a living saint, already a figurehead. Bringing her and the Lantsov line together would probably do both the crown and the Grisha some good.

He tucks the idea away for later consideration, but doesn't try to summon her to Os Alta ahead of schedule again. Better for her to stay beneath notice in an orphanage, than get pulled into the viper's nest that produced people like his father and brother.

The other part of Vasily's ranting, he's absolutely dead wrong on. Nikolai is going to be king, even if it kills him.

Which it does, repeatedly.

Chapter Text

Nikolai is either twenty-six or a hundred and thirty-three, depending on how you measure. He's been eighteen so often he's lost count. He wonders, sometimes, if this is how the Darkling feels.

He's a privateer as well as a prince, now (under an assumed identity, after that first regrettable kidnapping incident). He's spent his waiting years on skill after skill: added an assortment of degrees in economics and engineering to the military history and politics; apprenticed with shipwrights and gunsmiths until he can best even the best at their own craft; spent years of cumulative time picking David's brains on science both small and large, on explosives and merzost, trying to understand what had happened to him and if it can be stopped, to no avail. He's learned Shu and Fjerdan, though he keeps putting off learning Zemeni. The complete lack of consequences was fun for a while—he's used loops to pick up useless skills and unsuitable people—but the novelty has long since worn off. In his darker moments, he wonders whether he died that first time after all, and reliving all the ways he can almost save his country is his own personal hell.

Because while he's beaten gravity, and beaten the odds more times than he can count, he's yet to beat fate. The shadow the Darkling forced into him re-emerges eventually in every loop, and twists him into monstrous forms that he has to spend the remainder of his days subduing with tonics and chains. More than once he comes back to himself just as he dies, broken and battered against the belltower of Balakirev, or shot down by farmers or First Army soldiers because the demon attacked an encampment or farm. More than once he resets a loop himself after he wakes with the metallic tang of blood in his mouth and the mangled remains of someone he knows before him. He refuses to let that be the reality which sticks. More often, he dies two or three or five years into the task of trying to right this sinking ship of a country. So close, and yet so far.

For every assassination attempt his guards foil—every averted lab accident that Nadia spots in time, every crisis headed off before it can begin—there's a sniper's bullet, or a blow to the head, or some noble with a grudge. He's been exploded by otkazat'sya insurgents and by David's tinkering; drowned with his own lung fluids by Grisha assassins, and by crashing a flyer prototype into the palace lake. He's been crushed under his spooked horse during a riot, and once, to his eternal embarrassment, Oretsev had accidentally killed him with an unlucky punch. Responding with a flippant joke to the heated (and accurate) accusations that he was sleeping with Alina was perhaps, in retrospect, not the wisest course of action when the other man was already drunk and belligerent.

Death in general has stopped fazing him. Getting stabbed by a cultist of the starless saint with a Grisha steel dagger even makes him laugh a little, at the parallels. The cultist clearly wasn't expecting that, looking young and shaken by their actions. He wants to pat them on the head and tell them that it's alright. That their sly and savage saint would be proud. But he's already lost too much blood to coordinate his tongue or limbs. He dies awkwardly grabbing their hand, with an incongruous smile on his face.

All of them exist now in a superposition of alive and dead, like that poor hypothetical cat he'd read about at university. Zoya too, who he's dragged into this macabre merry-go-round, and David, and Tamar, and Tolya, and so many others. Sometimes the Darkling is the only one who dies; sometimes he takes them all with him. Sometimes it's just Alina, and the Darkling is taken to prison without complaint, looking broken and empty. Sometimes the two of them go out together in a furious blaze. Mal lives or dies, or frequently dies and then gets brought back, and spends every moment from then on looking faintly perturbed. And Alina... It feels like he should start each loop with the outline of the Lantsov emerald still imprinted into his palm, as her sad smile and head shake are imprinted into his memory.

He works out eventually what words get her to accept, but even when she stays, she exists in a perpetual state of departure in all senses but the literal. He's never believed in 'impossible', but trying to keep her at his side is like trying to hold the sunset in his black-stained fingers. Nothing he tries makes any difference. He gives her social projects, control not of one orphanage but of the reform of all of them. He gives her the second army, leaving Zoya quietly seething. He lifts her up and shares ruling with her in equal measure, one united front to lead a united Ravka. No matter what he tries, she's miserable. She wilts like a hothouse flower in the stifling atmosphere of court.

In desperation he tries giving her Mal: appoints Oretsev as captain of the queen's guard, and turns his face away from their obvious love for one another. Subsists on the scraps she throws him, closes his ears to the humiliation on the tongues of every gossip in the palace and goes to bed alone. Mal turns out to be the issue, that time: he chafes under the secrecy and persuades Alina to leave anyway. The scandal of her divorcing him so soon, and to marry a peasant at that, destabilizes what was already a difficult loop. His rule never really recovers. The next loop, Nikolai 'discovers' the truth of the Firebird early, and pulls out every trick, every ounce of persuasion he has, to coax an unwilling Alina into doing what is necessary. He holds her as she cries, and tells her she did the right thing, that Mal died a hero, that he would have wanted her to save Ravka and herself. When everything is over she accepts his proposal numbly. They call her the ghost queen, that loop, for the way she haunts the palace, pale and passive. Nikolai retreats to the solitude of his own bed because he can't bear to be in her presence knowing that he's the cause of her grief. She never once blames him. She should.

When he dies that time it's almost a relief. He doesn't even fight the encroaching dark, just falls into it like the embrace of an old friend. He never goes through with marrying Alina again.

If anyone had asked him, before this all happened, what the worst part would be, he'd probably have said having to experience and remember any number of nasty ways to die. In reality, it doesn't take him many loops to realize that the worst part is that no one else remembers. He knows far more about everyone else than they know about him. The majority of his time is spent yearning for the comfort of friends who view him as an acquaintance at best, and every single loop he has to rebuild those relationships from scratch, step by achingly small step.

The vitriol the Darkling aims at him takes on a strangely comforting quality. It might be largely undeserved, but it's at least consistent. Almost intimate. That, as much as the suffocating ennui of repetition, is probably behind his decision to indulge fifteen-year-old Nikolai's idle daydreaming one loop. When they're well underway on the Bone Road, he knocks on the door to the cabin he relinquished with a bottle of rum tucked under his arm and two sturdy tumblers in his hand.

"Captain," comes the uninviting drawl when the Darkling answers the door. "I sincerely hope that your presence here means you've located the sea whip."

"Alas, no. But take it from an old sailor: the nights at sea pass easier with company and drink. You look like a man who could use a friendly ear."

He thinks the Darkling will refuse, but he lets Nikolai in. "So, ears other than yours, then," he says once he's shut the door behind them. There's no real challenge in his voice, just an acknowledgement that anything told to a privateer may be traded away for money or favors. He shoves the papers and the copy of the Istoryii Sankt'ya, which Nikolai probably knows by heart by now, into the drawer of the desk.

"Fair point," Nikolai concedes, snagging the chair in front of the desk and putting his boots up on the cleared surface, enjoying the mildly irritated look that triggers. "My ears are better described as dignified than friendly."

"And you look far too young to be describing yourself as an 'old sailor'," the Darkling observes as he pours them both a glass. "Dignified ears or no."

He lifts one shoulder in a shrug. "I'm older than I look, you know how it is."

"Your Tailor isn't making you look younger for some unknown reason, then." That does surprise him, and the Darkling smirks faintly at having managed to catch him off guard. He waves away whatever expression has made itself at home on Nikolai's face. "Relax. I don't care who you really are, or whatever port authority or jilted lover or personal enemy you're concealing yourself from."

Nikolai smiles into his rum, amused beyond measure. "Well, good then. I like a man who knows how not to ask questions."

"Do you count yourself among their number?"

"Not even remotely. I don't ask probing questions of clients as a matter of policy, but I'm incorrigibly curious otherwise. It's my singular flaw. If you don't count the mercenary attitude, which I don't."

"You're incorrigibly something," the Darkling mutters, but he's about as relaxed as Nikolai has ever seen him.

Emboldened, Nikolai rises from his chair and goes to perch himself on the edge of the desk. The Darkling watches but doesn't stop him. He leans in, gloved hand reaching out to deliver the merest brush of fingertips against the Darkling's jaw. Testing. "That wasn't a no," he points out.

"You have yet to ask a question," the Darkling retorts, a challenging light in his eyes. "I can hardly refuse something you haven't proposed."

He lets out a bark of laughter. "You have me there. A proposal, then. Would you like to pass the time with something more diverting than conversation? We could make use of the bunk I so magnanimously gave up to you."

The Darkling takes a sip of his rum, before setting the glass aside and standing up into the space between Nikolai's legs. As he leans in, he stops to murmur right into Nikolai's ear. "You ought to have led with the offer to stop talking."

"I'll bear that in mind for next time," Nikolai laughs, as he uses one leg to hook the Darkling closer in.

It gets him a huff of amusement, as fingers begin to work at the buckles of his bandolier. "You overestimate your charm, Captain. There will be no next time."

Nikolai presses his lips together to keep his mirth contained. He could spend a dozen loops repeating this moment, if he wanted, and the Darkling would be none the wiser. Not that he's going to. He submits to the attention, and restricts himself to one last flippant remark.

"That sounds like a challenge to me."

He's almost done redressing—the Darkling doesn't strike him as a man prone to post-coital cuddling and he doesn't want to push the limits of that patience—when there's a hammering on the door, and Tolya's voice coming through telling him that they've found the Sea Whip. The Darkling disappears through the cabin door in a flurry of boot steps and black fabric, and Nikolai hurries after him, pulling his frock coat on as he goes.

On the deck, Alina stands before the form of the sea whip, lightly aglow, hand stretched out towards its enormous snout. It sways, sinuous, for one stretched-out moment. And then it lunges. Sea serpents, it seems, are less interested than stags in quaint ideas like mercy. Nikolai has seen a lot of death by now, of all degrees of gruesomeness and from both sides of the thing, but the crunch of bone and smear of blood across the whaler's deck has even him wincing. At his side, the Darkling is frozen, shocked into immobility.

Well, fuck. There's no point continuing with no way to get rid of the Fold. It feels almost like the Making is taunting him for daring to indulge in a little fun, though he's also relieved that he isn't going to have to live through the Darkling realizing he's been hoodwinked on this particular loop. He sighs and pulls his pistol from his re-buckled holster. Knowing that it won't kill him doesn't stop the yawning chasm in his gut.

"I guess there won't be a next time after all," he quips, rather more weakly than he'd hoped. It draws the Darkling's wild-eyed, bewildered attention from the gruesome scene in front of them, and it's not quite the same thing as comfort but it's just enough to make him not feel alone, as he presses the barrel to the roof of his mouth and pulls the trigger.

Every loop after that where he takes the Darkling's contract, he spends the majority of his time at the helm, keeping watch. Just in case Alina gets it into her head to try communing with the sea whip rather than killing it again. It takes a few loops for the thought to occur to him, that she might have just been taking the same route out that he did.

He marries Zoya just once. He cleaves close to the general shape of the more successful loops, that time. Alina leaves, as usual. But Zoya stays, and rolls her sleeves up, and gets to work. She's a shining, sharp-edged thing, as beautiful and uncompromising as diamond, bracing as winds off a stormy sea. He falls for her with the same inevitably as he'd fallen to earth, when his demon transformation had been undone by the Darkling's death. She'd caught him then, and she hasn't stopped catching him since. Her vibrant presence keeps him from sinking into the despair that stalks a half-step behind him everywhere he goes now.

He loves her fiercely; dearly; entirely. He's spent endless loops chasing a faint facsimile of this feeling with Alina, he realizes now, and he could kick himself. He kicks himself, too, for the amount of time they spend dancing around one another, kept at arm's length by irrelevant, bullshit reasons. When they finally do collide, it's glorious. The five years they spend together are plagued by threats both internal and external, but they're the happiest he's experienced in any of his lives. He finds himself wishing, desperately, for this to be the one. For an end to the endless repetitions. If he dies for good this time, only let him die in her arms, and he will be content.

He gets half his wish. He does die in her arms, as she tries to shield him from an explosion. He wakes up in Kribirsk just like every other time, and curls into a ball right there on the sand to weep until he runs out of energy to even sob. If he didn't know full well that it would just land him right back here, he'd be tempted to walk into the Fold and let the volcra have at him.

There's a noise of footsteps nearby, and when he looks up, vision tear-blurred, there's a figure in Etherealki blue looking down at him. Zoya, freshly fifteen and precocious, cocks her head at him with no recognition in her eyes.

"Moi tsarevich? The skiff captain wants to know if you're getting on this launch or not. What shall I tell her?"

He watches from the docks as the skiff departs, swallowed by the Fold. Then he waits in the shadows for the Darkling to leave the safety of the Grisha command tent for the smaller one in which he sleeps. He's never let the demon take over on purpose before, but it rises eagerly to his call. It's faster and stronger than he ever was, and sees much better in the dark; it snatches up the Darkling like a raptor and launches itself easily to the sky with powerful wing beats. Gunshots follow them, but they're already almost to the treeline.

The Darkling rolls as he's dropped, already moving his hands to form the Cut as he stands. The demon launches itself at him, knocking him down and pinning his forearms with razor sharp claws, tearing deep gouges into them even through the kefta. The Darkling cries out, still trying to throw them off. Nikolai's pulse sings as the demon lunges in to tear at the Darkling's throat with its razor sharp teeth. For a brief, heady moment, the blood tastes like victory in his mouth.

But he looks down at the Darkling's twitching form, his skin even paler than usual as his blood soaks the ground below, and the taste turns to ash. Nikolai sags over him, shadow wings draped over the two of them, one hand pressed to the bird-boned chest beneath him as it hitches with each pained, shallow pant through parted lips.

"Why did you do this?" he asks, voice cracking on the question. "Was killing me once just not enough? Why me?"

But the Darkling who stole his ability to die isn't merely dead, he stopped existing the moment Nikolai died the very first time. There are no answers to be gained from his desperate plea, which is falling on deaf ears regardless as the Darkling chokes on his own blood. The shadow summoner must surely recognize his own power in the monster, because his eyes are resigned, before they flutter closed. Nikolai watches as the Darkling goes still under him, and sits there until the oprichniki catch up and shoot him dead.

This time he takes the skiff, and takes a loop off to study poetry in Kerch. He's not really sure that he's enjoying it (and he's certainly not improving much), but the only alternative is thinking about what he's lost, or planning, and the prospect of either is enough to make him scream. Or cry. Or both.

He's twenty-three again when he hears the news that the Darkling has overthrown Ravka and encircled it with shadows. Good for him, frankly. He's twenty-four when one of the Darkling's Heartrenders catches up with him, to remove any possibility of any attempt to take Ravka back. He's almost tempted to tell the poor girl the Darkling is welcome to it. Let him deal with all the problems that pop up like mushrooms after his usual conveniently-timed death. Fjerda, jurda parem, the Shu Han's forsaken Khergud program. Saints and monsters and men like Brum who make monsters seem benign. The Darkling has long since been relegated, on the list of issues in Nikolai's head. Everything which follows him is worse. The Heartrender kills him, of course, before he can say anything.

He wouldn't have meant it anyway. Ravka is a hot mess, but it's his mess, he's going to fix it, and the Darkling can't have it.

He's so tired, though. Of knowing how everything unfolds. Of getting to know people only for that version of them to be dead and gone in a flash. Of having to pretend he doesn't know to the deepest molecule how everyone around him thinks, how they'll act, before they do it. His first instinct now is to view the world as patterns of cause and effect; it takes active effort to see people as individuals with thoughts and feelings of their own that might be taken into consideration.

He gives in to the urge not to bother, one loop, and intercepts a freshly-defected Alina and Mal in the countryside surrounding Os Alta, the night of the Winter Fete. He takes them on a tour to the Bone Road via the Fjerdan permafrost, and then flies them back to Os Alta without the pomp and circumstance tour. Vasily turns out to be stupid enough to fall for his own tricks, and dies choking on poisoned wine as they toast the safe return of the sun summoner. His father he executes and his mother he sends away, her parting words that she will never forgive him.

"I don't need you to," he tells her, and he means that it doesn't matter because she'll have forgotten all about it if this loop fails, but there's a tiny part of him that also means if the loop doesn't fail, if this is what it takes to save Ravka, her undying resentment will be a small price to pay for it.

He's coped with Alina's wariness of him across countless loops, but it takes on a new tenor now. She flinches if he moves too abruptly, and doesn't speak up even when she clearly disagrees with him (such as over his decision to send an assassin after Bo Yul-Bayar before he can ever invent parem).

He brings Baghra to her to complete her amplifier set, and Baghra grabs her knife hand and tells her to do it without even a scrap of fear in her voice. Like mother, like son.

"Get on with it, girl," she snaps. "I don't want to live to see this anyway."

News must have reached the Darkling about the coup, but he doesn't return to the capital. He takes the Second Army and disappears.

It probably shouldn't surprise Nikolai when he's informed that the sun summoner fled in the night. He spares a moment to wonder who helped her, and then sends people to retrieve her. She can go wherever she likes once she's taken down the Fold, he explains, but Ravka has need of her yet. When she refuses to help him he shoots Mal in the shoulder, moves the barrel to his forehead, and asks her again. She glares at him the whole way to the Fold, and it makes him oddly nostalgic for that kick in the shin she'd given him the first time they shared a coach.

We were married, in another life, he doesn't tell her. I didn't make you happy then either.

"You told me once that you didn't think I was like the Darkling." This Alina didn't tell him that. It doesn't matter. He glances away from her confused frown, out at the Ravkan countryside rolling past.

"I think you're exactly like him," Alina replies. One thumb worries at the smooth bone bangle encircling her wrist.

Everything I did, I did for Ravka. The Darkling said that, the very first time Nikolai beat him. He hadn't understood, then.

He closes his eyes, and lets his head bump against the padded seat. "The longer I live, the more I start to think he had a point."

He doesn't hold it against Alina when she leads her Soldat Sol in a coup against him, a few years later. He'd have done the same long before now, in her position.

He spends a loop off to clear his head, visiting the Ravka he's doing this for under a series of assumed identities. He goes back refreshed, and more than a little ashamed of himself. This loop unfolds predictably: Fold and Firebird and farewells. He keeps Zoya at an arm's length of professionalism that still breaks his heart all these loops later. And then the Darkling gets resurrected, by some shifty little cultist called Yuri, and Nikolai is suddenly flying blind.

How has this never happened before? Has he (or Alina, or the Darkling himself) accidentally killed Yuri and never even known, every loop before this? It boggles the mind. But the man they get back isn't the Darkling he knew before. Nikolai has seen the Darkling calm and professional; has seen him furiously defiant, incandescent with rage, fired up with hope. He knows what he looks like during that tiny moment after release when he's still subsumed by physical sensation, before that clever mind kicks back into gear with all the thoughts and plans that power it. He's never seen him so utterly out of fucks to give before. The bastard has the audacity to wink at him, in the middle of a battlefield, but there's a fatalism to him that was never there before he'd spent three years dead.

There's a terrible sense of circularity to the moment at the Thornwood tree. To the way that the Darkling—Aleksander, suddenly, and isn't it a mind-bending thing to know his name after all this time—holds his gaze steadily as he declares once more that everything he did, he did for Ravka. Nikolai contemplates ending the loop then and there, because he refuses to believe that this war crime, this utter travesty of justice and morality, is really the best they can manage. He's spent a long time hating the Darkling, for condemning him to this cursed cycle; has watched him die and killed the man himself and been killed by him in return, so often that he's stopped keeping track of who's ahead. But his very soul recoils from the idea of anyone being condemned to an eternity of torture. He wouldn't have wished this fate on the man even when he'd considered him to be Ravka's greatest problem, and it's been a very long time since he last believed that to be true.

But he's loathe to give up the knowledge of the future he can gain from the loop by ending it prematurely, and as awful as it is, the Darkling's suffering will be undone by the reset. So Nikolai sets his jaw, and goes back to work, and if he thinks far more often than he'd like of the Darkling's pride and defiance as he stepped up to that terrible fate—if he daydreams in ways that border on fantasy of getting him out of there—no one else has to know. Zoya, hardened at his side, would never understand. Nor would Genya, who was sent to a battlefield no one should have to endure, or David, whose work was subverted and corrupted in ways he's clearly haunted by still. Nikolai carries the Darkling in his thoughts alone, and adds this to the ever-lengthening list of things he's going to fix, right at the top.

Chapter Text

That loop, he finally makes peace with the demon. He embraces the part of himself it was formed from, and the demon seems to accept that he's an integral part of it too, without which it couldn't exist. It takes over when the Fjerdans hit Os Alta with a radiation bomb during Nikolai's twenty-ninth birthday party, trying to fly him out of the blast range. It's not going to be enough to save him, but he appreciates the gesture. The poison is already spreading through his body, shutting it down. Breathing is difficult. His gums are bleeding, independently of any injuries he'd sustained. When he blacks out, he fully expects to wake in Kribirsk, eighteen yet again.

Scratching pulls him back to the edge of consciousness. The demon is gouging furrows in the trunk of a tree, keening incoherently in the back of his mind. It's afraid, he realizes with a jolt. It's never been afraid before; he didn't think it knew how. But it clearly doesn't understand what's happening. Their location finally registers for him: it's tearing strips out of the thornwood tree where the Darkling is entombed. Is it seeking comfort from its creator, or does it think he could help?

He'd be as likely to finish the job as to save me, he thinks ruefully at it. And that's even before we did nothing to prevent his consignment to the worst of all possible hells.

He rearranges himself so he can sit on the flagstones, back pressed to the bark and wings angled awkwardly out to drape over the floor.

"All these years, and I've never made it to age thirty," he tells the presence standing sentinel behind him. There's no response, but he chooses to take the silence as solemn agreement about the fundamental unfairness of this. "I should stop having birthday parties, really, my track record with them is terrible. You'll have to up your game if you want to reclaim the title of 'worst party guest'. The competition is fierce."

He trails off eventually as talking becomes too much effort. He lets his head tip back against the trunk. When he rests a hand on one protruding root, the shadow beneath his skin draws towards it like iron filings to a magnet. The cold, tingling feeling where the sap coats his scraped-up fingers feels exactly the same as the Fold, and understanding trickles through him. Is this why he's been reliving the same few years over and over? Perhaps this last lingering remnant of the Darkling's power within him is what's tethering him; perhaps it can't be destroyed so long as the tree preserves the remainder. Which raises a new thought. When he stops this future, will it mean an end to the loops at last? The possibility triggers a dizzying, conflicting surge of hope and fear in him.

In the east, a hint of pale gold tints the clouds, heralding the approach of dawn. The last thing he's aware of is the frantic feeling of the demon trying to hold onto him as he slips into the dark.

He comes back to himself writhing on the terrace of the Spinning Wheel, his body contorting under the pressure of wings, claws and fangs forcing their way through.

Stop, he thinks forcefully, even as he reels at the fact that he's been reset to a different point, something which has never happened before. You and I had an understanding, come on. Get yourself together.

By the time the demon has stopped flailing in confusion, the Darkling is gone. Alina's terrified gaze flicks between Nikolai and the edge. The first time this happened, he'd been long gone by now. He fishes through his memory for what Alina had recounted afterwards. Baghra jumped, and the Darkling followed. The demon perks up in his mind again, and before he can attempt to stop it they're launching themselves off the edge on wings of shadow.

The Darkling sits at the bottom of the cliff, cradling Baghra's broken corpse. Pain radiates from him in palpable waves, and despite everything Nikolai's heart goes out to him. He's mourned his own mother often enough to empathize. He crouches quietly on a branch, talons keeping him steady, and waits. Nichevo'ya skitter in the nearby trees, but they leave him be. Eventually, the Darkling's anguished noises subside enough for him to notice that he has company. He looks up, unafraid at the monster looming above him.

"Here to finish the job?" he rasps.

Nikolai shudders at the recollection it stirs of the time he ripped him to shreds in a futile attempt at revenge. He lets the demon drop them safely to the floor before pushing it gently aside. It resists, just a little, until he reassures it that he isn't going to hurt the Darkling, only to talk. "If by that you mean kill you, then no. It doesn't solve anything, in the long run."

Those pale eyes are unbearably weary. "Why are you here, then? To gloat?"

"Also no. I'm here to make one last plea, I suppose." He's tried reasoning with the Darkling before, over the loops, but never in these circumstances. It feels like it might actually work, this time. "Put a stop to this. You must see there's no good outcome left here. You've driven Alina away, you've turned Ravka against you. Your mother is dead. Let this be the end of it."

"It's too late for that."

"It's never too late."

There's quiet for a moment, and the words the Darkling says next are so strained that Nikolai isn't sure he meant to say them aloud, or that he would have picked them up without the demon's acute hearing. "She was all I had."

It's strange, to think that this is something in which he has more experience than the Darkling. Even with all the loops he's lived by now he's never stopped seeing the shadow summoner as a class above mere mortals such as himself. Ancient and unknowable. But right now he's just a boy, lost without the anchor of a parent.

"I'm sorry," he says, because he is.

The Darkling looks sharply up. "You killed her. Don't pretend that you care now."

"If I didn't care, I wouldn't have bothered to evacuate her from the palace." There's no response to that, and after a moment he gives up waiting for one. "Do you want some help building a pyre?"

There's no answer to that either, but the Darkling also doesn't stop him when he pitches in. They work in silence, and then watch the flames in silence. It isn't until they've died down to a low, slow burn that the Darkling glances over at him again. "The transformation didn't work the way I imagined it would. I intended it to drive you mad."

Nikolai shoves his hands casually in his pockets, though with feet bare and his shirt in tatters, he still looks wild and unhinged. "It worked better than you think, for a lot longer than you realize. But the monster and I have reached an understanding."

"What understanding can ever be reached with a monster?" The Darkling's tone is bitter, and Nikolai matches it with lightness.

"You'd be surprised. There was darkness in me long before you forced shadows down my throat. I've embraced that now." And then he voices the thought which has been simmering for a while now. "Deep down, we want the same things. Why are we wasting our strength trying to take one another out of the equation, when we could do so much more working together?"

The Darkling doesn't contradict him, and Nikolai feels the balance of the moment, the future on a knife edge. He gives it one last push. "Please, Aleksander."

But at the use of his name the Darkling's face contorts into a snarl. "You may have been able to sweet-talk Alina into betraying her confidences, but I'm not naive enough to fall for your schemes."

Before Nikolai can even voice a refutation, the nichevo'ya have descended on him.

That felt close to a breakthrough, though, before he bungled it. It ignites a faint and flickering flame, in some neglected corner of his mind. He's been the Darkling's enemy in almost every single variation imaginable. He's never tried being his ally. Could it really be so simple? Almost certainly not, but it's worth a go at least.

This time he picks Alina up in Poliznaya, which he's arranged for both himself and the Darkling to visit as part of a royal inspection. When the Darkling tells his Heartrenders to take her straight back to Os Alta, Nikolai inserts himself into situation with all the confidence and entitlement bestowed by a lifetime (several lifetimes) of royal upbringing, and the compromise reached is that they take her back together, but incognito via the back roads. Alina slumps into a doze almost the moment they stop to make camp. Unfortunately for her, knowledge and muscle memory reset for everyone else from loop to loop, so she's as unpracticed at riding a horse as she presumably was the very first time.

He's never felt the need to tag along on her journey to Os Alta before, since he knew full well that Alina arrived safely at the capital without him. As such, he's never seen the Darkling like this before: sitting on the ground with his men, sharing meager rations without complaint. It's a far cry from the image he always projects at court, or the way he acts once they're fighting.

His observation doesn't go unnoticed. "If the accommodations aren't to your liking, moi tsarevich, I remind you that you could have waited and had travel arrangements more to your usual standard."

"I think you have me confused with Vasily. If anything this is making me nostalgic for my infantry days."

Mild amusement crosses the Darkling's face at that. "Ah yes, the heady bygone days of... what is it, not quite a year ago?"

Saints, it really is, measured that way, isn't it? He spares a moment to wonder, if he was put face-to-face with his old unit, whether any of them would recognize the man he is now, or whether they'd think him almost a stranger, wearing their captain's face.

"It feels like a lot longer," is all he says, breaking a piece off his bread to eat.

There's a long pause, broken by the familiar background music of the field: the crackle of the fire, the scurry of animals through the undergrowth and the low hoot of owls. Boot scuffs and throat-clearing, and faint snoring from the more distant tents. He's so immersed in it that when the Darkling speaks again it surprises him.

"You seemed set on putting Ravka behind you, when your service ended. And yet here you are, still. What changed?"

He discards flippant responses, sensing that sincerity will serve him better. "I felt like I could do more good for Ravka by staying. Which has worked out remarkably well, wouldn't you say?"

"For whom," the Darkling deadpans back. "It means I have two high-importance figures to shepherd safely back to the palace."

"Well, you know what they say, about keeping your friends close..."

That almost-amused expression returns. "I know the rest of the phrase. Are you imagining us to be friends or enemies, in this scenario?"

He sends a bright smile back. "Friends, of course. I'm far too charming to hate."

He makes good on his word, hanging around the Little Palace to chat and pass on snippets of gossip, to explore with David in the lab and watch the summoners. The Darkling outwardly tolerates this with grudging acceptance, but Nikolai, who has spent lifetimes watching him, can see that he's pleased at the genuine interest and engagement with Grisha matters from a Lantsov.

Nikolai dances with Alina at the Winter Fete, and the Darkling's eyes track them around the room. He's not surprised when he's pulled into his mother's sitting room, later.

"Since we are apparently friends, I'm warning you, as a friend, that associating so publicly with the sun summoner will generate expectations. Unless you are prepared to marry her, I strongly suggest that you desist."

As though he hasn't been there, done that, and bought the commemorative postcard ten times over. "It was only one dance. I am in fact aware of the workings of the court gossip machine, I'm not going to risk establishing any expectations. And you really don't have any cause for jealousy. Alina and I... it would never work. If my parents get it into their heads to marry her to me or Vasily I'll talk them down."

The Darkling is still regarding him with narrowed eyes, and he huffs. "I'm not trying to seduce Alina. That's not why I came back."

"Why did you come back? And if you start spouting off about divine providence again, I will stuff your cravat down your gullet."

"You have such a charming way with words. I spend more time with you than I do with Alina, you may as well assume that I'm trying to seduce you."

He counts as a win the way the Darkling's eyes flick up and down the length of him automatically, even if it is followed by an amused smirk. "You have a high opinion of yourself, if you think anything you could offer would tempt me."

That draws a laugh from him, one of genuine delight. The Darkling might have taken him up on his offer back on the whaler, countless loops ago, but he knows full well that wasn't about him. It was just a meaningless, fleeting distraction. The energy of this moment feels different. New, and there has been so very little newness in Nikolai's life, of late.

"My high opinion of myself is entirely justified, and I know for a fact that I can offer something that will tempt you." He leans in close to the Darkling's ear, and drops his voice to a low, seductive murmur. "Help me take the throne. Neither of us can fix Ravka alone, but I have a good feeling about our chances together."

The Darkling goes very still, but he can't suppress the way his lips part on a breath, or the slight crook of his fingers in readiness for violence. Even after all these loops, surprising him is a incomparable feeling. Only flying beats it.

"Overthrow my family with me, I know you want to," Nikolai goads, still encroaching shamelessly on his personal space. He delights in the little shiver that his breath produces as it ghosts warm over the Darkling's neck.

"You know very little about me, moi tsarevich," the Darkling murmurs back, but there's no rebuke in his tone. He's intrigued. He's considering it. "Though it seems I also know less about you than I thought. I wouldn't have thought you had it in you."

"I'm full of surprises." Nikolai's pulse surges at the Darkling's proximity; at the sheer unknown of this moment, the potential spooling out from here. "And you'd be surprised how much I know about you, I think, but it's still not half as much as I'd like to know."

The Darkling must feel it too, that knife-edge tension, the pull. The quartz of his eyes is darkened; his breathing is shallow. Nikolai should have known he'd be turned on by treason.

"Are you in?" he asks, and the Darkling walks them backwards until Nikolai's back hits the wall.

"If you know so much about me," he murmurs, leaning in even further, "Do you even have to ask?"

Just as Nikolai is about to pull him in by the neck to close that last hair's breadth of distance between them, there's a rattle of the doorknob, and Alina pokes her head in. Her eyes flick between the two of them, and a blush rises on her cheeks.

"Oh! Sorry! I was looking for..." She looks beseechingly at the Darkling, who is smoothing out his kefta where Nikolai had grabbed it. "We're up soon, for the demonstration. Are you—sorry!"

It could be worse, Nikolai supposes; if she'd turned up five minutes later she'd likely have interrupted far worse.

"I'll be there," the Darkling tells Alina, and the calm reassurance of his voice is enough to make her nod and retreat with a rapid patter of footsteps. He exhales noisily, when she's gone. "You, sobachka, are going to be the death of me."

"Nikolai," he corrects, with a grin. He doesn't expect Aleksander to reciprocate on that first name address any time soon, but he can be patient. "Though I've also been known to answer to 'handsome'. And do you know, I really don't think I will be."

Not this time. Never again.

Nikolai leaned over Aleksander, shadow wings draped over him and one hand pressed to his bare chest. The slow trail of claws over pale flesh was just teasing, for now. He let one clawtip nick the skin, slow and deliberate. The demon's keener hearing easily picked up the hitch of Aleksander's breath and the way his pulse increased, as he arched beneath him.

"Does it count as narcissism, to be turned on by something not-this-you created?" Nikolai mused, which was grammatically nonsensical, but earned him a snort.

"Even if it is, I don't take accusations of narcissism from a man whose face is on the money."

"I didn't actually invent the tradition, but point taken." He dropped to trail his tongue along the mark, the demon's presence humming contentedly just beneath his own awareness. The first time Aleksander had suggested letting it out in the bedroom, the surge of secondhand exhilaration it sent through Nikolai at the first hint of blood triggered such a vivid sense memory that he'd brought everything to an abrupt halt to go be violently sick, but by now the taste only inspired a faint buzz of anticipation from it. Nipping at one pectoral finally drew out a sharp hiss of breath from Aleksander, then a groan when he followed the bite with gentle suction.

"Are you intending to get on with it any time soon," Aleksander drawled, tone lazy but eyes dark. "Or should I make other plans for my evening?"

"Plans for your morning," Nikolai corrected, just to be irritating. "It's past midnight." Then he blinked, the statement sinking in. "It's my birthday."

An arched brow. "I didn't get you anything; you already have everything you could possibly want."

"I want any number of improbable things," he retorted automatically, but his mind failed to offer up a suitably witty example, and he lapsed into silence, for a beat. He was thirty years old, for the very first time. What was he going to do without the mental countdowns to key events, that had been his constant companion for endless loops? How could he prepare for anything now? Panic was overtaking him as his thoughts spiraled out. His breath was coming faster and shallower, the walls seeming to close in around him.

"Nikolai?"

The name reached him as if through water, as peripheral awareness filtered back. He was clenching down tightly on Aleksander's thigh, claw tips digging in and blood welling up around them through the black fabric of his trousers.

"Shit, sorry." He shivered and undid the transformation, blinking slightly at the sudden improvement of his color vision. "I've just... never made it this far before. I have no idea what's going to happen next."

"You and everyone else in the world."

He shook his head. "I've spent so long knowing at least the vague progression of things. Now I have nothing to go on."

Aleksander's expression softened. "That's not true. You have all the experience you've gained up to now. You have your intelligence network, your advisors, your instincts... and you have me. Whatever happens, we'll deal with it."

Nikolai sent a fragile smile back. He understood why Alina, Genya and Zoya all found his relationship with the Darkling faintly baffling. Even without knowledge of all the violence they'd visited on one another in other lives, it seemed an improbable match. Aleksander was an incurably sarcastic son of a bitch, who broke out in hives at the prospect of admitting to any sort of emotional sentiment, and his displays of affection were best described as alarming. It had taken him an entire year to give Nikolai his name. They butted heads constantly over the best course of action in a given situation, and whether it was reasonable for Nikolai to shut down suggestions that he'd seen fail in other loops, given the infinite fractal branching of time. They had a lively and ongoing disagreement over whether four hundred years leading the second army conveyed more experience than living the same four years a hundred times over.

But he was the closest that anyone could come to understanding what Nikolai had gone through. He was probably the only person as stubbornly dedicated to this lost cause of a country. And last year when Nikolai had been shot, and practically out of his mind with fear—not of dying but of waking up in Kribirsk again with the two of them back to almost strangers, about to be enemies—Aleksander stayed at his side the entire time despite his obvious wish to be interrogating the shooter, because Nikolai had needed him. He knew where he ranked, in Aleksander's heart: right behind Ravka, as it should be. He wrapped arms tight around him now, laying his head on his shoulder and letting the contact ground him. Slowly, the panic subsided. His heart rate settled, aligning itself to the slower one pressed against it.

Aleksander tolerated the embrace with an unusual amount of patience, scrubbing his fingertips through the hair beginning to curl at the nape of Nikolai's neck. When he was finally released, he cleared his throat slightly. "As a fair warning, I know your stance on birthday parties, but Genya and Alina intend to drag you out for a picnic in the grounds later today."

"And you didn't discourage this flouting of royal decree?" He pressed one hand dramatically to his breastbone. "I am beset on all sides by enemies. Even my own consort conspires against me."

"You overthrow one king and suddenly people are seeing conspiracies in everything you do."

Nikolai, laughing, tackled him back down to the mattress to kiss. The remnants of his need for reassurance spilled over into it, leaving both of them slightly breathless when he pulled back. "The fact that you do it in every timeline is working against you here. I can only conclude that you keep me around for my body, and will overthrow me at the first sign of aging."

Amusement lingered in Aleksander's expression. "The demon is a fun addition, that will buy you a little more time."

"Well, in that case..."

The demon rose back to his call obediently, wings unfurling. As its keen senses brought everything into sharp focus, Nikolai shimmied back down to carry on where he'd left off earlier. He immersed himself in the sensations, as his own arousal built back up from the banked embers: salt and copper on his tongue; the smooth friction of hands over his skin; heat and pressure and the low groans Aleksander made. For now, he let himself exist just in this one single moment. All the others would wait.