Hello @azuliocoolio! This is my gift for you in the @aphsecretsanta, featuring NorBela and background HunUkr with a mishmash of the prompts fashion, Christmas and space. I hope you like it!
aurora
pairings/characters: Belarus (Nadzeya)/Norway (Einar), Hungary (Erzsébet)/Ukraine (Iryna)
word count: 3856
summary:
Nadzeya’s inspiration has waned so much that even a dumb gift from her sister-in-law that’s supposed to bring her luck seems like a good way to bring it back. She isn’t sure what to think of the strange, beautiful man it lands in her life instead.
Nadzeya would like to be able to say that she’s trying. That she’s been trying.
She stares at the blank paper on her lap, and sighs, letting herself slide down the headboard until she’s lying flat on the narrow bed in her sister’s guest room. The glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling seem to be mocking her, somehow. She sticks her tongue out at them, uselessly lifts one leg and swipes pointed toes in their general direction.
It was her idea to stick those stars up there, because she’d already realized then that she’d be the person spending the most time in the guest room and reckoned she deserved a say in its decoration. Besides the fact that she’s always been fascinated by the night sky, it was also a tribute to the first successful fashion collection she’d ever designed, which had been inspired by that very same thing.
And now here she is.
Nadzeya puts her sketchbook over her face like a tent and lies still, trying to pretend she’s not feeling sorry for herself instead of doing anything about her situation.
“Uh, not to interrupt whatever’s going on here…” The voice comes from near the door and belongs to her sister.
Nadzeya vaguely waves one hand around, aware that her sliding has rucked her skirt up all the way to her waist and she must look like a mess lying around in her stockings. Still, Iryna has seen her in worse condition.
“We think you should at least come down and have dinner with us.” Iryna pads over, barely making any noise with her socked feet on the wood of the floor, and sits down on the edge of the bed, the mattress dipping. “Erzsébet got you a present.”
“She shouldn’t have,” Nadzeya tells the empty pages of her sketchbook.
“Well, she has. She likes you.”
Erzsébet, Iryna’s wife, is a great person, Nadzeya has always thought that. Especially now, though, when the woman has accepted her staying here without once complaining, she’s almost jealous of her sister for having gotten to marry her.
“I like her too, but she really shouldn’t have,” she repeats, blinking up at her sister when the sketchbook is plucked from her face. “You look nice.”
“You look great as well, I like your underwear.” Iryna tucks her short hair behind her ear with a smile. “It’s Christmas, Nadz.”
“I know,” she groans, pushing herself up. “I know. I dressed up and everything. I’m just having one of those days.”
“That’s fine. Come on down and take your mind off it.”
That’s usually the best course of action for her, so Nadzeya nods, swings her legs out of the bed, and follows Iryna downstairs, where it smells delicious, a little sweet and a little spicy, and Erzsébet is singing along so loudly and so horrendously to Christmas songs that she wonders how she didn’t hear it from upstairs.
“Honey,” Iryna says, raising her voice slightly, and Erzsébet jumps around, then grins when she sees them standing in the doorway to the kitchen.
“Welcome!” she tells Nadzeya, who inclines her head with a small smile. “Well, you better help out!”
It’s good to have something to do that isn’t staring at an empty page and hoping inspiration will strike so that Nadzeya won’t have to live off her sister and sister-in-law anymore, can get her own apartment back. Can get back to doing what she really loves. For now, she chops and slices vegetables diligently according to Erzsébet’s instructions, does a duet with Iryna to Do They Know It’s Christmas where she gets all the lyrics wrong, and laughs at the panicked searching for cinnamon that ensues halfway through cooking something that needs a lot of it.
Dinner is a mishmash of what Nadzeya and Iryna have grown up with and what Erzsébet must have, but it’s great. They call their brother, who’s working, and he has to yell through the bad reception until he’s cut off completely and they decide to send a message instead.
When Nadzeya looks up from that, Erzsébet is holding a small gift out to her, a boxy shape wrapped in red paper.
“You shouldn’t have,” she says, staring at the thing.
“It reminded me of you.” Erzsébet grins. “If it makes you feel better, it’s second-hand. Just something silly.”
That does kind of make her feel better, and Nadzeya has to admit she’s got a fondness for odd trinkets. She takes the present gingerly, putting it on her outstretched hand and inspecting it. It feels heavier than she anticipated. Curious, she tears the paper and puts it aside when the cardboard box underneath is revealed.
Erzsébet gestures at her to continue, while Iryna hooks her chin over her shoulder and watches with curiosity, swiping her wife’s long brown hair away. Nadzeya smirks up at them.
In the cardboard box, she finds a snow globe, of all things, a tiny thing with a brass bottom engraved with unfamiliar, rune-like signs. Behind the slightly dusty glass, she can make out small shapes. A little landscape, it seems, with pine trees and a cottage on a hill. When she shakes the thing, there’s the expected swirl of white inside. She smiles.
“It’s cute.” She looks up at Erzsébet. “How the fuck did it remind you of me, though?”
The woman grins. “The guy I bought it from told me it’s got a legend attached. I know you like that kind of stuff. The mystic.”
Nadzeya can hear the quotes around ‘mystic’, which just makes her huff. She does have an interest in that. Not many people seem to understand, but that’s fine.
“What’s the legend?” Iryna asks.
“No clue,” Erzsébet replies cheerfully. And, when Nadzeya shoots her a flat look, “The dude said the runes explain it, but neither of us reads runes, so that was that.”
“And I do?” Nadzeya asks.
Her sister-in-law just grins wider, and Iryna shakes her head fondly.
“Thank you, Erzsébet. I like it.” Because it’s nice that something made her think of Nadzeya at all, let alone that she actually bought and wrapped it for her.
“I’m glad.” She actually pats her head—Nadzeya thinks she might be slightly tipsy—then turns and drags Iryna to the couch, falling down on it.
Iryna shoots Nadzeya a slightly helpless smile.
“Well,” Nadzeya says, standing up, “merry Christmas. I’ll leave you to it.”
Iryna wishes her a merry Christmas. Erzsébet just winks at her and throws her feet up on the coffee table.
Back in the guest room, she swaps her skirt and stockings for comfortable jogging pants and lies on the bed for a while, shaking the snow globe and inspecting the runes. If they’re regular runes, it shouldn’t be too hard to find out what they mean, right? The internet exists, after all. Might as well give it a try.
Half hanging off the bed and listening to music a little bit too loudly on her earphones, Nadzeya searches for runic alphabets and tries to match the letters she finds to the ones on the snow globe. As expected, it isn’t hard to find the corresponding letters in the Latin alphabet, and the resulting text looks like proper words too—the problem is that she has no idea in what language, and Google Translate is completely unhelpful on that front.
Still, she’s nothing if not stubborn, so she tries looking up an Old Norse translator and putting the words in one by one. After it tells her she needs the base forms of the words, whatever that means, she spends over an hour learning what that means, and it’s way too late when she finally manages to get some semblance of coherent text from the globe.
The previously blank page of her sketchbook now looks like her average French class notes from high school, a mess of words and scratches and random doodles, but what she gathers is that the globe ‘calls with intent’ the ‘guardian of the north’—or maybe the ‘avenger of the north’—to bring forth… Something. Something good.
“Well, guardian of the north,” Nadzeya mumbles, mostly asleep by now, “I could use something good, so you better bring it forth.”
When she falls asleep, the snow globe tumbles to the rug and fills with the familiar swirl of white, interspersed with deep midnight blue and turquoise. She doesn’t see it.
In the morning, Erzsébet and Iryna leave early to go and visit Erzsébet’s family. They invite Nadzeya to come along, but she doesn’t even know them, and feels her time is better spent not ruining anyone’s day. Iryna gives her a sad look and hugs her, warm and sweet.
“I’m fine, sis,” Nadzeya says.
“I know.”
Once they’re gone, Nadzeya does stretches in the living room because she’s got nothing better to do, and drinks three cups of coffee in a row. Jittery, she searches for food and finds none to her liking, so she takes a trip to the store to buy groceries.
When she gets back to Iryna’s house, there is a man sitting on the couch.
“Hello,” he says with a voice like velvet, casual as anything, looking up at her.
“Hello?” Nadzeya blinks, frowning. “Who the hell are you?”
He stands up in a fluid motion, unfolding into a tall, willowy shape decked out in midnight blue. Nadzeya involuntarily takes a step back when he comes her way, cataloguing the nearest things she could use as a weapon.
“You can call me Einar.” He looks down at her. His eyes are the most curious color she’s ever seen, dark blue bordering on violet, and they seem almost bewildered. “I’m… Confused.”
“You’re confused? You’re in my sister’s fucking house and I have no idea who you are and you’re confused?”
“I was called here,” he says, now sounding defensive.
“By whom?”
In response, he reaches into a pocket of his pants—and what the hell kind of fabric is that suit, it looks incredible—and pulls out the snow globe. Inside, the tiny landscape is cast in light, little ribbons of light along the top of the glass in hues of blue and purple. Nadzeya closes her fingers around it without thinking, and the man lets it go easily.
“What the fuck?” she says, feeling a little hysterical. “How did—No, oh my god, don’t tell me this actually worked.”
“It usually involves more… Rituals. But I come when needed.”
“So you’re the ‘guardian of the north’, or what?”
“In a way.” The tiniest smile tugs at his mouth. “You could say I am the north, or at least its light.”
Nadzeya looks between the snow globe and the man’s eyes. The light of the north. Surely, he doesn’t mean he somehow is the northern lights, does he? For all her interest in the mystic, the occult, she’s never actually encountered anything supernatural. Didn’t really expect to. And yet… This strange man with his beautiful eyes and his deep voice may just be the first. It shouldn’t be so easy to believe, but she’s tired and could honestly use some excitement.
“If you’re here, who’s manning the northern lights?”
The look he gives her in response is so patently unimpressed that Nadzeya decides she likes the guy, whatever he is.
“So, Einar.” She’s pleased that he takes a step back when she pushes forward, walking past him to the kitchen to make her food. He follows. “What do you usually get called down for?”
“It’s been very long,” he replies, watching with seeming curiosity while she puts groceries away, “but I’m expected to bring light to the life of those who summon me.”
Nadzeya leans against the kitchen counter and eats a sandwich while gesturing for him to continue.
“That can take many forms. My goal is to help.”
“Right. I don’t suppose you know anything about fashion?” She eyes him, and he gives her a searching look in return. “I thought so.”
“I feel insulted.” He doesn’t look insulted. He looks amused, and his strange suit looks…
“I’ve gotta draw something.”
Nadzeya practically runs out of the kitchen, and fills three pages of her sketchbook with flowing lines and dark blues while Einar watches quietly, his eyes swirling.
He’s gone when Iryna comes into the guest room to say goodnight.
The designs are good. They have the potential to be some of the best Nadzeya has ever done.
And she can’t seem to make any more.
Whatever it was about Einar that inspired her that day, she can’t capture it from memory. His form is fleeting in her mind, hard to pin down as the northern lights are. It frustrates her now more than before, because it seems so close. Shaking the fucking snow globe has no effect.
Not, at least, until the new year starts and Iryna and Erzsébet take their leave for a few days, entrusting Nadzeya with the care of their house and the chickens in the yard. The minute Nadzeya comes back inside after seeing them out, ensuring them the chickens won’t die, Einar is standing in the hall, pale face almost amused.
“What the fuck!” Nadzeya bursts.
“I’m—”
“I know who you are, you absolute—”
“Yes, I know, listen.” He touches her shoulders with long, cold fingers, and she stills. “There are conditions to the summoning. I’ve heard you calling, but I can’t always answer.”
“Well, you’re here now,” she replies, deflating. “I hope you can help me.”
He does. The fabric of his suit feels flighty under Nadzeya’s fingers, like nothing she’s ever worked with, but his voice is unexpectedly deep every time he speaks, like velvet or silk. He’s obviously smart, but in a different way than Nadzeya is used to. There is a wisdom about him, but also something cynical, something almost cold. Maybe it comes with the years.
For all that he knows much, without doubt, he doesn’t speak a lot, doesn’t eat or seem to use the bathroom, just hangs about and watches Nadzeya work, on her designs or around the house, obligingly helping when she asks.
On the last day before Erzsébet and Iryna are due back, Nadzeya grows a little tired of the passiveness of her shadow, because he’s so interesting and could be so much more, she feels.
“What do northern lights do for fun?” she asks Einar. He frowns ever so slightly—his facial expressions are minute, as if he isn’t used to communicating his emotions. Which is fair, really. Space phenomena probably don’t have much use of those, anyway. Nadzeya knows she’s not the best at emoting either; it’s something she’s never been good at, but the fashion world is harsh and doesn’t take kindly to weakness either.
“For fun?”
“Hm.” She raises her eyebrows. “Frolic in the snow? Have saunas? I don’t fucking know, put furniture together or something?”
“Why would I enjoy making furniture?” he asks, sounding so completely bewildered that she has to laugh.
Then he’s laughing too, and it’s the best sound she’s heard in ages, rich and melodious and yet fleeting as well, like everything about him. He’s one huge contradiction, and that’s what makes him so interesting.
“Never mind.” She sighs. “Can you stay?”
“Not here,” he replies. “One of the conditions is that there must be no one else in the dwelling of whoever calls on me.”
“Dwelling.”
Einar gives her one of those unimpressed looks she’s become pretty accustomed to over the past few days, and she grins.
“So as long as there’s no one else in the house, you can stay?”
A nod.
She considers this. There’s no one in her former apartment, but then she can’t pay the rent if she doesn’t finish her designs, and she can’t—at least, doesn’t seem to be able to right now—do that without Einar around. She hates to think of it like that. Hates to be dependent on anyone, even on her sister, let alone a not-quite-man she doesn’t even really know.
“Wait. Hold on.” She tugs at her sleeve. “This isn’t actually my house. I don’t technically have a house. Or a dwelling or whatever.”
She definitely doesn’t imagine the sly smile curling around Einar’s lips, or the defiant tilt of his head when he announces the aurora will have to do without him for a while.
-
To say her sister and sister-in-law are bewildered when they come home to find Einar there would be a gross understatement.
Still, there’s enough space in the house for him, and although Iryna complains that she isn’t running a charity here, she accepts that he’s an old friend of Nadzeya’s who’s in a bad place and is ordering him around in the kitchen within hours. That, in turn, leaves him bewildered, and Nadzeya has to laugh at him again.
The contrast of him and Iryna is baffling. The juxtaposition of his long, sharp lines and her kind, rounded shapes inspires several other designs, some of which will definitely make the final cut.
Erzsébet seems to take everything in stride. Nadzeya loves that woman.
“I’d tell you to marry her if you weren’t already married,” she tells Iryna, who laughs in response.
“If it weren’t for that man, I’d be sure you’d steal my wife one day.”
Einar stays through January, and Nadzeya sees the actual northern lights in the sky for the first time in her life, even though they’re too far south here and the sky isn’t actually dark enough for them, she thinks.
“Just trying to help,” Einar says.
“Of course.”
In February, Nadzeya gets restless and leaves on impulse, taking her old car and driving away without a destination in mind.
She’s never been good at domesticity, probably never will be. It’s stifling to her, too reminiscent of her chilly childhood and its pretend-happiness.
Einar, of course, shows up the day after she leaves. She’s glad to see him, again wearing the midnight blue of the mysterious fabric she hasn’t seen in a while—because it would be weird for him to turn up in that every day.
“You’re here.” Leaning against the door of the motel room she’s just checked into, Nadzeya looks over at him. Are they friends? Although he’s technically only around because he was summoned, he’s changed quite some. He talks back, now, makes bitingly sharp comments at TV shows Nadzeya likes to have on in the background. Tells amazing stories about the things he’s seen from the sky.
“Of course I am.” One raised eyebrow, blond hair falling in front of his other eye. “Someone has to look after you.”
“Fuck you,” she says lightly. He smiles.
The impromptu getaway turns into a roadtrip, because ‘things look different from the ground’, according to the local space phenomenon. Maybe Nadzeya should have done this before, should have gotten away from everything she knows and just explored the world. Or the country, as it were. But it’s difficult to do that alone, even for her.
Einar, though, Einar wonders at the most common things. He likes to touch everything he can, likes to comment on smells, and it helps Nadzeya see the world in a completely different way than the slightly jaded one she’s become used to. She, in turn, sees patterns where there are none, makes up crazy stories about people that pass by, and introduces Einar to music. He shares her taste, it turns out. She’s rather proud of that and blasts loud guitars from her car radio whenever she can.
In spring, the collection, which she titles Aurora, is completed and accepted, and she couldn’t be happier, until she realizes that this might be the end of what she has with Einar.
He’s her friend, in a way she can’t describe because she has never had anyone like him before. Someone so familiar yet completely alien in many ways, and it feels like he’s chosen her. She doesn’t care about him inspiring her as much as she does about keeping him as a person. If he left…
“There will always be new collections.” Her tone is hopeful, she’s aware, she’s tugging at the sleeve of her dress, and Einar appears searching more than anything else, looking down at her with those beautiful eyes of his. It’s dusk, and the red sky casts sharp shadows on his angular face, accentuating the sharpness of his cheekbones, the cut of his jaw.
“I suppose so.”
“Please,” she says, and they both know she’s not one to plead, “stay.”
He reaches out and runs a thin finger along her temple, gently tucks a lock of pale hair behind her ear, and she’s afraid to look away lest he disappear. Her inspiration is back, and it may not be linked to this man, but he is linked to her now.
“Nadzeya,” he breathes. His eyes are purple and turquoise and pink.
She grasps his wrist. Bony, and cold as always, and there’s so much she’s yet to learn about him.
“Stay,” she says again.
He stays.
He stays through the summer, through short nights that feel like they last forever, warm evenings and the first sunburn he ever gets.
“You’re literally light, how the hell do you get a sunburn?” Nadzeya rages.
“I’m light pushed inside a human form,” he replies, “and humans are… Dumb.”
And you know what, she can’t really argue with that, because it only takes her a whole summer and autumn of apartment-hunting with the guy before she figures that shit, she might be in love with him. It takes Erzsébet assuming they’re together and her brother congratulating her on landing a hot guy like that—seriously?—before it really sinks it what the hell she’s doing.
“You’re distressed,” Einar observes, leaning against the window of her—of their?—new apartment, more out of the city in an area with little light pollution but great internet.
“I’ve had a weird year,” she says faintly. Sighs. “A year probably doesn’t mean much to you, right? All of this…”
“It means everything to me, Nadzeya. I promise.”
They look at each other quietly across the darkened, mostly empty room.
“I should be long back,” Einar eventually says, voice low. So low, in fact, that Nadzeya draws towards him like a magnet to hear him better.
“Why aren’t you?”
He takes some steps in her direction as well, and then they’re in the middle of the room, in each other’s space, and he smells as he always does, like pine and ozone and snow, and his eyes are midnight blue.
“There are many ways to bring light to someone’s path.” He presses his thin lips together. “Maybe you did that for me. I’ve never known what it’s like to be human, and you’ve shown me.”
“Strangely, I feel much the same.”
“I can stay, for as long as you want me. Until such time comes that you can join me in the sky.” He huffs. “Well, you know, if you want that by then.”
The dry tone is too much. Nadzeya smiles helplessly, pushes her hands into his hair, and kisses him.
He feels light.