a.n: The end of Siege and Storm left me with too many tears and not enough ice cream, so - because I'm totally not a masochist for these characters, nah man, not me - I wrote something that has the potential to be even more tragic! YEAH!

disclaimer: lol

He doesn't want to believe it when he hears the stories.

They call him the dark king and her the pale queen. They say Grisha patrol the streets. They say dissenters are hung, quietly, without trial - and they say an army of blackness roosts in the highest towers, in the shadowy alleyways, waiting for their time to strike.

Mal also bides his time. He remembers those last few months with Alina with a dull, twisting ache. I loved her, he thinks, and then: I love her. He has never not, not since the first time he saw her, scraggly hair, barefoot, her eyes wider than the rest of her face. It doesn't matter what she's become. He sharpens his knives, thinks of his hand on her shoulder, tugging her free from the Darkling's grip; he would not have her martyr herself. It was selfish, but he had thought there was another way, that, maybe, if he saved her, he would somehow save everything else, that all their cracks would mend, that things would be good again. He thinks of the Darkling wrenching her out of his grasp, blood and blackness pouring down his face, calling his creatures back into himself; and Alina had gone limp, her hair brittle and white and her body broken.

He does not know what he believes. She could be sitting upon the throne of Ravka. The Apparat lays his hands on his pilgrims and his soldiers and tells them that she is an unwilling pawn, that she has been captured, that she is even now - even as they speak, drugged, manipulated. Mal sits in the corner and doesn't speak. Her glinting gaze haunts him; it was the mad fever of the saint they portray her as, an unworldly lust, an ambition with teeth. Her laughter, too, and her scent, are ghosts around him. She was his best friend. She was the love of his life. He hopes that when he finds her it will be in a gilded cage, and that they will put their heads together and escape, and that together they will bring down the Darkling. They will be heroes. It will be like a story (and her voice, whispering in his mind: doesn't have an end, Mal) and they'll live happily ever after.

If she is in the dark he will drag her into the light, and if he can't - he will love her, even with his hands around her throat, even with her neck snapped between his fingers.