Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Elain was lying in bed, her duvet pulled up to her chin, smiling at the ceiling like a fool. The helpless, involuntary, slightly ridiculous smile that she couldn't have suppressed if she'd tried.

Because of her phone.

Because of the conversation on her phone from last night, still open on her screen, the words glowing in the early morning like something precious.

She'd texted him first. That was the part that kept making her cheeks flush and her stomach flutter every time she thought about it. She had texted him first, and it hadn't been about Mister Fern.

For the first time, it hadn't been about the fern at all.

It had been nearly midnight when she'd finally left the library. Her paper had taken twice as long as it should have, partly because the research was dense and her concentration was shot, but mostly because she'd lost two hours of her afternoon having lunch at a noodle restaurant with a man who made her forget that time existed.

She'd walked back to her dorm in the dark, her shoes crunching on the frozen path, the campus quiet and still around her. The cold bit at her ears and her fingers and the tip of her nose, but she barely noticed. She was thinking about the way Azriel had said you can get used to me. About the way he'd looked at her when she'd told him she didn't regret it.

She'd reached her building, swiped her keycard, stepped into the warm lobby. The elevator carried her up to the fourth floor. She unlocked her door, dropped her bag, hung up her coat.

And then she'd stood there, in the middle of her room, with her phone in her hand and a feeling she couldn't quite name pressing against her ribs.

She wanted to tell him she was home.

The impulse was strange and specific and completely without rational justification. They weren't dating. They weren't anything, not really. Just two people who shared custody of a fern and had accidentally shown each other the worst parts of themselves. There was no reason for her to check in.

But she wanted to. She wanted him to know she was home, safe, inside, warm. She wanted the last thought of her day to be directed at him, and she wanted—selfishly, desperately—to be the last thought of his.

It was the kind of impulse she'd have overthought into oblivion on any other night. She'd have drafted the message, deleted it, redrafted it, analyzed every word for hidden implications, and then ultimately not sent it because the risk of seeming needy or presumptuous or too much outweighed the reward.

But tonight was different. Tonight she still felt warm from lunch. Still felt the echo of his quiet laugh and his terrible jokes and the way he'd said that's not what everyone makes a fuss about with that devastating calm that suggested he knew things she hadn't experienced yet.

So she'd typed it. Quickly, before the anxiety could catch up.

Elain:
It was a long evening at the library. But I'm home now.

She'd hit send and then stared at the message, her heart hammering, the reality of what she'd just done settling over her like a wave.

She had just texted a man at 11:30 at night to tell him she'd arrived home safely.

That was a girlfriend thing. That was what people in relationships did. That was I want you to know I'm thinking about you at the end of my day disguised as a casual update.

She was halfway through composing a follow-up message, something about the paper, about the library being cold, anything to make the first text seem less loaded, when the three dots appeared.

Azriel:
You shouldn't have been at the library that late.

Elain stared at the message. The concern in it. The quiet, instinctive protectiveness that he probably didn't even realize he was showing.

Elain:
My assignment took longer than I planned. Turns out I didn't account for losing two hours of study time to an unexpected lunch.

She pressed send and felt a spike of adrenaline. That was teasing. That was unmistakable, deliberate teasing, implying that he was the reason she'd fallen behind, that their lunch had disrupted her carefully planned schedule, that she was blaming him for stealing her afternoon.

The three dots appeared and disappeared. Appeared again.

Azriel:
I didn't realize the lady had such a strict timetable. I'll try to keep future meals under ninety minutes so she can get back to her soil microbiomes.

Elain bit her lip, grinning into the dark of her room.

The lady. He'd called her the lady. And there was humor in it, that dry, understated wit she was learning to recognize, but also something else. Something warm. Something that suggested he was smiling on the other end of this conversation, lying in his own room, his phone in his hand, the screen lighting up his face the way hers was lighting up hers.

She could play it safe. She could respond with something neutral… haha or exactly or some other conversational dead end that would let them both retreat to comfortable distance.

Or she could be brave.

Elain took a breath. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard for a long moment.

Then she typed:

Elain:
I would choose lunch over the library anytime, actually. 😊

She pressed send and immediately pulled the duvet over her head, her heart slamming against her ribs like it was trying to escape her chest.

I would choose lunch over the library anytime.

In Elain's world, in the quiet, carefully constructed world of a girl who hid behind plants and polite smiles and the safety of never saying what she really felt, that was a declaration. That was I like spending time with you. I would choose you. Over and over, given the option, I would choose you.

And the emoji. God, the emoji. She never used emojis in text messages with him. The smiley face was intentional— a tiny yellow face that said I am flirting with you on purpose and I want you to know it.

Azriel:
That's a dangerous thing to tell me. I might start scheduling lunches every day.

Elain pressed her face into her pillow and made a sound that was half laugh, half scream.

Every day. He wanted to see her every day.

Or was he teasing? Was he matching her energy, the way he always did, reflecting her warmth back at her without necessarily adding his own?

No. No. She was not going to spiral. She was going to take this at face value. She was going to believe that a man who said you can get used to me and that's a dangerous thing to tell me was saying exactly what he meant.

Elain:
I wouldn't complain.

Azriel:
Noted.

She had set down her phone and stared at the ceiling with the kind of smile that made her cheeks ache.

I would choose lunch over the library anytime.

She'd said it. She'd actually said it. And he hadn't retreated. Hadn't deflected. Hadn't responded with something careful or distant or designed to put space between them. He'd matched her. Raised her.

I might start scheduling lunches every day.

Elain had fallen asleep with her phone on the pillow next to her, their conversation still glowing on the screen, and for the first time in weeks, her last thought before sleep wasn't about her father or the house or the garden.

It was about Azriel.

——
The bowling alley was louder than Elain had expected. Not unpleasantly loud, but a particular kind of warm, chaotic noise that layered over itself in waves: the rumble of heavy balls rolling down polished lanes, the crack of pins scattering, and the tinny speakers overhead playing pop songs from three years ago.

Elain stood by their assigned lane—Lane 7—in rented shoes that were half a size too big, watching Cassian punch their names into the electronic scoreboard with the focus and intensity of a man programming a missile defense system.

"Teams," Cassian announced, spinning around to face the group as if he had been waiting for this moment all week. "We're doing teams."

"Three teams of two," Cassian continued. "Couple versus couple versus—" He stopped. Looked at Elain. Looked at Azriel. Looked back at Elain. His grin widened into something enormous and insufferable. "Elain and Az. Total pins, team scores combined. Losers buy drinks."

"Fine," Rhysand said, selecting a ball from the rack with the calm deliberation. "Perfectly fine."

Feyre smiled at him encouragingly. He didn't seem to need it, which was part of why she did it. Or maybe he needed it?

Elain hadn’t planned her Sunday like this until she received a text message from Feyre in the morning. Her younger sister asked if she wanted to join a spontaneous bowling meetup with the others. She hesitated at first, but she decided to give it a try and agreed.

Now Elain stood there in her too-big shoes, her heart doing something complicated in her chest, because she was on a team with Azriel. A team. The two of them, together, their scores combined, which meant they would be playing together, which meant every time she bowled he would be watching, and every time he bowled she would be watching, and they would be sitting next to each other on the little bench between turns, and—

Oh no.

She was terrible at bowling. Not charmingly bad. Not oops I threw a gutter ball, how adorable bad. She was catastrophically bad.

Azriel was standing beside the ball return, having already selected his ball, a dark blue fourteen-pounder that he held loosely at his side with the easy confidence of someone who was good at physical things without trying. He was wearing a dark henley with the sleeves pushed to his elbows showing his tattoos and dark jeans, and the rented shoes, which on anyone else have looked ridiculous but on him just looked like shoes, because Azriel had the particular talent of making everything he wore seem beautiful.

"I should warn you," Elain said, looking up at him. She could feel the heat in her cheeks already. "I'm really bad at this."

He looked down at her. His expression was calm but there was something at the corners of his mouth. Not a smile. Not yet. Just the faintest suggestion that a smile was being considered and hadn't been rejected.

"Bad how?"

"Bad like—" She gestured vaguely toward the lane. "Like, I might not hit anything. At all. For the entire game. If you want to just play for yourself, I completely understand."

Azriel looked at her for a moment. Then he looked at the lane at the ten white pins standing in their neat triangle at the far end, gleaming under the overhead lights.

Then he looked back at her.

"We'll win," he said.

Simply. Quietly. Without bravado or qualification. The way you'd state a fact about the weather or the time of day. The sky is blue. It's three o'clock. We'll win.

"I'll make sure of it," he added.

And something in Elain's chest liquefied.

It wasn't what he said, it was how he said it. The absolute, unhesitating certainty. The calm, unshakeable confidence that didn't need to announce itself because it simply was. He wasn't posturing. He wasn't showing off. He was just telling her, matter-of-factly, that he intended to win and that her inability to bowl was not a variable that concerned him.

As if her weakness was something he'd already accounted for and factored in and decided to carry without complaint. As if protecting her score was just another thing he'd quietly taken responsibility for, the way he quietly took responsibility for everything.

We'll win. I'll make sure of it.

Elain's face was on fire.

"Okay," she said, in a voice that came out approximately two octaves higher than normal. "Okay. Sure."

Cassian bowled first. He approached the lane with a run-up that was entirely too athletic for a casual bowling outing, four long strides, a fluid swing of his arm, and the ball rocketed down the lane.

Strike.

The pins exploded. All ten of them, scattered by the force of impact with a crack that echoed through the alley like a gunshot. Cassian spun on his heel, arms spread, face split in a grin so wide it was practically structural.

"That's how it's done," he said, pointing at Rhysand. "Take notes."

Rhysand selected his ball without comment and stepped up to the lane. He bowled a clean, controlled roll down the center that took out six pins. He looked at the remaining four, picked up three on his second ball, and walked back without a word.

Feyre went next and knocked down seven, picked up two more on her second throw. She pumped her fist in a small, private way that made Rhysand look at her with the expression he reserved for her when he thought no one was watching.

Nesta bowled with the focused efficiency of someone executing a plan she'd made in her head before approaching the lane. Eight pins on the first throw, spare on the second. She came back to the bench without ceremony.

And then it was Azriel's turn.

He stood up from the bench. He picked up his ball from the return without looking at it.

Elain watched him.

She watched the way he positioned himself, feet shoulder-width apart, his weight balanced, his body aligned with the lane's center arrow. She watched his right arm draw back, smooth, controlled, the ball an extension of his hand rather than a separate object, and she watched the muscles in his forearm shift beneath the pushed-up sleeve of his henley.

He released the ball.

It left his hand with a rotation she could see, a deliberate, calculated spin that sent it curving down the lane in a wide, and—

Crack.

Strike.

Every single pin. Obliterated. The sound was different from Cassian's—not the explosive, forceful crash of power, but a clean, surgical hit that dropped all ten in a cascade that looked almost choreographed, as if the pins had agreed in advance to fall in the most efficient possible sequence.

Azriel turned around.

As he walked back to the bench—back to her—his eyes found hers for just a second. And in that second, something flickered. Not a smile. But the ghost of one. The faintest lift at the corner of his mouth, there and gone so quickly she might have imagined it, except that it was directed at her, and she hadn't imagined it, and he'd just bowled a strike and the first person he'd looked at was her.

Elain was going to die. She was going to die in a bowling alley in rented shoes, cause of death: a man who threw a perfect strike without smiling and then looked at her like she was the only person in the building.

"Show-off," Cassian called from across the scoring table.

Azriel sat down beside her on the bench. Close, closer than necessary, given the available space, his thigh not quite touching hers but near enough that she could feel the warmth of him through the fabric of her jeans.

"Your turn," he said.

Two words. Spoken quietly. Accompanied by the barest nod toward the lane.

Elain stood up on legs that felt like they were made of something unreliable, jelly, or wet paper, or the specific substance her bones became whenever Azriel was sitting close enough to touch.

She picked up her ball. It was light, but it still felt awkward in her hands, too round, too smooth, the finger holes never quite where her fingers expected them to be.

She approached the lane.

She could feel them watching. All of them.

And Azriel. Behind her. On the bench. Watching her with those steady hazel eyes.

She drew her arm back. Tried to remember how Feyre had done it, the smooth step, the fluid release, the easy confidence that came from actually knowing what you were doing.

She released the ball.

It rolled down the lane. Slowly. So slowly that for a moment it seemed like it might simply stop in the middle, giving up on the endeavor entirely, surrendering to gravity and friction and the fundamental hopelessness of its trajectory. It drifted left. Then more left. Then—

It hit one pin.

One.

The pin on the far left, the corner one, the straggler, the one that was practically standing in the gutter itself. It toppled over with a lonely, anticlimactic clack while the other nine stood untouched, gleaming under the lights with what Elain could only describe as contempt.

Behind her, she heard Cassian make a sound. He disguised it as a cough. He was not successful.

Elain's face burned.

She turned around and walked back to the bench with the particular gait of someone who was trying very hard to look like they didn't care while caring enormously. She sat down next to Azriel and stared at the floor.

"It went left," she said quietly.

"A little," he agreed.

She looked up at him. He was watching the lane, but the corner of his mouth was doing that thing again. That almost-smile. That suggestion of amusement that never quite broke through his composure but was there, visible to anyone who had spent weeks studying his face for exactly these micro-expressions.

She wanted to melt into the floor.

Her second ball knocked down zero additional pins. Zero. The ball rolled with an optimistic wobble, veered right this time and disappeared into the gutter with a hollow, echoing sound that felt like a personal insult.

Elain sat back down. Her total score for the first frame: one.

The game continued and Elain was a disaster.

And the worst part—the absolute, unbearable worst part—was that Azriel was watching her. Every time she stood up. Every time she approached the lane with her too-light ball and her wrong stance and her arms that apparently didn't understand how straight lines worked. Every time she released the ball and watched it drift, wobble, and ultimately betray her. He was watching.

By the fifth frame, Elain had accumulated nine total pins. Azriel had a strike in every round. Their combined team score was competitive only because he was essentially playing for two, which was both mortifying, and she couldn't help it, quietly, stupidly touching. And hot.

"I'm so sorry," she said. "I told you I was bad."

She groaned and continued. "You should have picked a different partner."

"I didn't pick you."

She looked at him. He was looking at her, turned slightly on the bench so that he was facing her, his knee angled toward hers, his body language open in a way that felt deliberate. His hazel eyes were warm. Steady.

"You were assigned to me," he continued. The pause lasted exactly one beat too long. "But I would have picked you anyway."

Elain's heart stopped. Started again. Stopped again. Decided it didn't know how to function anymore and began operating at approximately twice its normal speed.

"Oh," she said.

"Your grip is wrong," he said, as if he hadn't just said the most devastating thing anyone had ever said to her in a bowling alley. "That's why it's pulling left. And your release point is too high."

"My—what?"

"Your release point. You're letting go of the ball when your arm is still on the upswing. It needs to come off lower at the bottom of the arc." He mimed the motion with his hand, a smooth, pendulum swing, his scarred fingers demonstrating the point of release with a precision that made it look obvious, inevitable, like the ball couldn't possibly go anywhere except exactly where you wanted it. But she only saw his hands. These beautiful scarred hands.

"Come on," he said, standing up. "I'll show you."

He said it casually. Easily. The way he said most things, without fanfare, without making it a thing.

Elain stood up. Her legs had that unreliable quality again. She picked up her ball. Walked to the approach line. And then he was there.

Behind her.

Not pressed against her, he was careful about that, careful about space, careful about consent in all its unspoken forms. But close. Close enough that she could feel the warmth radiating from his chest, close enough that when she inhaled she caught his scent. Clean, subtle, the particular combination of laundry detergent and something warmer beneath it.

"Okay," he said. His voice was right there close to her ear, low, pitched at a frequency that seemed to bypass her brain entirely and speak directly to her nervous system. "First your grip."

His hands appeared on either side of hers. He didn't grab, didn’t take the ball or reposition her fingers by force. He just guided. His fingers hovering near hers, touching lightly, adjusting.

"Your thumb goes in first," he said. "Deeper. All the way to the second knuckle."

She adjusted. His hand was on hers, the contact so light it was more suggestion than touch, and the warmth of his fingers near her skin sent a current up her arm that made her breath catch audibly. She prayed he hadn't heard it. She prayed the bowling alley was loud enough to cover the sound of her entire cardiovascular system short-circuiting.

"Good," he said. "Now the other two fingers. Less tight. You're gripping it like you're trying to strangle it."

She laughed a small, nervous sound that came out slightly breathless. "Sorry. I strangle everything."

"Don't apologize." She could hear the almost-smile in his voice even though she couldn't see his face. "Just loosen up. Let the ball do the work."

She loosened her grip. His hand was still there, hovering, guiding, a whisper of contact along her knuckles that was somehow more devastating than a full touch would have been. The almost-ness of it. The restraint.

"Okay," he said. "Now, your stance."

And then his other hand was on her hip.

Not on her hip, near it. Beside it. His palm hovering at the curve of her waist, not quite making contact, a ghost of pressure that she felt more as heat than touch. He was adjusting her position, squaring her shoulders to the lane, angling her feet, and his hand was right there, and Elain was fairly certain that her heart rate was now visible from space.

"You're too square," he said. "Turn your right foot out. Just slightly. Yeah—like that."

She turned her foot. Her body shifted. And for one second—one brief, electric, reality-altering second—her back pressed against his chest.

The contact lasted maybe half a second. Maybe less. The faintest brush of her shoulder blades against the solid warmth of him, the accidental collision of two bodies standing too close in a bowling alley. But in that half-second Elain felt everything. The breadth of his chest, the steady rhythm of his breathing, the heat of him through the thin fabric of his henley.

She was trembling. She could feel it, a fine, continuous vibration in her hands, her arms, her shoulders, the kind of trembling that had nothing to do with cold or weakness and everything to do with proximity. With him. With the fact that Azriel was standing behind her in a bowling alley with his hand near her hip and his voice in her ear and his chest an inch from her back, and her body was responding to all of it with a raw, visceral intensity that made her vision swim.

"Now," he said, and his voice was somehow even lower, somehow even closer, his breath warm against the shell of her ear, "the swing."

He guided her arm back. His hand followed the path of her elbow.

"Let it come all the way back," he murmured. "Don't rush it. Let gravity do the work on the downswing. And release—" His fingers tapped the inside of her wrist, the lightest touch. "Here. Right at the bottom. When your hand is lowest."

Elain's wrist was on fire where he'd touched it.

"Got it?" he asked.

She nodded. Speaking was out of the question. Speaking required air, and she had none, he’d taken it all, standing behind her, his warmth and his voice and his impossible nearness draining the oxygen from her lungs and replacing it with something that felt like electricity.

"Okay," he said. "Go."

He stepped back. The warmth disappeared. The space behind her became empty and cold and she hated it immediately.

But her body remembered. Her grip was right, looser, more natural, the ball sitting in her hand instead of being strangled by it. Her stance was better. Shoulders aligned, right foot angled, weight distributed the way he'd shown her. And when she swung her arm back, she could still feel the ghost of his fingers tracing the arc, guiding her toward the release point.

She let go.

The ball rolled down the lane. Straighter than any ball she'd thrown all night, not perfect, not the beautiful curving arc that his throws had, but straight. Aimed. Intentional. It hit the pins with a satisfying crack and Elain watched—mouth open, eyes wide—as five of them scattered.

Five pins.

She spun around.

Her face was flushed, her eyes bright, and the smile that broke across her face was involuntary and enormous.

And he was looking at her.

He'd been looking at her since the moment she released the ball, his gaze tracking her the way it always did, quiet, thorough, the kind of attention that didn't announce itself. But the moment she turned around and that smile broke open across her face, something happened in his chest that he couldn't name and had no use for.

It was just a smile. He'd seen her smile before. He'd catalogued it the way he catalogued everything, involuntarily, precisely, his mind filing away the specific degree of warmth, the particular angle of it, the way it reached her eyes and changed the shape of her face from careful to radiant. He'd seen her smile politely and he'd seen her smile for her sisters and he'd seen the small, private ones she tried to hide when she found something funny she didn't expect to find funny.

But this was different. This was the whole thing, unreserved and unperformed, bright with surprise and pleasure and something that looked, undeniably, like joy. And it was pointed directly at him.

He thought, before he could stop himself: she should look like this all the time.

The thought came with a weight behind it that he didn't allow himself to examine. Just the simple, overwhelming truth of it: that this was what she was supposed to look like. Not the careful, measured version she offered the world, the one where she made herself small and easy and pleasant. This. Flushed and laughing and unselfconscious, her whole face lit from somewhere inside.

He knew, in the way he knew most things about her now — gradually, involuntarily, against his better judgment — that the world had not been kind enough to her. That the careless, systematic way it had asked her to shrink and accommodate and accept had cost her something real.

She deserved more of this. More of the surprise and the joy and the evidence that things could go right. She deserved to know that this wasn't all she got, that her life could be something other than managed grief and quiet sacrifice. She had choices. She was allowed to want things.

He wanted to tell her that. He wanted to say it simply and directly, the way he said most things: you have options. There are other ways this can go. If you need help, I'm here. He could say it. The words existed.

But they also did not exist, not in any way he could deliver them without making them into something they shouldn't be. Because the truth underneath was more complicated than I want to help you, it was tangled up with everything else, with the fact that he was standing in a bowling alley watching her smile and feeling it in his sternum, and he was not entirely sure he was the right person to be anyone's anchor when his own ground was this uncertain.

So he said none of it. He just stood there and let the warmth of her smile do whatever it was doing to him, and when she spoke he answered her in the only language that felt safe right now: small, steady, present.

"Five!" she said, slightly too loud, slightly too excited, her voice carrying that particular breathless quality that happened when she forgot to be embarrassed.

"Five," he confirmed.

"That's the most I've ever knocked down. In my entire life."

The corner of his mouth lifted. Not the almost-smile. An actual smile. Genuine. A smile that reached the quiet, guarded place behind his composure and cracked it open, just a fraction, just enough to let something warm and unguarded through.

"You had a good teacher," he said.

Elain laughed, light and surprised, and for one moment standing in a bowling alley in rented shoes with fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, the world narrowed to just this. Just him. Just the smile at the corner of his mouth and the warmth still fading on her wrist and the five fallen pins glowing behind her like small, ridiculous trophies.

——

The game's final shape came down to the tenth frame.

Cassian and Nesta held first. His relentless strikes combined with her precision had built a lead that felt insurmountable for most of the night. Azriel and Elain trailed in second. Feyre and Rhysand occupied third, though not disastrously.

Tenth frame: Cassian approached the lane with his usual confidence.

Seven pins.

He stared at the remaining three with the personal offense. He picked up the spare, but the door had cracked open.

Then Azriel stood up. Set his feet. Drew back his arm. Released.

The ball curved in that sweeping, inevitable arc and struck the head pin with a crack Elain felt in her sternum.

Strike. His final throw of the night, perfect.

Cassian dropped his head back and stared at the ceiling. "Every. Single. Frame."

"Not bad," Nesta said. Which from Nesta was practically a standing ovation.

Azriel walked back to the bench. Back to Elain. He sat down beside her and his expression was the same as always composed, steady, unreadable to anyone who didn't know where to look. But she knew where to look. She'd been learning his face for weeks, studying it the way she studied leaf patterns and root structures, and she could see it: the quiet satisfaction. The competitive edge that he kept sheathed but that burned, steady and hot, beneath the surface.

He'd wanted to beat Cassian. Not the team—Cassian. In the direct, head-to-head comparison of their individual scores, Azriel had thrown a perfect game and Cassian had not. It was a small victory. A private one. The final scores appeared on the overhead screen. Cassian and Nesta: first place. Azriel and Elain: second. Feyre and Rhysand: third.

"Feyre and Rhys buy drinks!" Cassian announced, with joy.

"We know," Rhysand said. "We can read the scoreboard."

Elain turned to Azriel. The blush was still there, it had been there all night, a permanent fixture, a new feature of her face that she'd apparently acquired the moment she'd been assigned to his team and would probably keep until she died.

"You bowled a perfect game," she said.

He looked at her. "Close to it."

"No.. an actual perfect game. Every frame. Strikes in all of them." She shook her head, smiling in a way that felt too big for the moment but she couldn't help it. "You're really good at this. Is there anything you're not good at?"

The words came out soft. Warm. Laced with something she didn't entirely mean to put there but couldn't take back. Admiration, yes, but also something more tender. Something that said I like this about you. I like watching you be good at things. I like the way your competence makes me feel, which is safe and small and slightly dizzy.

Azriel held her gaze for a beat. "Plenty of things."

"Name one."

The corner of his mouth lifted. "I'll let you figure that out."

"There's a bar next door," Rhysand said, pulling on his jacket as they returned their rented shoes. "Attached to the bowling center. Since Feyre and I are apparently funding the evening's refreshments, we might as well do it somewhere with decent drinks."

——

The bar was nothing like the bowling alley. Where the lanes had been bright and loud and saturated with neon, the bar was dim and warm, low lighting and dark wood. Soft music played from speakers Elain couldn't see, something with a slow bassline and a woman's voice singing in a way that made the air feel thicker. The tables were small and round, the booths along the wall upholstered in worn leather, and the whole space had a quality of quiet intimacy that was entirely at odds with the cheerful chaos they'd just left.

They found a table near the back. Cassian pulled out a chair for Nesta with exaggerated gallantry; she sat without acknowledging the gesture, which was her version of saying thank you. Feyre slid into the booth beside Rhysand, who draped his arm along the back of the seat behind her.

Elain hung back slightly as the group settled. She was reaching for the chair beside Feyre when she noticed it, a small thing, barely perceptible, a detail that only someone who had been paying very close attention to one particular person's movements would catch.

Azriel had stopped walking.

He was standing beside the table, his hand on the back of the chair next to the one Elain was reaching for, not pulling it out, not sitting down, just waiting. Holding his position. He was waiting for her to sit down first. So he could sit beside her. So the arrangement would happen naturally, without anyone noticing or commenting, just the two of them ending up next to each other through what would appear to be the simple accident of who sat last.

Elain sat down. He sat beside her. Their arms didn't touch, but the distance between them on the small chairs was measured in centimeters, and she was aware of every single one.

Drinks were ordered. Beer for Cassian. Red wine for Nesta. Something elaborate for Rhysand. A pink cocktail for Elain, sweet, almost too sweet. A whiskey for Azriel: amber-gold, short glass, no ice.

Elain wrapped her fingers around her cocktail and took a sip. "Not a strong drinker?" Azriel asked.

She looked at him over the rim of her glass. "Not even a little bit. I get drunk embarrassingly fast. Like—two of these and I'm done." She gestured at her cocktail with a self-deprecating smile. "Feyre can drink half a bottle of wine and still walk in a straight line. I have one glass and start telling people I love them."

She realized, a beat too late, what she'd said. Start telling people I love them. Her cheeks flushed. She took another sip of her cocktail, larger this time, which was counterproductive given the conversation topic but at least gave her mouth something to do besides say mortifying things.

"Fruity cocktails are enough for me," she added quickly. "They do the job."

She looked at his glass. The whiskey caught the low bar light and glowed, warm, rich, the color of autumn leaves and old wood.

"You seem like a strong drinker," she said. "Whiskey and all."

He turned the glass slightly in his hand. "I like wine too. But whiskey's good."

"It looks intense."

"It's simpler than it looks." He took a sip. The motion was unhurried and Elain watched the line of his throat as he swallowed and then immediately looked away because watching a man swallow whiskey should not have been a significant experience and yet, somehow, catastrophically, it was.

Across the table, Cassian was already deep into a retelling of the evening's highlights, his voice loud and animated, his hands moving in sweeping gestures that nearly knocked over Nesta's wine twice.

"—and then Rhys, in the fifth frame, I swear to God, the ball went backwards—"

"It did not go backwards," Rhysand said.

"It hesitated. It left your hand and it paused.“

"I was adjusting my release point."

"You were adjusting your will to live. Meanwhile—" Cassian pointed at Azriel with his beer bottle. "Mr. Perfect Game over here is just calmly destroying the lane like he's done this every day of his life. Az, be honest. How often do you bowl?"

"Not often," Azriel said.

"Not often. He bowls 'not often' and throws twelve straight strikes. Some people are just—" Cassian shook his head, grinning. "It's offensive, is what it is."

"You're only offended because he beat you," Nesta said, taking a measured sip of her wine.

"He didn't beat me. His team came second."

"His individual score beat yours."

Cassian opened his mouth. Closed it. Took a long drink of beer. "I hate that you notice things like that."

"I notice everything," Nesta said, without looking at him. But somehow Elain had the feeling, her sister was looking at her. At them.

Feyre laughed, leaning into Rhysand's side, and the conversation splintered into overlapping threads. Cassian challenging Nesta to a one-on-one rematch, Rhysand suggesting they try an activity where his particular skills would be more applicable ("Debate club? Wine tasting? Literally anything that doesn't involve throwing a heavy ball?"), Feyre mediating between all of them with the fond exasperation of someone who loved these people and also found them collectively exhausting.

Elain listened. She smiled at the right moments, laughed when something was funny, contributed the occasional quiet comment that was heard by the people nearest to her and absorbed into the general flow of conversation. She was good at this at being present without being central, at occupying the warm periphery of a group without claiming its attention. It was a role she'd inhabited her whole life: the quiet sister, the gentle one, the one who watched and listened and let the louder personalities fill the room.

But beside her in the small, private space that existed between her chair and Azriel’s, she was anything but quiet.

Her mind was loud. Buzzing. Cataloguing every detail the way it always did when he was near, the way his forearm rested on the table, the sleeve of his henley still pushed to his elbow, the tattoo visible on the inside of his forearm in the bar's low light. Dark ink against his skin. She'd noticed it before but she'd never seen this much of it. The light was low and warm and the tattoo was right there, and she was sitting close enough to trace its lines if she'd been brave enough to reach out.

She wasn't brave enough.

But she could ask.

"Your tattoo," she said, turning toward him slightly, her voice pitched below the group's conversation, not a whisper, but close to it. "I've seen the edges of it before, but I didn't realize it was… it’s really detailed."

He glanced down at his forearm, as if he'd forgotten it was there. "Yeah. It's—" A pause. Something that might have been self-consciousness flickered across his face, which was so rare on Azriel that Elain's heart stuttered at the sight of it. "It's kind of a stupid thing, honestly. Me, Rhys, and Cassian got them together. Years ago."

"Together?"

"Yeah." Elain thought about Cassian's Instagram. She'd scrolled through it once—okay, more than once— and she remembered the photos. Cassian at the gym, at the beach, at various outdoor locations that seemed designed to showcase the extensive tattoo work covering his shoulders and upper arms. Bold lines. Dramatic shapes.

"I saw his on Instagram," Elain said. "The ones on his shoulders and arms. They’re… big.“

"That's one word for it."

She smiled. "Do you have—" She felt the question forming and her pulse quickened, because the question was do you have tattoos on your chest and shoulders too and asking that question required her to acknowledge that she had been thinking about his chest and shoulders, which she had, extensively, but which she had not intended to announce. "I mean… is yours just on your forearm, or does it… go further?"

Smooth. Very smooth. She sounded like a doctor asking about a rash.

Azriel looked at her. His expression didn't change but something shifted behind his eyes. A warmth. An awareness. As if he understood that the question she'd asked and the question she meant were not quite the same thing, and he was choosing to answer the one she meant.

"It goes up," he said. Simply. "Shoulder. Chest. Down the arm."

Elain nodded. Her face was doing something she couldn't control, a flush that started at her collarbones and climbed upward with the steady, unstoppable progression of a sunrise. She took a sip of her cocktail. Then another. The starfruit garnish bumped against her lip.

"So," she said, and she could hear herself doing the thing she did when she was nervous—stringing observations together like beads on a wire, building toward something she hadn't quite identified. "You have a motorcycle. You have tattoos. You smoke." She ticked them off, her voice light but her heart hammering. "You drink whiskey. You're good at basically everything. You study something with intelligence and covert operations." She looked at him squarely. "You sound like the main character of a romantasy novel."

The words left her mouth and immediately she wanted to die.

Not slowly. Not metaphorically. She wanted the floor of this bar to open up and swallow her whole, chair and cocktail and all, because she had just told Azriel—to his face—that he was like a fictional love interest, which was essentially the same as saying I have been casting you as the romantic lead in my personal fantasy life, which was true but was absolutely, categorically not something she had intended to say out loud in a bar while sitting close enough to touch him.

Azriel blinked.

And then he laughed. A real one, low and warm and surprised, the laugh of someone who had not expected to find something funny and was genuinely delighted to discover he did. It broke through his composure the way light broke through a crack in a wall. "A what?" he said.

Elain pressed her hand to her face. Her cheek was burning beneath her palm. "Nothing. Forget I said that. I didn’t… that was… forget it."

"A romantasy novel." He was still smiling, actually, properly smiling, that reached his eyes and changed his entire face from composed and beautiful and amused. "Is that a genre?"

"It’s… yes. It's romance and fantasy. It's a thing. It doesn't matter. I'm going to stop talking now."

"Please don't."

Two words. Spoken quietly, still carrying the remnants of laughter, and so completely disarming that Elain forgot how to breathe for approximately four seconds.

She took a very long sip of her cocktail.

"Well," she said, when she'd recovered enough to form words, and decided that since the embarrassment had already reached its maximum possible level she might as well commit to the conversation. "Whatever. But I still haven't seen this motorcycle. Do you actually have one, or is it—" She narrowed her eyes at him with exaggerated suspicion. "Or did you lie to me?“

The smile was still there. Smaller now, settling back into its usual almost-state, but the warmth behind it hadn't faded. "I have one."

"Prove it."

"It's January."

"So?"

"So it's in storage. It's still cold." He turned his glass on the table, that absent, comfortable gesture again. "When the weather gets better, I'll take you for a ride. If you want."

I'll take you for a ride.

Elain bit her lip.

She did it without thinking, the instinctive, physical response to a sentence that her brain was processing on approximately seven different levels at once, most of them inappropriate for a public setting. She caught her lower lip between her teeth and held it there, and she saw his gaze drop to her mouth for just a fraction of a second before returning to her eyes.

He saw it. Of course he saw it. He saw everything, that was the problem, that was the particular and relentless difficulty of being the kind of person whose attention was calibrated to precision and who could not turn it off. He saw her bite her lip and he saw the flush climbing her throat and he saw the way her eyes had taken on a quality in the last twenty minutes that had nothing to do with the cocktail and everything to do with the specific thing they were not talking about.

She probably didn't know what her eyes were doing right now. That was the thing, that was the thing he kept coming back to, the thought he should not have been having and couldn't seem to stop. She was looking at him with the openness of someone who didn't fully realize how much she was showing, and what she was showing was—

He shouldn't be thinking this. He knew that. He had no right to this line of thinking. He had too many jagged edges and too much complicated history and too many things he couldn't offer, and she had a life that was already hard enough without him adding his particular weight to it.

But she was looking at him like that, and her mouth was still slightly open from the lip she'd just released, and everything he was thinking right now was so thoroughly, categorically wrong that he should have been able to simply stop to fold it up and put it away and return to the clean, manageable version of this that he'd been maintaining for weeks.

"I'd like that," she said. Her voice came out quieter than she intended. Softer. "I've never been on a motorcycle."

"I'll go slow."

I'll go slow.

The words landed in Elain's brain and immediately split into two—the thing he meant and the thing her body heard, and those two things were not the same thing, and the distance between them was the distance between innocent and indecent, and she was standing right at the edge of that distance with her toes over the line and her pulse in her throat.

I'll go slow.

On the motorcycle. He was talking about the motorcycle. About speed. About kilometers per hour and safe driving and the responsible introduction of a nervous passenger to a two-wheeled vehicle. That was what he meant. That was all he meant.

But her brain—her treacherous, overheated, completely unmanageable brain—had taken those three words and run them through a filter that had nothing to do with motorcycles and everything to do with the way his voice sounded when it was pitched low and close and meant only for her, and what had come out the other side was—

She took another sip of her cocktail.

It was her ovulation week. That was the problem. That was the entire problem or at least the problem she was choosing to blame, because the alternative was admitting that she was simply, fundamentally, chemically incapable of sitting next to Azriel without turning every word he said into something that made her want to press her thighs together under the table.

It had been happening all night. At the bowling alley, when he'd stood behind her and said let it come all the way back—about the swing, about the bowling ball, about the pendulum motion of her arm—and her brain had short-circuited so completely that she'd nearly dropped the ball on her own foot. When he'd said loosen up, let the ball do the work, the release point and she'd heard—no. She wasn't going to think about what she'd heard. When he'd tapped the inside of her wrist and murmured right here, at the bottom, and she'd felt the touch in places that were anatomically unrelated to her wrist.

And now I'll go slow.

It was the hormones. It had to be the hormones. Or the alcohol, the cocktail was half-gone now, and she'd meant it when she said she was a lightweight, and the combination of sugar and alcohol and proximity was doing something to her inhibitions that felt less like lowering them and more like dismantling them entirely, brick by brick, until there was nothing left between her thoughts and her mouth except a rapidly deteriorating sense of self-preservation.

Or maybe it was just him. Maybe it was the tattoo she could see on his forearm and the tattoo she now knew continued up his shoulder and across his chest, ink on skin she hadn't seen and couldn't stop imagining. Maybe it was the whiskey in his glass and the way he held it and the way his throat moved when he swallowed. Maybe it was the fact that he smelled good and looked good and was sitting right there, close enough to touch, and her body… her stupid, hormone-flooded, ovulation-week body had decided that rational thought was optional and desire was mandatory.

She set her glass down. Looked at him. And because the cocktail had apparently dissolved the last remaining barrier between her brain and her mouth, she said:

"Slow how?"

Azriel blinked.

"On the bike," he said.

"Right." Elain nodded. Took another sip. Her cheeks were on fire. Her entire face was on fire. She was reasonably certain that her ears were on fire. "On the bike. Obviously. I just meant… how slow? Like, city-speed slow, or—"

She was making it worse. Every word she said was making it worse, because every word was giving her brain another opportunity to find a second meaning, and her brain was accepting every single opportunity with the enthusiasm of someone who had been starving and had just been presented with a buffet.

"Depends," Azriel said. He was watching her with that steady gaze, the one that missed nothing, that catalogued every micro-expression, that probably knew exactly what was happening behind her flushed face and was choosing, with characteristic restraint, not to acknowledge it directly. "On how comfortable you are."

On how comfortable you are.

Elain bit the inside of her cheek. Hard.

"I think I'd be—" She stopped. Reconsidered the sentence. Reconsidered everything. Reconsidered her entire life and the series of choices that had led her to this moment in this bar, slightly drunk on a fruity cocktail, trying to have an innocent conversation about motorcycles with a man whose voice was doing things to her central nervous system that should require a medical license. "I'd probably be nervous at first."

"That's normal," he said. "Everyone's nervous the first time."

Everyone's nervous the first time.

Elain pressed her lips together so hard they went white.

He was doing it on purpose. He had to be doing it on purpose, except that his face was completely neutral, completely composed, completely devoid of any indication that he was aware of the double meaning hanging in the air between them like smoke. He was just answering her questions. Just talking about motorcycles. Just being Azriel, calm, direct, saying exactly what he meant without embellishment.

And she was the one hearing something else. She was the one whose brain was translating every sentence through the particular filter of a woman in her ovulation week sitting next to a man she wanted with an intensity that bordered on medical.

This is my fault, she thought. This is entirely, completely, one hundred percent my fault, and I need to stop talking immediately before I say something that cannot be unsaid.

"So," she said, because apparently she had no survival instincts whatsoever, "the first time you'd go slow with me."

Something shifted. She couldn't identify exactly what but something moved between them. A frequency. A vibration. The particular tension that existed between two people who were talking about one thing and thinking about another.

"The first time," he said, and his voice was steady—perfectly, infuriatingly steady—but lower than it had been a moment ago. Lower and slower and pitched at a frequency that Elain felt in the base of her spine. "Yeah. I'd go slow."

She swallowed. "And the second time?"

He turned his glass on the table. Slowly. The amber liquid catching the low light.

"If you enjoyed it," he said, "the second time we could go faster."

The table. The bar. The music. The entire city outside the windows all of it ceased to exist. Elain's world contracted to the space between his mouth and her ears, to the three feet of charged air that separated her body from his, to the pulse she could feel hammering in her wrists and her temples and a location significantly south of both.

They were talking about the motorcycle. They were absolutely, definitely, unambiguously talking about the motorcycle. About velocity. About acceleration. About the mechanical experience of riding a motorized vehicle on public roads at varying speeds.

That was all.

That was all.

"I think I'd enjoy it," she heard herself say, in a voice that did not sound like it belonged to her, a voice that was lower and breathier and approximately eight hundred percent more suggestive than anything she had ever produced in her entire twenty-one years of life.

Azriel looked at her.

And she looked at him.

"Good," Azriel said quietly. "Then we'll see how fast you want to go."

Elain reached for her cocktail with a hand that was not entirely steady and took a drink that emptied the glass.

——

The second round arrived. Rhysand set a fresh pink cocktail in front of Elain. She accepted it without comment. It felt like the right thing to do.

The conversation at the table had drifted into something easier and more scattered. Cassian and Feyre debating something about film adaptations, Rhysand and Nesta engaged in what appeared to be a silent and entirely separate disagreement that communicated itself through pointed glances and the precise angle of Nesta's wine glass. Elain was watching them with a faint smile when Azriel's phone lit up on the table.

He glanced at it. Something shifted in his expression.

"Everything okay?" Elain asked.

"Yeah." He turned the phone face down. "Mira was at the food bowl. Cass set up a camera."

Elain blinked. "Sorry — who?"

Azriel looked at her. "Our cat."

She stared at him. "You have a cat?“

"We have a cat," he said.

"Az has a cat," Cassian corrected from across the table, having apparently abandoned the film debate entirely. "I live with it under duress."

"You named it," Azriel said.

"I named it as a joke and you let the name stick."

"Mira," Elain said, testing the name. She looked at Azriel. "You have a cat," she said again, because this information was still settling into her understanding of him and requiring a moment to find its proper place.

Azriel. With burn scars on his hands and a Master's thesis on covert intelligence and a motorcycle in storage and a cat named Mira. "I didn't know that. For how long?"

"About a year." He paused. "I found it on campus. It was hurt… something had gotten to it, probably. I took it to the vet, and then..." He made a small, resigned gesture. And then it never left.

"He brought it home in his jacket," Cassian said, with the particular tone of someone recounting an event that had redefined their understanding of a person. "Just walked in with this thing wrapped up inside his coat. Bleeding on everything."

"It wasn't bleeding that much."

"There was a lot of blood, Az."

"It was fine."

"It was absolutely not—"

"She's fine now," Azriel said, and there was a finality in it, quiet but complete, that closed the topic of how much the cat had been bleeding. He picked up his phone, unlocked it, and turned the screen toward Elain.

She looked at the photo.

A black cat, truly black, not dark grey but the pure, light-absorbing black of a winter night was sitting in what appeared to be a patch of kitchen floor sunlight, looking directly at the camera with the expression of a creature who had assessed the situation and found it acceptable. One ear had a small notch in it. Her eyes were a very pale amber-gold.

"Oh," Elain said softly. "She's beautiful."

Azriel said nothing, but he didn't look away from her face while she looked at the photo.

"She looks—" She frowned slightly, tilting her head. Something about the set of him, the watchful stillness, the way the photo had caught him mid-thought. "She looks like the cat I used to see on campus. Near the east library, there was this black cat that would sit by the side door in the mornings. I used to bring her pieces of whatever I had in my bag."

She looked up hoping for a response. Azriel was watching her with an expression she couldn't entirely read. And he said nothing.

"Okay," Elain said then to change the topic. "You promised me something earlier."

He looked at her. "Did I?"

"You said there were things you were bad at and that you'd let me figure it out." She narrowed her eyes at him. "Name one thing."

"I'm patient," he said.

"That's a good thing!“

"Not always." He turned his glass.

"Okay," she said. "I'll allow it."

"Generous."

"I'm a generous person." She picked up her cocktail. "What else?"

"Cooking."

She looked at him. "Seriously?"

"I can make four things. Cassian makes everything else."

"Cassian cooks?"

"Cassian is an excellent cook," Azriel said, and the note of genuine respect in it was so unexpected that Elain laughed, a surprised, bright sound that she didn't manage to smother in time. She thought of Cassian, who had spent the last hour narrating his own bowling career, apparently going home to make dinner. The universe was full of surprises. "What else?" she asked.

"You know," he said, after a moment, "it sounds like you're keeping a list."

Elain looked up. "A list?“

"Things Azriel is bad at," something moved in his expression. "Things Azriel is good at. Two columns."

"I'm not keeping a list," Elain said already blushing.

"I bet there is a list." He tilted his head, just slightly.

Her cheeks were warm. She picked up her cocktail so she had somewhere to look. "I'm just paying attention."

"To me specifically."

"To… the conversation!" She could feel the flush spreading. "Generally."

He was quiet for a moment. "Which side is longer?"

She blinked. "What?"

"The list." His voice was easy, unhurried, giving nothing away except the faint warmth behind it. "Things I'm good at versus things I'm not. Which column is longer?"

Elain opened her mouth. Closed it. The honest answer arrived immediately and she was absolutely not going to say it out loud, which meant she needed a different answer, and the combination of his eyes and the second cocktail and that almost-smile was making the different answer very difficult to locate.

"I'm not answering that," she said.

"That's an answer."

"It's not."

"It tells me which side is longer."

She pressed her lips together. The flush had reached her ears and she was fully aware of it and fully unable to do anything about it. "You're very smug for someone who just admitted he can only make four things in a kitchen."

"I'm curious," he said, and the way he said it; low, genuine, unhurried, made it worse somehow. Not teasing exactly. Something that lived just underneath teasing. "What's at the top of the good list?“

The question landed and stayed.

She looked at him. He was looking back at her, steady and warm, waiting for her. The bar hummed around them. The music played. Cassian said something loud and Nesta said something precise and neither of them registered at all.

Elain looked at her cocktail.

"Your patience" she said quietly. "With me."

The silence that followed was different from the ones before it. Softer. More careful. He looked at her for a long moment.

She wasn't looking at him. She was looking at her cocktail, her cheeks flushed, her fingers turning the glass slowly in a way that suggested she was very aware of what she'd just said and was not entirely sure what to do with having said it.

He looked back at his whiskey.

"That's a low bar," he said quietly. "Being patient with you."

Elain glanced up.

"You make it easy," he said. Simply. Like it was just a fact about the world, the way the temperature was a fact, the way the bar was dim and the music was slow. He took a sip of his whiskey and looked at the glass and said nothing else.

Elain looked back at her cocktail.

The flush hadn't faded. But she was smiling now and she didn't try to hide it.

——

They left an hour later. Coats retrieved, tabs settled, all of them spilling out into the cold January air. Feyre immediately listed into Rhysand's side and his arm came around her with the automatic ease of long habit.

"We're getting an Uber," Cassian announced, already thumbing through his phone. "Az, Nes you're with me."

Elain glanced at Nesta. Nesta was pulling on her gloves with the focused calm. She didn't look up.

Elain left it. There was a whole conversation she and Nesta hadn't had yet, probably wouldn't have for a while longer, and the pavement outside a bar at eleven o'clock on a Sunday was not where it was going to start. Nesta would come to her when she was ready. Elain had approximately zero confidence that Nesta would ever be ready, but she believed it in the same stubborn, hopeful way she believed that difficult plants eventually grew, not because she had proof, but because she couldn't make herself stop.

Rhysand's Uber arrived first, pulling smoothly to the curb. Feyre hugged Elain quickly, tight and warm.

"I'm glad you came," she said into Elain's scarf.

"Thank you for inviting me," Elain said.

Feyre was already turning, already folding herself into the car, Rhysand's hand at the small of her back with that particular careful attention. The door closed. The car pulled away.

Elain turned back to find Azriel standing beside her.

"Your Uber's three minutes," he said.

"Okay." She pulled her coat tighter. "Thank you. For tonight."

"You said that already."

"I meant it." She could hear Cassian's car arriving behind her, Nesta's quiet voice saying something, the sound of doors. "The bowling was… even the bad parts, it was good."

"The bad parts were the best parts," he said.

She looked at him. "Five pins."

"Five pins," he agreed. The ghost of the smile again.

Her Uber, a silver sedan appeared at the curb. Azriel stepped forward and opened the door for her. She didn't expect it. It wasn't a dramatic gesture, wasn't performed for anyone's benefit; he just did it, the same way he did everything, quietly and without announcement.

She was halfway in when he spoke to the driver.

"Drive carefully," he said. Straightforward. Calm. Just the two words, but they landed with a weight behind them that the driver, to his credit, simply nodded at. "It's cold and the roads near campus ice over."

Elain looked up at Azriel from the backseat. He was looking back at her.

"Text me when you're home," he said.

Not you can text me or let me know if you want. Just the simple, direct expectation of it.

"I will," she said.

He gave a small nod and closed the door.

She watched him through the window as the car pulled away, just for a second, just long enough to see him standing on the pavement with his hands in his coat pockets, watching the car go, and then he was gone behind the turn in the road.

Elain sat back against the seat. The driver had the heat on and the car smelled like pine air freshener and outside the windows the city moved past in amber streetlight.

——

The apartment was quiet when they got back.

Cassian had fallen asleep in the car, not deeply, and was now in the process of loudly denying this while Nesta moved past him into the kitchen without comment. Azriel dropped his keys on the hook by the door. Shrugged off his coat.

And then something small and black materialized from the hallway.

Mira moved the way cats moved when they had decided to seem indifferent but had actually been waiting, a careful, deliberate approach that maintained the fiction of coincidence, winding once around Azriel's ankles before sitting back and regarding him with those pale amber eyes.

Azriel crouched down.

He gathered the cat up in both hands and held her against his chest, and Mira went immediately boneless, head tucking under Azriel's chin with the familiarity of long habit, a low steady rumble starting up somewhere in her small ribcage.

For a moment Azriel just stood there in the hallway, the cat in his arms. He wasn't thinking about anything in particular. He was just breathing.

He was good at this at finding the small, quiet things that brought him back to level when the noise in his own head got too loud. The cat helped. The cat had been helping for almost a year, since the morning he'd found her behind the east library, thin and frightened and hurt, with a notch taken out of one ear and a way of looking at people that said I want to trust you but I have not decided yet. Azriel understood that. He'd brought her home wrapped in his jacket, taken her to the emergency vet, sat in the waiting room for two and a half hours with cat blood on his shirt and Cassian's increasingly alarmed texts going unanswered.

The cat had decided to trust him. Eventually. Not immediately, not without the slow, patient work of showing up every day, being consistent, not asking for more than was offered. But eventually.

He was thinking about that when Nesta spoke.

"I didn't know you were close to my sister."

Nesta was in the kitchen doorway, a glass of water in her hand, watching him with an expression that gave away exactly nothing except that she had opinions and had decided to have them out loud. Cassian had claimed the sofa and appeared to be already properly asleep, one arm thrown over his face, his breathing slow and even.

Azriel said nothing. He kept his hand moving along Mira's back, the fur warm and smooth under his palm.

"You talked all evening," Nesta said. "Cassian mentioned you see each other at the university too."

"We see each other sometimes," he said. "Same university."

"That's not what I asked."

Azriel looked at her. He kept his face exactly as it was — composed, neutral, revealing nothing — because that was what he did, always, and because he genuinely wasn't sure what the right answer was or if there was one.

Nesta came further into the kitchen, set her glass down on the counter. She moved the way she always moved like she'd decided exactly how much space she was taking up and had no interest in taking less. He'd always respected that about her, even when it made conversations like this one feel like a negotiation he hadn't been told the terms of.

"If you're thinking about falling for her," she said, "think twice."

He didn't react. Just kept his hand moving.

"She doesn't let people in," Nesta said. "Not really. She seems like she does, she’s warm and she's kind and she makes you feel like you're the only person in the room, and then you realize that's just who she is, that's the thing she does for everyone, and you were never as close as you thought you were." A pause. Something moved across her face, briefly, and then was gone. "She's complicated. When it comes to that."

Azriel looked at the cat. Thought about what Nesta wasn't quite saying, and the specific weight of it, the weight of a sister who loved her sibling and had been hurt by the gap between them and had turned that hurt into something that looked like warning.

"I know she's beautiful," Nesta said, and the shift in her voice was subtle but real. Flatter, more careful, like she was reciting something she'd made herself say before it could surprise her. "I think she's probably the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. She will probably ever be." A beat. "But that's what everyone thinks. That's the first thing everyone thinks, every time. And she knows it, and it doesn't mean anything to her."

Azriel said nothing.

He thought: that is the most interesting thing anyone has ever said to me about Elain, and you've understood nothing. He thought it without heat, without judgment just the clean, clear recognition of it. Because Nesta was watching her sister from the outside, from the position of someone who knew her and loved her and had still somehow missed the part that mattered. The part that wasn't the beauty or the warmth or the way she made every person feel seen. The part that was a girl who studied soil microbiomes at midnight and baked cakes for her sister's birthday and cried over Mr. Fern and texted someone at 11:30 at night just to say I'm home now, because she'd wanted to tell him and had decided, for once, not to talk herself out of it.

He thought: she's not complicated. She's careful. And she's been careful for a long time because the world has not given her much reason to be otherwise, and if you think those are the same thing, you have not been paying attention.

He kept all of this behind his teeth.

"Whatever," Nesta said, and her voice had gone back to its usual register, cool, precise, done. "Just telling you. Before you decide you know her better than you do and then wonder what went wrong."

She picked up her water and disappeared into the hallway.

Azriel stood in the kitchen with the cat purring in his arms and the apartment quiet around him.

His phone buzzed.

Elain 🌹:
I'm home. Thank you for tonight. Really.

He looked at the message for a moment. Then he crossed to the kitchen counter, leaned against it, and typed back.

Azriel:
Good. Was the driver careful?

Elain 🌹:
He drove 10 km under the speed limit the whole way. I think you scared him.

Azriel:
Good.

Elain 🌹:
That's not something to be proud of.

Azriel:
I'm not proud. I'm satisfied. There's a difference.

Elain 🌹:
Cute..

He looked at the word.

Cute. He turned it over, slowly, examining it from different angles. She'd called him cute. He wasn't sure anyone had called him that in his adult life. He wasn't sure what to do with it. He wasn't sure he minded.

Azriel: ?

A pause. Three dots appearing, disappearing, reappearing. He watched them with more attention than he was prepared to admit.

Elain 🌹:
I’m just teasing you.

She was getting better at it. That was the thing, she’d been careful for so long, kept herself measured and polite and at a certain distance from her own impulses, and lately he could see her practicing the particular courage of saying the thing instead of swallowing it. He found it, against all better judgment, completely disarming.

Azriel:
You need more practice.

Elain 🌹:
Will you teach me?

He stared at that for a long moment. The kitchen was very quiet. Mira had started purring again, a low continuous sound.

Will you teach me.

He thought about the bar. About the way she'd looked at him during the motorcycle conversation with those completely unguarded eyes, not knowing what she was showing, not knowing the effect of it. He thought about your patience, with me, said quietly into her cocktail glass like it had surprised her too.

Azriel:
You want a lot from me.

Elain 🌹:
If you only knew.

He read that twice. Then a third time.

Elain 🌹:
Whatever… goodnight!

He huffed something that was almost a laugh. The backpedal. The whatever deployed like a smoke screen, the exclamation mark doing its best to make the previous message seem like nothing. He'd noticed she did this a lot. Said the true thing and then tried to walk it back before he could look at it directly.

Azriel:
Mhmm.. Goodnight, Elain.

He set his phone face-down on the counter. Mira had relocated from his arms to the counter beside him, which he was not supposed to allow but had long since given up enforcing, and was regarding him now with that particular amber-eyed calm that cats reserved for moments when they had decided to extend their approval.

Azriel looked at her. "Don't," he said.

Mira blinked slowly.

Azriel reached out and scratched behind the notched ear anyway.

He stood there for a moment in the quiet kitchen with the cat and the hum of the refrigerator and the muffled sound of Cassian's slow breathing from the sofa, and he thought about the first time he'd seen her.

Not the party. Not December, not the penthouse.

A year before that. On campus, in the early morning, before the east library opened for the day.

He'd been cutting through the side path — the one along the building's wall, the shortcut that saved eight minutes off the walk from the parking structure — when he'd stopped. Because there was someone crouched on the ground ahead of him, in the particular January cold that turned breath visible, and she was talking.

To a cat.

A small black cat, pressed into the corner where the library wall met a concrete planter, ears flat, watching her with the terrified stillness of something that had learned not to trust sudden movements. And she was sitting on her heels with her bag beside her, her gloved hands open in her lap, not reaching, not approaching, just being there. Talking in a low, gentle voice about something he was too far away to hear. He'd stopped, and watched, and thought: who is this person.

She'd produced something from her bag. Something wrapped in a napkin. She'd placed it a few feet from the cat and moved back, giving the cat the space to decide on its own terms, and gone back to talking. The cat had watched. Considered. Come forward, eventually, in that wary, tentative way of something that wants very badly to believe in kindness but has not yet gathered enough evidence.

He'd left before she noticed him. He hadn't wanted her to feel watched.

He'd seen her again, the next morning. And the one after that. Always the same spot, always the same low voice, always the same patient waiting that asked nothing and simply offered. The cat — Mira, wouldn't have a name until the morning she was hurt and Azriel carried her home wrapped in a jacket.

He hadn't spoken to her. There had been no occasion. She was a girl he passed on a path in the early morning who talked to a frightened cat with a patience and a gentleness that he found, for reasons he didn't examine, quietly impossible to forget.

He'd remembered her. That was all. He'd filed her away in the particular, careful way he filed away things that mattered, without knowing exactly why, without demanding that the knowing come before the keeping.

And then it was December, and there was a party, and a cake that smelled like strawberries and lavender, and she'd said don't smoke, I don't like the smell and he'd put it out immediately, without thinking, which was the first time in as long as he could remember that he'd done something because someone had asked and not because he'd decided it was the right thing.

He scratched behind Mira's ear one more time.

I know she's beautiful, Nesta had said. That's what everyone thinks.

He thought, that is not what I think about her. He thought about the way she'd sat on her heels in the cold, talking to a frightened animal for as long as it took. He thought about five pins and the smile that had followed, the one that had been entirely, unguardedly real. He thought about I would choose lunch over the library anytime and the particular courage it had taken her to type that and press send.

She had choices. He hoped she knew that. He hoped, with a quiet and specific fierceness he didn't know what to do with, that she knew she was allowed to want things more than what she'd been handed, more than what she'd been told was hers. He wanted to tell her. He wasn't sure he was the right person to say it. He wasn't sure about a lot of things, right now, standing in a kitchen at midnight with a cat and a phone and a conversation still warm on the screen.

But he was sure about this: she was good for the world.

She was patient and careful and quietly, stubbornly hopeful, and the world had not been kind enough to her, and he was aware — more than was comfortable, more than was wise — that he would very much like to be part of changing that.

He turned off the kitchen light. Picked up the cat. Went to bed.

Outside, somewhere across the city, Mister Fern was reaching toward the window in the dark of a dormitory room, his new fronds unfurling, patient and alive.