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fiddleabout · 1 year

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(previously on the fabulous adventures of sun summoner ava and the druskelle who’s gonna fall in love with her)

It’s their third day of walking, from one whaling shelter to another, and so far Ava has learned that the druskelle is fastidious to the point of absurdity, that she sleeps on her left side-- potentially due to the cruel burn scar that Ava had seen on the first night, in spite of the way they had both burrowed deep under their respective bearskins until their clothes dried; it starts below her ribcage on her right side and snakes down past her hip, terminating in a splotchy discoloration halfway down her thigh-- that she sleeps light but pretends not to wake up when Ava wiggles closer in the middle of the night for warmth and starts each morning with a set of fifty pushups, and that she’s proven herself impressively immune to Ava’s charming habit of chattering to fill the silence.

She still doesn’t know her name.

Ava’s halfway into a hilarious story-- in Fjerdan, just to irritate the druskelle-- about when she and Diego had managed to prank Frances at the orphanage with an elaborate plot involving a rabbit snare, a basket full of fresh mushrooms, and a piece of twine stolen from the kitchens. She’s taken a detour in her rambling, away from Keramzin and towards her first and only experience in the unsea, stowing away on a skiff in a desperate attempt to keep her little brother safe, and has been on an impressively colorful five-minutes-and-building rant about how the First Army had treated the both of them after her powers became known. She can feel her own frustration building, at the situation and at the druskelle and at the darkling, when the druskelle speaks for the first time in hours.

“--and then the lieutenant, that cunt--”

“Should you really refer to your commanding officer so crassly?”

Ava nearly trips at the sound of her voice. It’s melodious and soft, her accent rounded warmly. The other druskelle on the ship had sharper accents, thinner edges to their vowels: a Djerholm accent, urban and rich, the accent of the children of nobility plucked for elite service. This druskelle, though, has a quiet, rural accent that differentiates her from the rest of the druskelle as her dark hair and eyes had differentiated her from the rest of Fjerda.

“She speaks,” Ava manages to say after a split second. “And here I was thinking that the druskelle had made you take a vow of silence.”

“I speak,” she echoes thinly. “Only when there is something worth speaking to. Such as insubordination.”

“Don’t tell me you’re concerned with me respecting a Ravkan lieutenant.”

“You are a soldier, even if you are a witch,’ she says. She steps around a patch of snow that looks exactly like the rest, and Ava follows automatically. “Soldiers should respect their commanding officers.”

“Well,” Ava says grandly. “Forgive me for not agreeing to let my brother get sent to slaughter. Some of us have beating hearts instead of unwavering obedience to work with.”

The druskelle doesn’t respond. She continues hiking, and Ava nearly drops the bearskin she’d hauled with her for the last two days, wrapped around her shoulders like the druskelle’s cloak is wrapped around her own. An irritation builds in her stomach, itching and impossible to ignore.

“Hey,” she says sharply. “What should I have done, then? What would you have done if it was your brother?”

“I never had a brother,” the druskelle says without hesitation.

“Fine, play with semantics,” Ava says, unwilling to give up. She hitches the bearskin higher around her shoulders and scrambles after her. “Someone you love. Your best friend. Your mother--”

“My parents threw me out,” the druskelle says. She turns abruptly, quick enough that Ava nearly falls on her ass trying to stop from barrelling into her. “They took me on a carriage out into the wilderness and left me there. When I tried to go home, my entire village had been destroyed by an inferni. My parents burned in their beds.”

Ava stares at her, the bearskin heavy at her shoulders. She’d grown up in Keramzin, meaningless and unimportant and dreaming like all orphans do about parents who loved her, a mother and a father who would love her if they were still alive. It had never occurred to her, a war orphan whose only memory of her parents was them trying to protect her when the war spilled into their town, that there were parents who might cast their children aside.

“I am druskelle to protect Fjerda,” the druskelle says, fury snapping in her dark eyes. “To protect other children from losing their families to witchcraft. From people like you.”

“To protect people from me,” Ava says slowly. “People like your parents, who threw you away?”

The druskelle’s jaw clenches, muscles in her neck working in stark lines, faint freckles dark against the flush of anger spreading across her cheeks. “I became druskelle to honor them in their death as I should have when they lived,” she says, voice shaking with anger.

“You hunt people who just want to exist so you can honor people who abandoned you in the woods?” Ava shoves at her shoulder. It’s weak-- she’s exhausted, and hasn’t eaten in two days, and the druskelle has broad shoulders and powerful arms that Ava has become more familiar with than she’d ever want to, thanks to the Fjerdan cold and the unheated huts they’ve been forced to sleep in, and she barely flinches with the effort. Ava slams a fist into her shoulder, stubborn and unwilling to give up. “I never wanted to be grisha. I didn’t ask to be this. I just wanted to keep my brother safe and then--”

A groan snaps through the air, and she cuts off when the druskelle’s eyes go wide. There’s a split second when she’s about to pick up her anger and keep ranting, and then the world cracks below her feet and she falls.

She slams into the side of the crevasse, her shoulder nearly dislocating and an aching pressure around her wrist. Her face crashes into the ice of the ravine when her momentum stops, and she lets out a pained noise through gritted teeth before looking up.

Above her the druskelle is flat on her stomach, both hands closed tight around Ava’s wrist, and they both freeze. Ava hangs from her grip, her entire body aching as it hangs from the druskelle’s hands. She could drop Ava, could just let go and let her fall into the unending dark below her, leave her here to die alone and cold in the middle of the wilderness, and no one would ever find her. The druskelle who killed the sun summoner, a hero to the Fjerdan people for killing the first hope the Ravkan people have had in four centuries..

Ava hangs in her hands and finds the same desperate need to live, the one that had burst out of her when a volcra’s claws had latched onto her on the deck of the skiff and tried to pull her away from Diego, crawling up her throat. Sunlight warms under her skin, but sunlight won’t save her here.

“Please,” she says, aching and scared. The unwavering grip on her arm aches, radiating beautifully down her arm, the only thing keeping her alive. “Please.”

The druskelle stares down at her, hands still tight around her wrist, and Ava watches her eyes narrow and shoulders somehow square even as she lays half-hanging over the edge of the ravine, and then, suddenly, she pulls.

Ava’s shoulder screams, the joint protesting the tension it’s under, until she can get her other arm up and gripping at the druskelle’s wrist and square up her weight. It’s only half a minute, maybe, before Ava is able to reach up and latch onto the druskelle’s arm to help pull herself the rest of the way up and crawl over the edge, sprawl onto the snow, but it feels like an eternity. Her body aches with the effort, but she collapses onto her side next to the druskelle and then rolls onto her back, gasping and shaking and staring at the cold gray sky.

Next to her, the druskelle flops onto her back as well, and Ava’s head rolls to the side to stare at her profile and the way her chest is heaving.

“Beatrice,” the druskelle says eventually. “My name is Beatrice.”

Ava keeps staring at her, at the straight line of her nose and the arc of her cheekbone and the sweep of her jaw. The druskelle who saved her life. Beatrice.

“Beatrice,” she echoes after too long staring. She speaks carefully, testing the way the name feels in her mouth. “I’m Ava.”

Beatrice’s head tilts to the side, precise and meticulous, until she can look at Ava. Her dark eyes are unreadable but her mouth is soft and uncertain, and Ava fights the urge to shift closer and curl herself into Beatrice’s side.

“Pleased to make your acquaintance.” Beatrice drags one arm up and offers it awkwardly across the space between them, and Ava meets her in the middle without thinking about it. Her hand is warm, somehow, despite the cold they’re lost in; her palm calloused and her thumb folding carefully over the back of Ava’s hand.

“Nice to meet you, Beatrice,” Ava finally says.

Ava means to let go, but her hand lingers. Beatrice doesn’t let go either, and Ava can barely feel the cold seeping through her kefta-- the bearskin had fallen away, lost into the ravine-- for long seconds before Beatrice pulls her hand free and stands up, only to offer it back to Ava and pull her up to her feet.

Wordlessly, Beatrice strips her cloak off and wraps it around Ava’s shoulders. She fastens the clasp and her knuckles brush against Ava’s throat, and a warmth that has nothing to do with her summoning spreads through Ava.

#s2 of s&b was all over the place but it has been jarring my feelings about #grishava #writing tag #warrior #ava silva #sister beatrice #sun summoner ava and the druskelle who fell in love with her: a fic by me that will probs never be fully written #though who knows #trying to shake off the cobwebs for chef au and needed a palate cleanser

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