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missorgana · 3 years

Text

flying like a bird to you

pairing: alina starkov/genya safin

fandom: shadow and bone (tv)

rating: teen and up

word count: 2424

warning: referenced rape, mentions of death

summary: Alina doesn’t feel like she knows much of anything in her new life, but she does know that Genya is very pretty. (canon compliant angst)

(i caved in and wrote this for my genyalina feelings. made myself sad. i miss them. hope you like this ????)

read on ao3

Alina struggles to understand much of her new life, as strange and unfamiliar and confusing as it proves to be.

She doesn’t know where Mal is, or why he hasn’t sent her any letters yet. Surely he must be trying his hardest to find her, she’ll convince herself to believe it. She doesn’t know why Zoya hates her so relentlessly, stubbornly and unwavering, or what she ever did to deserve her stinging words.

And she doesn’t know what to do with this power, despite being told what feels a million times - to close the fold. To save the world. She doesn’t understand what she did to be called a saint, to deserve the power and glory that comes with such a title.

Alina feels like a fraud. She feels like that little girl she used to be, running away with her best friend because she had no other choice, fear set deep in her bones at the thought of change.

Well, now that change has caught up to her, that’s for sure.

Alina doesn’t feel like she knows much of anything, but she does know that Genya is very pretty.

This must be obvious to anyone, she concedes, the redhead’s beauty. But it’s what struck her when they first met, unlike all the other first meetings in her life. Genya is not the first pretty girl she’s seen, of course, but this is different, it must be.

Alina can’t deny her loveliness; in fact, it didn’t exactly wash over her when the tailor walked in through the door, rather, it was when a delicate thumb was raised to caress her cheek. She must’ve frozen right there and then, albeit Genya was only removing the bruises from her face.

And so Alina finds it rather hard to look away from the girl, who wakes her up with elegant robes and touches up her lips and tries out colorful pigments on her eyelids with a single sweep of her fingertip. She’s quite unsure if the redhead notices her staring.

In all honesty, she’s not sure if she wants her to notice.

When the day came of her showcase, when Aleksander expected her to flash her power and shine like the trophy he’d found for himself, Alina just found herself looking into the crowd of the hall, until she found Genya, and there her eyes stayed. When the tailor’s light blue eyes meet her own brown, they shimmer in a way she imagines the ocean to do, and it brings her a sense of safety.

Genya smiles; a soft raise of the corners of her mouth, one that Alina allows herself to receive, as if it is meant for her and her alone.

Her lips are pink and face is flush, she finds it hard not to notice this, which is why Alina also notices Genya turning her head and looking toward the Fabrikator who visited them in her bedroom at sunrise - David, she recalls.

Alina feels, in this moment, unlike when Genya walked her down the halls arm in arm, significantly less pretty. Maybe the redhead’s smile wasn’t meant for her after all. But the Tailor looks back, and she knows, she’ll tell herself she knows, that Genya believes in her, even if she doesn’t believe in herself. Mal would believe in her, but he’s not here. She’ll have to stop reminding herself of that.

She fulfills the General’s wish, her first task of being a seemingly flawless saint.

But her feeling of flawlessness is imagined, a performance, and the prettiness that the Tailor makes her feel dwindles again, like the light in her hands disappear, and the Sun Summoner is once more Alina Starkov, a Grisha who’s barely learned to be Grisha yet.

Genya keeps looking at her until she walks off the stage. She wishes she could talk to her, but the General doesn’t let her, too busy parading her around to the royals. When Alina searches for the redhead again, she’s missing from the crowd entirely.

When Alina wakes her from her slumber to the touch of a hand, she doesn’t flinch, somehow, because she knows the person is not there to hurt her. Zoya’s not in the palace anymore, she hasn’t come back, and her room is the most guarded of them all, regardless.

She’s not shocked to adjust her vision in the dark to Genya’s face looming over her, but the single tear threatening to escape the corner of the redhead’s eye does surprise her.

Her hand rests lightly on Alina’s forearm, neither of them speaking a word.

She has a feeling she knows. She knows why the Tailor has come to her in the middle of the night, but she doesn’t know why her.

It scares her, the pretty girl with the crystal eyes, and the sadness doesn’t screw up her beauty, not at all, but it hollows out Alina’s chest in return, because how could anything- anyone dare to make Genya cry?

She can tell the redhead is trying unbelievably hard to hold it back. Alina lifts the blanket without hesitation, and Genya seems hesitant, yet not removing her hand.

“I’m sorry,” she tells her, barely above a whisper.

Alina shakes her head. “You shouldn’t be,” she replies, the steadiness in her voice surprising the both of them.

The redhead’s forehead furrows when she keeps the tears at bay, and she thinks she hears a sniffle, too, and Alina can’t think of anything else to do than ask. “Can I touch your hand?”

Time seems to be moving at snail speed, but Genya nods, and so she does, touches it, holds it faintly so the redhead knows she can let go, easily and immediately. She doesn’t.

She feels another fear. Alina’s known fear all of her life, known how to suppress it, more than anything, but she fears, now, that Genya will slip away from her. She wishes she could comfort her, but it couldn’t be enough. Yet she finds herself trying, anyway, “Do you want to stay?”

Then, the Tailor smiles. It reminds Alina of the smile she was given back at the dinner, soft, but the sadness so overwhelming she wants to stand up, call back the sun in her hands, bathe the entire palace in light if that is what it takes to take the tears away from Genya’s features.

Or rather, she feels a dire urge to walk. Walk until she falls upon the chambers of the king, she ponders, what sort of damage, what amount, her light could do. That’s the first time Alina’s thought of hurting someone.

But she knows deep down she’d do a lot more than hurt him. And she can’t find any way to feel bad about it. He knows what he did. He knows why Genya has visited Alina’s room. He knows why Genya doesn’t feel safe.

She also knows that she cannot possibly carry out that plan. Alina wonders which one of the many soldiers, the royals themselves, or the General, who would kill her first.

Instead, Alina does the only thing she can and needs to do, because if she can make Genya feel safe in the way she gave it upon her back at the showcase, even just for one night, it’s more important than any saint’s mission, she decides.

The Tailor’s thumb is touching her pinkie finger, and Alina wraps two fingers around it. “If you don’t mind,” Genya then says, and Alina pushes the blanket back a bit further.

“Not at all.”

And so when the redhead lies down beside her on the covers, carefully tending to the blanket and that it’s wrapped around the both of them, Alina needs to remind herself to not stare too much. They’re both looking to the ceiling, lying on their backs. When she lies alone here, she sometimes imagines she’s gazing upon a starry night instead of the palace walls.

Then they both look at each other, incredibly synchronized.

Genya looks pretty, even in the darkness. Alina can’t make out all her features, but she knows, she’s still impossibly pretty for her to describe. But even more so she’s kind, and helpful, and in pain .

“I apologise for waking you,” her Tailor whispers, and the apology hurts in her chest, again.

“Don’t,” Alina says, then frowning at herself, a sense that the word might’ve come out too harshly, “You can come to me anytime. I know you’d do the same for me.”

The tear rolls down Genya’s cheek then, disappearing into the pillow. She blinks more away, still smiling, and moves up a bit.

When a few seconds pass by, Alina thinks the redhead might not answer, and she just wants her to be okay, as okay as she can be. Genya surprises her with a question, the both of them still not looking away from each other, “Would you… it’s alright if you say no. Would you spoon me?”

“Of course,” Alina answers, with no hesitation. It makes her just a tiny bit nervous, but her voice doesn’t waver, her gaze stays, because she’s scared that if it does Genya will feel bad, be mad at herself, feel that it was wrong to ask, when it isn’t.

The girl turns her back to her, and she wraps her arms around her feather light, fear, again. The Little Palace traps you. Alina doesn’t want to trap Genya, not for the life of her.

When the Tailor moves into her embrace a little more, her heart jumps a couple of times, into her throat, pleasant and painful at the same time, which she didn’t know was possible until now.

And when she wakes up once more to sunlight streaming through the curtains, her arms are empty and Genya’s nowhere to be seen, until the door pushes open and the pretty girl tells her good morning. She smiles. Alina smiles back immediately.

Her heart sincerely hopes Genya slept peacefully that night, if at all.

Alina Starkov will no longer be a caged bird under the command of General Kirigan, or the king, or anyone else. That much she knows.

Much else she can’t think of, much else she cannot do than want, need and try to escape. Get on an empty carriage, pray to whatever sainthood she possesses that it leads to her freedom. But she thinks of Genya. She has to find her.

But in the guise of darkness in the courtyard, the Tailor finds her instead.

She doesn’t call her name, and Alina doesn’t call hers, but they know . Genya’s white and gold kefta trails after her feet, she doesn’t run, it seems she’s almost floating, and the crystals in her eyes are glazed over with worry.

Alina would very much like to kiss her, she realises.

She doesn’t know why she hadn’t thought of it before. She wishes she had, because now is not the time, now there’s no time, and the footsteps heard from inside the palace feel like a whole other world away. But she can’t hesitate.

Alina saw a carriage the furthest way back, with a chest lodged on the carrier. She’ll hide there. If the residents riding it try to capture her she’ll have the light as her weapon, she’s in control, as much as she can be without letting fear take over.

And when the pretty girl opens her mouth but shuts it again, immediately, Alina says the first thing that comes to her mind, “I’m going to run.”

The redhead seems to consider this.

Her eyes never waver from Alina’s own, even when she moves just two steps closer. Genya could give her up to the army so easily, she ponders, but the trust she has in her, there’s no way that’s misplaced. The tailor doesn’t smile, but nods.

“Alright.”

“Come with me,” she finds herself blurting. It feels right, Alina thinks. The question is right. She wants Genya with her.

With her, she feels stronger. Safer. At the palace, she’s the Sun Summoner, the savior, a foreign thing to herself. Before, she was Alina Starkov, a stubborn version of herself that somehow seems just as far away.

But with Genya, she can be both. She’s herself.

At the suggestion, the redhead smiles, but it’s not accompanied by Alina’s cheeks flushing and her mind telling her to stay , because the smile is melancholic and doesn’t look like the Genya she knows. Alina’s scared to hear her answer.

“I don’t think the General will like that,” she says.

Her own fist comes to a clench at the thought of his face. “I don’t care what he likes.”

It’s enough to make her blood feel like boiling, and the sun to break out from her fingertips and beneath her skin, if it wasn’t for the Tailor’s gentle fingertips appearing, as if from thin air, and fixing a stray lock of Alina’s raven hair behind her ear.

The hand stays on her cheek long, grazing it down to rest on her chin, that Alina considers acting. Mere inches would connect her to her red lips and somehow, she knows it would feel nothing like wielding her Grisha powers. It’d feel different. New. Millions of times better, like she was soaring.

But she finds herself unable to do so because the sound of the army grows louder, and Genya’s smile grows sadder.

“You know I can’t go with you,” the redhead tells her, “I want you to be safe.”

So her thumb finally leaves her chin, comes to rest at her hips, faintly wrapped arms like she’s protecting the both of them from what’s lurking behind them, continuously moving closer and closer. And because Alina doesn’t know what else to do, she raises her own thumb, the urge to touch Genya’s bottom lip too strong to ignore.

She’s moving slowly, too slow. The Tailor doesn’t stop her. Her smile becomes more familiar; like an embrace, like a kiss, almost.

Her lip is even softer than she imagined, for the quick seconds she does feel it. The smile radiates off of her, becoming all the more tangible. And warm.

Alina can hear her own heartbeat.

But Alina also has to run now, she knows it, and the pretty girl knows it, nodding once again, proof of an unspoken secret locked away in between them. She’ll keep her safe, as long as possible, anyway.

And so when she ultimately has to move out of her space, Genya’s ring finger draws upon her lip, where Alina abandoned the touch of her own. It feels like a goodbye.

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