Chapter Text
Nesta snored like the living dead, her head on Elain’s lap.
Everyone was here, Elain noticed, observing the soft glow of the drawing room. Everyone except for a particular shadow-wreathed male. That was to be expected these days.
Something caught in her ribs at the thought and whispered,
It wasn’t always that way.
No, she supposed. It wasn’t.
Azriel hadn’t always been pointedly absent. Azriel hadn’t always been the first to leave when he did attend a dinner. There were several evenings in the months leading up to that terrible Solstice a year ago, in which everyone would dissipate upstairs as the hour grew late.
And in that hour, Azriel would stay.
The memory surfaced to her like a hand reaching through fog.
Winter’s breath clung to the windowsill.
A year and some months ago. Her second solstice in this strange, fae body was fast approaching. Nesta had finally accepted whatever was forged between herself and Cassian. Feyre and Rhysand had a beautiful baby boy to spoil and fawn over.
And Elain,
Elain was beginning to fall.
She was falling into something deep and fragile and nameless.
Falling in a way she never had with Graysen, a love she thought so true, but was brittle within and broken with ease.
Falling in a sense she certainly couldn’t force with Lucien. Lucien, who was thrust at her the moment she first drew breath into this new body, before she could even recall her own name. A choice now ripped from her by some cruel, unseen hand.
No.
Not in those ways.
Nobody saw, nobody noticed.
But Elain was falling.
The first real winter storm was upon Velaris. Her family spent the week together at the sprawling river manor, eating and laughing and drinking away each night leading up to the holiday. Mor, Feyre and Cassian were standing to leave the drawing room after a particularly long and lush drinking session.
Solstice decorations littered the room. They needed tidying, but Solstice proper was still another couple of days away. Elain would tend to them in the morning.
Maybe rope in the twins.
She was too tired to fuss this evening.
Too undeniably content.
Cassian was inebriated enough to stumble into an armoire as he stood to leave, knocking over a decanter filled with some invaluable liquor that Elain knew was something obscene like 2,000 years old. The room itself seemed to inhale sharply, awaiting the inevitable shatter- but it was Azriel who reached out with one quick, feline movement just in time.
A collective sigh rang throughout.
“Rhys would have skinned my ass for that one,” Cassian snorted, slapping Azriel on the back hard enough to make the furniture chatter. Feyre muttered an agreement.
“Fare sleep, brother,” is all Azriel murmured, resettling in his armchair.
The trio left the room, and a lovely, enveloping silence filled the space. The shadowsinger leaned his dark head upon a perched fist as he gazed at the hearth.
Quiet settled. Blessed quiet. Elain exhaled gently at the welcomed splendor of it.
It was just the two of them now. She generally looked forward to it being that way.
Elain loved her family dearly- she loved that they teased, and spoke, and laughed, and argued constantly, so that she didn’t have to. She was never that person. She enjoyed listening. She enjoyed echoes of silence. It would never make her uncomfortable, as it did so many others. Elain found solace just to simply watch, to listen, to learn, to know.
And not share any of it at all.
“You’ve had the same amount to drink as Cassian,” she observed, a shy sort of lilt in her voice.
Azriel's mouth quirked upwards.
“No one would know.” He indeed took a casual sip from an amber colored glass resting on his knee.
“Has he always been a sloppy drunk?” she grinned, wine lacing warm tendrils up her cheeks.
Azriel's shoulders loosened ever so marginally, the only indication that he was now more at ease than he had been a few minutes prior. Those great, dark wings draped behind him, relaxed.
“Cassian’s his own creature.”
A poignant, warm sort of pause.
“As are you,” Elain noted quietly, her smile fading into something softer.
Azriel slowly lifted his hooded lashes to look to her, his head still resting slightly sideways. The movement seemed to last an eternity.
She did not turn away, choosing to take in his face.
It was a thing of ethereal beauty.
Not even Elain could deny that the males of this house were particularly damning specimens.
But she knew somehow, in the quiet hours of the night, that Azriel was leagues beyond his brothers. There was a symmetry in his visage that was nearly flawless, like he was carved out of stone in a manner perfected by some long forgotten god.
The shadowsinger's face was slightly more narrow, with thick brows framing a haunting pair of eyes, often hooded by those sweeping eyelashes. His cheekbones were slightly higher, curving handsomely to the plush of a sensual mouth set against a chiseled jaw. A tangle of thick, black hair kissed his brow and softly curled just at his cheeks and neck, unlike either of his brothers.
After flying in the rain, she noticed, those soft curls appeared all over his head. She couldn't remember the number of times she'd dreamt of running her fingers through them.
Belladonna
Elain thought, in the quietest hours of the night.
Azriel blooms like belladonna.
Deadly nightshade, devil's cherry, some call it. A beautiful omnipotent plant with delicate leaves and dark flowers, sweet to taste, but once ingested would choke the life from any being within a few moments. Filled with poison, blessed with beauty and rage.
He was leaner and lither than his brothers, yet still corded with muscle all the same. A particularly defined knob in his throat that was ever so male, and her attention snagged there all too often. Strapping, taught shoulders where his shadows often perched and swirled. Those same shoulders brandished imminently large, dark wings.
Elain still remembered the first time she saw those wings.
“Cassian and I hail from a race of faeries called Illyrians,” he had said a lifetime ago, “We’re born hearing the song of the wind.”
She finally turned to look at him, really look at him.
"That’s very beautiful,” she had replied with honest, open eyes.
What was more beautiful was the gentleness with which he said such wistful things. It was not lost on Elain, even then.
And what she meant that day, what had stilled her shaking human hands, was another thought.
He is certainly no monster. He is very beautiful.
He, who was gentle and reverent with words, from the start. It called to the innate softness in her like the haunting song of a siren.
Azriel was not playful like Rhysand. Or arrogant like Cassian.
No, he was his own creature.
Observant, churning. A vast, dark, sapphire sea of listening and knowing and choosing not to share any of it at all. There was something exquisite about that, but Elain couldn’t name it.
The prowess in his silence, his careful choice of whatever words he did speak, it drew her like a moth to flame.
Elain examined the feeling as it awoke within her that evening, watching him from across the room.
She planted it like a seed into the space on her right side, just between her ribs. A place that too-often ached with loneliness. She seeded it with the thought of him, and him alone. This fragile secret stowed away from the world. A quiet, budding desire she couldn’t share with anyone at all.
If the fates were less cruel, they'd allow her to watch him for hours this way. Elain did anyway, sometimes, as subtly as she could, just to spite them in the end.
She watched him brood. She watched him finish particular things on his dinner plate more quickly than others. She watched him tilt his head every so often, as if he were listening to all the lost songs of the world. She watched his annoyance flair when Cassian spoke with a mouth full of food. She watched him grin on rare, lovely occasion. She watched his eyes observe and note things, linger places, and rarely meet anyone else’s gaze.
Those eyes.
Azriel had remarkable, hazel eyes of molten ore that seemed to change color with those moods. Some evenings Elain thought the gold simmered most, others it was the flecks of forest green or cool slate that stood out. All blended into an impenetrable hazel fortress.
Elain wanted to know what was locked within that fortress.
So slowly, she began to linger, week after week. To watch him. To listen. And learn. And not share any of it at all.
Tonight was such a night, and she was well at ease. Curled on one end of a long, plush sofa, a gown the color of pale moonlight spilling over her legs, which were tucked beneath her.
The gaze between them still held.
And for the first time, she allowed something to emit in her face, in her body, as she looked into his beautiful, haunted features.
want
Elain let the feeling shift something in her incandescent brown eyes, she willed it to create the most delicate invitation, a fragile trace of -
want
- into his own.
She dipped her chin lightly and pulled her heavy brown curls over a shoulder, allowing the fragile expanse of her neck to expose itself just a little bit more.
An offering.
Azriel swallowed, eyes hooded by impossibly long eyelashes, as she conveyed the offering.
I see you, shadowsinger. Come and see about me.
Elain could shatter the world with that look. But instead she just let it unveil itself here, in this quiet, warm space, with no one but him to witness.
And through it, a steady pulse of-
want
The smallest whisper of her scent began to shift, dancing to life for the first time in what felt like a thousand years.
Elain let that truth bask in the piercing hazel stare from across the room, let it devour his gaze and pull.
I see you, her eyes danced, and I have want.
Yes, Elain Archeron could destroy the world with a single look. But she’d rather flirt with this dark, beautiful creature instead.
Her liquid mahogany gaze did not falter, again, pulling.
Azriel swallowed. Hazel dilated the smallest fraction in the dark, a reaction to something she couldn’t name.
He lifted his head from where it was resting to observe her fully. His shadows, which had been lazing about his shoulders all evening, began curling as if to study her curiously.
The gold flecks of his eyes were now burning with something raw, sacred and new.
Something that Elain had not yet glimpsed in her delicate acquaintance with the shadowsinger. The unspoken charge between them now pushing and pulling and drawing closer. A fragile, hypnotic dance of few words and quiet understandings, these long weeks.
But tonight, that look in his eyes was something new, something raw, there- in the gold-
need
Elain's heartbeat absolutely keened with the recognition of it in his eyes. Calling her to envelope that whisper of need with chestnut brown warmth and pull.
Azriel's throat bobbed in turn.
She somehow managed not to look away. Attraction was a now different sort of thrum in her blood, inevitable and fierce and fae. It put the countless lost desires of her mortal life to absolute shame. Every shift in Azriel's eyes, in his scent, in his beating heart- she could taste them like rich, dark wine.
Something like restlessness tremored through her.
Something like liquid delight tremored through her.
Something like desire tremored through her, and purred-
Come see about me
And because he was no fool, Azriel moved.
Azriel held Elain’s gaze, downed the last of his liquor and stood, enormous wings trailing behind him.
He seemed taller than she recalled in that moment. The shadowsinger approached the sofa slowly, studying her cautiously like a fawn to bolt. He broke the trance only to regard the empty space beside her, dark hair falling into his eyes, and then glancing back to her for permission.
Always the gentleman.
Which went quite a long way with Elain Archeron.
She nodded once, lowering her lashes, and reached again for her wine.
Azriel claimed the opposite end of the sofa, leaning his back against the far arm and facing her directly. His wings settled to drape behind the back of his post, his boot nested on the floor beside him, and the other curled under his knee. Elain shifted her body to face him in a similar manner.
They stared across the empty space between them, which felt too small and too large all at once. Elain did not fidget or balk at this bold, newfound nearness, and she wasn’t sure why.
No looking away tonight, then.
Azriel kept his eyes on her from across the sofa, as if hypnotized by the fact that she was actually looking at him, not bashfully, or politely listening- but looking.
A gaze held between two people who often watched the world and seldom spoke was a rather powerful thing.
No turning away.
The hazel glimmered in agreement.
“Thought for a thought?” he asked, his timbre soft and velvet.
His voice shattered the spell she was under, as it so often did. Elain suddenly became aware of his proximity, lowering her lashes and toying with the soft fabric of her moon white gown.
“I’m thinking,” she murmured, “that I want to know something about you. Something that nobody else knows.”
Azriel remained silent. It was clear no one had truly asked him such a thing before. At least not a female. When he finally spoke, his words were calculated, intended, and beautiful.
“I believe you already know a thousand things about me that no one knows, Elain.”
There was an intensity to his gaze that had her toes curling. The naked truth in those words, undeniable.
Elain's face warmed at the sound of her own name on his sensual mouth, something in her ribs awakening.
“I don’t disagree with that,” she offered delicately in response. “But I suppose I would like to have something... something of you that you haven’t given to anyone else, so that I may cherish it.”
Where did such brave words come from, she wondered.
Azriel swallowed thickly, saying nothing for a long moment. He peered across the room to the fire, a slight golden blush staining his cheek.
Elain watched him with doe-bright, demure eyes. She felt the sudden urge to softly brush her lips over his blush. If only to tell him that she was overly prone to them herself, and understood the feeling all too well. She buried the thought before allowing it to take root.
Azriel's shadows began slipping from his end of the couch to her, slowly, cautiously, as if to test her comfort with their nearness.
Something in her murmured silent softness in that direction, soothing their hesitation. The shadows inched closer in response, and a particularly curious one came to rest on the sofa's edge near her shoulder.
Azriel watched his shadows, swallowing again. And then answered her request.
“My mother is alive," is all he said.
The words sounded hollow.
Elain's eyes glittered as she registered them.
"Is she well?"
A long, terse sort of pause followed.
"My father arranged for her to slave most of her years in the northern reaches. Some sort of punishment to me, I imagine, for finally growing into a creature he could never break.” Azriel's face remained unreadable but he continued. “Rhys was not yet High Lord, and his father was not a particularly caring male. He forbade us from searching for her. My father's status was... high among Illyrians. Rhys's father refused to put further strain on whatever flimsy leash the High Court held on the Illyrians before the war, for his own reasons." Azriel paused, considering. "But we did. Rhys and I searched for her for decades to no avail after we came of age. She was well hidden, and the Illyrians are crude and heartless. To find her and free her from those binds took well over a century.”
He contemplated for a moment, seeking out words. “I will not name what was done to her during that time.”
Elain swallowed, nodding solemnly.
The words left him quietly, as if they had needed to for quite some time but had no vessel for escape.
“Some Illyrian ways run so old and deep that they are beyond even Rhysand’s abilities to absolve. Eventually he shattered enough minds that her whereabouts were made known. She was alive, but broken. So we took her back, and that’s all that mattered.”
Azriel shifted, staring fixedly at the fire. “Rhys gifted her a small manor on the outskirts of Velaris, near the woods of the Umbrie. I see her as often as possible.”
Elain nodded again, some small relief sinking into her heart. She had never heard him share so many words at once. She noted the slight tension in his shoulders, the taughtness there. She knew revealing such things had likely left him feeling exposed. Vulnerable. His shadows coiling close, as if keen to retreat entirely.
But nothing could express the sorrow Elain felt, if only for the calmness he emitted even while recounting such tragedy.
“I hope she has found peace in that place,” was all Elain said.
It was honest.
“Peace she has never known elsewhere," Azriel murmured back.
The room was quiet.
“She is… precious to me.” The confession so soft it was barely audible.
Elain listened wordlessly, knowing it was a rare gift indeed for the shadowsinger to share any piece of his own true feelings.
“Whatever comfort I can bring her will be one of the few small joys I have in this life.”
How few joys he must have ever known sank into her heart. He would never believe himself deserving of any of them, she knew.
This beautiful, broken male.
My lovely, lethal belladonna.
“I am indebted to Rhysand for eternity for what he has done for her,” he said finally.
“I doubt the High Lord sees it that way,” Elain murmured. “No one should stand to watch the suffering of those who have already endured life’s darkest cruelties.”
In truth she didn’t know if she was referring to Azriel or his mother.
Or herself.
Or the rest of the family.
Mother above, were they a household of damaged souls.
Azriel’s eyes simmered. A bout of silence followed.
“Cassian never knew?” she asked after a while. Azriel remained pensive.
“Eventually he did. But not of our search, or how we found her initially. We needed to be as discreet as possible those years, and Cassian…” one of his eyebrows raised as he studied a cobalt siphon on his hand.
“I see,” Elain smiled gently.
“He knows she survived, and where she now dwells. He was furious not to be included, but with time he understood.”
Elain considered quietly.
“At any rate, Rhysand knows about it all, so it doesn’t fulfill my request, does it?” she asked with a smile.
A smile chasing away the darkness, laced with- come back, come play.
It seemed to pull Azriel out of the dark sea just enough, his shadows lightening a fraction. The shadowsinger exhaled.
“Alright,” he said coolly, unmoving.
She could tell that sharing so much was quite difficult for him, but he submitted to her anyway. She glowed just a little and tucked that knowledge away for later.
Azriel stared back over the fire.
“I take exceptionally long baths, and my shadows can’t stand it. They hate the water. They stay in the other room and… fuss about.”
Elain’s face went slack for a moment and she glanced at the shadow still resting near her shoulder, which seemed to actually huff at its master. She lifted a hand to her mouth, trying to stifle a sound and ended up just fully releasing a hearty laugh, the sound a rich melody drifting through the room.
“Fuss... about?” she began, but her laugh overtook her, the sound like liquid warmth leaking out of her. The shadow beside her darkened moodily.
“They refuse to enter the washroom. Create… mischief,” he visibly struggled with the words, “to punish me.” He loosened a small exasperated sigh as if he had needed to express this for 500 years.
Elain’s head fell backwards and she laughed. Warmly.
She had never seen him so… unruffled.
She finally composed herself and the stain on his cheek did not go unnoticed.
“Poor little darlings,” she cooed, voice still bright with amusement, turning to the shadow on her shoulder, and blowing a soft breath of warm air at it.
Azriel shuddered slightly and blinked several times before swallowing thickly.
“Doing the bidding of their sullen master all day just to come home to his endless, brooding baths.” A grin filled her lovely face.
The shadow caressed her cheek in response.
Sweet, wicked, lovely lady
It seemed to say.
Elain careened her cheek forward for a moment, allowing the shadow to stroke her skin, her eyes fluttering closed, soft laughter still dancing out of her.
Azriel's eyes glittered. Then he ever so slightly yanked the shadow back towards himself with a scowl. It obeyed sheepishly, huffing its way back, joining its brothers, which seemed to swirl with mild agitation.
“Hardly brooding,” he grumbled.
Elain gave him a pointed look and she felt all of his shadows do the same.
He stared at the siphon on his left hand again, lazed along the back of the sofa.
Her gaze drifted to the siphon as well, and she contemplated the power sleeping beneath the sea of cobalt.
“I’m sure the respite is needed,” she chided, looking pointedly at the swirling mists of his shadows, if only to appease Azriel, “after a hard day’s work, for the spymaster.”
The shadows calmed a bit, as if half agreeing.
She chewed her cheek, trying very much not to imagine anything as improper as Azriel, with his immaculately beautiful wings and narrow, chiseled form, in the bath.
Or Azriel with his shirt off. Or Azriel with everything off.
Or Azriel toweling his beautiful curls dry. Or Elain toweling his beautiful curls dry.
Or Azriel's beautiful wings laced with drops of water.
Or Elain quietly rubbing those glorious wings, gentle handed, after a long flight through then night.
She took a long sip of wine, willing all of that aside. And reminded herself that such things could become evident in the very air of this room, now that she was fae.
Elain she was a strictly private creature. As was the male across from her.
Who took care of Azriel, she wondered, in his darkest hours, when the world was asleep?
Who bothered to ask of his wants, or his woes?
She met his eyes again. Her next words left her slowly, softly.
“Does it ache, to hear all the secrets of this world, but to have no one hear your own?”
He stared back, emotions veiled, but gaze more piercing than ever before.
“That’s two questions,” was all he said.
The fortress remained.
Her thoughts drifted back to his mother. She let a pleasant smile float to her visage. “I thank you for these truths, Azriel. I will surely keep them. and I will cherish them.”
“Will you honor me with a secret?” his voice again, was too gentle, velvet, cautious.
But Elain was not a fawn to bolt, not tonight. She considered for a moment.
“Would it be safe with a spymaster?”
“No,” he paused.
She parted her lips.
“- but I see no spymaster here,” he continued, glancing around the room. He flicked his eyes back to her, as he turned his hands over and gracefully opened both palms, “- just a nameless Illyrian bastard.”
The words echoed with a cold distaste, but beneath it something far more visceral- shame. Azriel watched her face, as if he truly must remind her of this. As if he needed to drink in her reaction, to regard the inevitable pity dancing hand in hand with the shameful echo of his heart.
Elain gave him no such thing.
How many terrible thoughts had been left to root and rot within this tragic, beautiful male, she wondered. She would yank them out like the treacherous weeds they were.
Elain furrowed her brows and said nothing. Then ever so slowly, she reached up to Azriel’s left hand, lingering along the back of the couch. She found the courage to run a soft finger down a white scar on his thumb and his eyes raised to meet hers, a trace of something raw blooming there.
need
She trembled and returned his gaze with a look of her own, the same look she shared earlier, unadorned.
I see you
A soft lifeline between them.
I see it all, and I have want.
Elain spoke before she lost herself to the feeling.
“I hadn’t had a vision in months,” she admitted.
Azriel just listened, still as death, and waited, unmoving.
“Until first snowfall.” Her hand lingered, tracing his, featherlight.
A week ago. She closed her eyes, remembering.
“I had a vision of raindrops collecting on vines of ivy, iris blooming, pale and strange, of beautiful, scarred hands,” she paused, “dripping with rain, running through damp grass.” Her eyes remained unfocused, as if still in that void.
Azriel watched her, silent and enraptured, the gold simmering in his eyes.
“And then,” a taut moment passed, “those same hands were running through my hair.”
He stilled and let out a soft breath, his eyes filling with something like wonder.
And then more softly, more quietly, it bloomed again-
need
She scented it this time, as if it could not be helped. Cedar, enveloped in cool evening mist, it softly bloomed into the space between them, and the moment it reached her it tasted rich and dark and needing and something distinctly and utterly male.
“Such beautiful hands,” she murmured, inhaling the essence of Azriel with parted lips,
“covered in scars,
and rain,
and grass,
and me.”
Her eyes closed at the final word, as she recalled the vision with reverence.
“Elain,” she heard him whisper, the sound strained from him, like a soft dam within him was about to burst.
A shadow dared to touch the hollow, exposed piece of her neck.
She trembled against the exquisite sensation, her lips parting ever so slowly
“I know it is wrong,” she said, opening her eyes,
“But if the cauldron were to only have asked, if anyone were to only have ever asked-”
She paused, as hesitating on the edge of a great precipice.
“It would have been you.”
He might have stopped breathing.
The confession rang in the air, half-hung between them. Azriel’s eyes burrowed into her with soft, holy wonder and then-
need
She had never spoken of this. To him. To anyone. Her mating bond, with a male she didn’t choose.
Azriel’s scent became a living thing, thick and heady, reaching the small space between them, and Elain visibly inhaled it while looking at him. Raw emotion finally bled just a trace through the elegant planes of his face, and the beauty of him laying it bare for her made her sigh within.
The first, holy glimpse of whatever raged behind the fortress. Elain made sure to capture it in her mind forever.
His face was more open than she had ever seen it, his brows slightly drawn, eyes scanning hers and reaching with such beautiful traces, traces that tasted like holy and perfect, and exquisite and how,
and then utter, raw-
need
Elain came to him, slowly. She drank in the burning intensity of his eyes, where moisture shined but did not fall, to fuel her courage and close the distance. She reverently brushed a hand to cradle his high, lovely cheek.
He shuddered gently at the touch, and raised his own trembling palm to cover it, as if to make sure it was real. His face swam with silent emotion, and she poured every ounce of comfort and caress into her palm as it truly reached for him for the first time.
She brushed her thumb against his perfect cheek. Again, his breath caught.
So Elain looked deep into the hazel storm, and slowly said the only thing she truly knew.
“I see you,” whispered in a trembling voice.
The confession refracted within him like a jolt to the heart.
Azriel’s eyes shuttered, as if some sort of inner collapse was sweeping him into the undertow. He hung his head low, burying both hands in his hair, the smallest, low noise escaping him. A shaking breath coursed down his back.
Elain had never felt so vulnerable as she did then.But she needed Azriel to know. He deserved to know.
My lovely, fragile, lethal belladonna
She thought, as she beheld him.
Who listens to the melody of you in the darkest hours of the night?
Elain slid a pale hand to rest on his neck, fingers resting in the softest of his dark curls there. She placed the lightest, most reverent kiss on the crown of his head.
She knew it was too much, all at once.
It’s enough, the place in her ribs whispered.
She was certain that they were both unable to dwell much longer in the heady scents of this budding thing- his raw need, her want, or either of their troubled pasts.
Lest the room burst into flames, burning down the river manor with the pride of the Night Court inside.
And this thing,
this fragile, beautiful thing,
deserved time.
Time to grow and bloom and fruit and fill her life with a thousand lovely mornings and nights and days in between.
So she kissed those curls once more, ever so softly and murmured near his perfect ear in parting,
“I see you, Azriel, and I cannot look away.”
A quiver ran down his dark, draped wings.
Elain did not look back to him as she slid away, finding her feet. Yet the image of him burned like an embering brand across her heart. A lord of shadows, head hung low, emotion lingering there, great black wings draped about him like a shroud.
“I know it's a little early, but Happy Solstice,” she murmured softly in parting, at the acknowledgement that they would see each other again tomorrow, and stepped through the archway without a glance behind.
The world felt like a new song.
And for the first time since becoming Fae, since stepping into the strange, dark ether of her new life-
Elain Archeron dared to look to the stars above and dream.