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suilamhainsposts · 7 months ago

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You don’t have to be an Azris to enjoy this! And boy do I ever! !!!!

Enemies, All Too Familiar

Azriel x Eris

punk bank AU, secret romance, angst

Chaptered (1/?)

Chapter One

The muted thump in time to his foot pedal made the floor shake around him. Azriel tapped the pedal a few more times, establishing a rhythm before he settled his shoulders and opened his eyes. Both hands out, he waited for the rhythm to take him before he beat another layer on top of it. He could hear it clear enough through his headphones, but he couldn’t hear anything else. Cassian must have been playing something because he was hunched over his bass, as there was an occasional shudder from the floor beneath Azriel that wasn’t coming from him, from his arms and his legs and the thump-thump of his heart that was just a byproduct of being here, in this venue. He shut his eyes and focused on his footwork again, bass drum and cymbal. Thump, tish, thump, tish. Something was off. He opened his eyes again, but immediately lost his rhythm.

Cassian was staring at him. He stopped beating the bass drum and pulled his headphones off. The empty venue was unpleasantly echo-y without them.

“What?”

“I was asking you to shut the fuck up for a second,” Cassian said with no bite. He nodded to the floor in front of the stage, where Feyre stood with her arms folded and a sour expression. That wasn’t unusual. Feyre was pretty, but she could stand to treat the world less like she was punishing it all for not being her own house, to not treat everybody else like they were beneath her because they weren’t her sainted husband.

“Where’s Rhys?” he asked.

Feyre’s eyes flashed. “Weren’t you listening?”

“No,” said Azriel. Cassian echoed him. Feyre looked beseechingly at Morrigan, who looked like she had been listening but also a bit like she wished she hadn’t.

“I can’t do anything about it,” Mor said. Azriel frowned at her. She sounded upset. He fought the instinct to get up, to walk over there, to ask her what was wrong and who he needed to beat the shit out of to make her feel better. He fought it and won. He was winning more and more these days. Cassian didn’t have the years of emotional baggage he had, though, and he crossed the stage to her side.

“You don’t have to do anything,” he said. “Rhys will deal with him.”

So Cassian had been listening. Azriel felt left out. “What’s going on?” he asked, addressing Cassian and not Feyre who would just ask him if he was listening again. “I thought we had sound check.”

“Asshole is being an asshole,” Cassian told him. “Rhys is up in the office.”

Azriel’s stomach, already knotted since the moment he’d stepped foot in this place, lurched. “Why?”

Feyre had climbed up onto the low stage and was reading something on her phone. “Eris wants more buy-in from the band, or he won’t let you play,” he said. “I told him to go straight to hell and he told me,” she fashioned her fingers into air-quotes, “he ‘couldn’t deal with emotional females.’ What a fucking incel,” she said, rolling her eyes again. “Anyway, I can’t deal with sanctimonious scenesters, so I left Rhys to set him straight.”

Azriel’s ears were ringing, and only a little bit from his chronic tinnitus. Sanctimonious scenester? “He wants more money because it’s us?”

Cassian swore loudly and at length into the microphone over Mor’s keyboard. His words rang through the room, forcing Feyre to swat at his arm.

“One fucking record,” Mor muttered darkly. Azriel exchanged a tight smile with her. “We made one fucking record with that label, and they’ll punish us forever for it.” He mouthed the words he wanted to ask, that he wanted to express with the hug he wouldn’t give her because she’d think she was hurting him by hugging him back. Are you okay? “Yeah,” she said out loud.

Azriel stood. “I’ll go,” he said. “Rhys will only make things worse.”

Morrigan actually guffawed at that. “The second time you met Eris you broke his nose.”

“And his ribs,” Cassian nodded.

“That time was in a mosh pit,” Azriel muttered, setting his sticks down where nobody would slip on them. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. Get warmed up.”

“Bullshit. He broke Eris’s nose in my apartment,” Morrigan told Feyre, her voice ringing through the still-on mic in answer to an unheard question as Azriel let himself out the backstage door and into the service stairs. He could hear raised voices from halfway up and sighed heavily.

When he reached the top of the stairs, he followed the voices to Eris’s half-open office door. Harsh desk-lamp light spilled out of it and into the black-painted corridor, the stark contrast only doing bad things to Azriel’s mounting sense of trepidation. This place was not the place for this, for facing Eris. He was on the backfoot here and he hated being on the backfoot with Eris. Eris thought nothing of pushing when he had an advantage. When he reached the door, Azriel knocked softly. He stood outside but didn’t get an invitation. He doubted he’d been heard. Apart from the raised voices, Cassian’s bass had picked up again. And somebody was sitting at his drums, padding at his bass pedal. Azriel gritted his teeth. He didn’t like people touching his stuff.

“You’ll take in at least two hundred more covers tonight because of us, Eris.”

“Two hundred covers and not a single bar receipt. Have you seen my parking lot, Rhys? It’s full of teenagers caning cans of Red Stripe. The cops will-” Eris cool, deep voice was cut off by the bleet of a landline and he swore, his vocabulary not unlike Cassian’s. Not for the first time, Azriel thought Eris and Cassian might get along if they didn’t fucking hate each other. “Hello?”

Azriel took this as his cue and slipped into the office. The desk-lamp was the first thing that he saw, the bulb blowing his retinas to shit so he had to blink the afterglow out before he could make out Rhys, a vague shadow in the corner. Eris was behind the lamp, a cream-coloured handset pressed to his ear. Azriel didn’t look at him.

“They need you for soundcheck,” he said to Rhys.

“I’ll be down in a minute,” Rhys said.

“Now,” Azriel said. He put some force into the word, if not some volume. Eris, clearly on the phone to the police, was turned away from them. Rhys looked like he was going to protest but then he took in Azriel’s stance, his unblinking glare. “I’ll deal with this,” Azriel promised.

Rhys nodded. He smirked as he patted him on the shoulder. “Give him hell, Az,” he said, “Don’t break anything too vital,” and left. Azriel sighed. He had so many responses to that and none he could vocalise. On the other side of his desk, Eris was giving the cops chapter and verse on his indemnity and the security on site, but he turned around when Rhys shut the door behind him, leaving him alone with Azriel. He went very still. So did Azriel.

“You have a good night,” he said into the receiver, and then he dropped the phone in the cradle in front of him. Cautiously, he got to his feet. Azriel could barely see him. He reached out and moved the lamp, pointing it at the ceiling and leaving him in the shadows with Eris. He could make him out now, lean form wrapped in a skinny t-shirt that looked black in this light but was probably red or green or some other muted colour that would offset his flame-red hair. Even in this light his freckles stood out stark against his milk-pale skin. Azriel couldn’t read his expression at all.

“Do you all share a wardrobe?” Eris asked, moving finally, gesturing to Azriel’s black t-shirt, almost identical to Rhys’s but undoubtedly far, far less expensive, and about twice the amount of fabric Cassian was wearing across his expansive chest right now. Admittedly, Morrigan was wearing a shirt she’d borrowed from him, but Azriel ignored the jibe.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he asked.

Eris raised his eyebrows. “I’m trying to run a business,” he said coolly. Whatever momentary unmasking had occurred when he’d turned to find Azriel in his office was gone. He was the venue owner now, the hustler who’d spent the last half hour arguing with Rhys over what could only be a fraction of what he stood to make tonight, even after the cause took its cut.

“Your business will survive a few hyperactive teenagers who’ll only drink water,” Azriel said. “What are you really doing? This is a benefit show. For a cause you actually care about.” He didn’t add what was left unspoken there, that Eris cared about precious little else. He cared about The Mountain though. He’d spent most of his youth there, just like everybody else. Well, except for Azriel. And Cassian. But The Mountain was such a foundational place for their scene, an arts space and venue and youth centre and sometimes shelter, Azriel was just as invested as everybody else in keeping it from demolition.

“I care about having the cops on the phone,” Eris said sardonically. He stepped out from behind the desk and settled himself on the edge, arms folded but facing Azriel with a challenge in his green eyes. Azriel couldn’t even see his eyes in this light, but they were green. Like the forests in the real mountains, the ones he’d endured before he came here.

“Every single one of our fans pays a door charge-”

“Your fans,” Eris mocked. “Sorry rockstar. I didn’t realise I was talking to an idol.”

Azriel sighed. Talking to Eris was like talking to some kind of evil forest creature, one that would talk you into a bog. “Why are you doing this?” he asked again.

Eris grinned. “Because I can, Az. What savvy businessman could resist the opportunity to make some purse on the faded jewels of the northern scene? What do you want from me?” He shrugged, spread his arms in a yawn or a shrug, but nothing genuine. His long fingers left spindly shadows on the ceiling like the branches of trees that had lost their leaves.

“We want to be treated like everybody else,” Azriel said, knowing he’d said the wrong thing as soon as he’d said it.

“Everybody else didn’t get a special on CourtFM. Everybody else didn’t open for-”

“I won’t apologise for selling records, Eris. We have to make a living somehow.”

Eris pushed off the desk then, squaring up to Azriel. This close Azriel could see the kink in his nose where he’d broken it the night he’d called Morrigan a corporate sellout whore in front of all of her friends. Azriel had only met him once before that, but he hadn’t hesitated. He’d called him out and Eris had taken up the challenge. Neither of them were particularly good at backing down.

“You live so nicely,” Eris said, voice like silk and just as slippery. “So, what’s another hundred off your door cut? Pay it forward. It’s a benefit after all.”

Azriel felt his jaw clench. “A hundred?”

“Just a hundred,” Eris said. “You pay what everybody else pays, and a little extra on top. Then you can play your shitty sellout trash on my stage.” Eris’s eyes flashed. “Make sure you play the one about the first date. I love that one. So romantic. So radio friendl-”

Azriel caught the front of Eris’s t-shrit and pushed him against the desk. Eris shut up, eyes wide. Maybe he looked a little paler, or maybe that was a bloom of red crawling up his neck, Azriel couldn’t tell because he’d locked eyes with him and wasn’t looking away.

“A hundred on top of our door take,” he said, “and every penny of it goes to the benefit.” He meant it. He’d pay it himself if the others refused. Eris had a point; they’d bring in more people tonight than the other three bands combined. “But if you tell anybody about that,” he went on, voice dropping so he could barely hear himself over the sounds of Illyria warming up downstairs, “I’ll tell everybody you’re creaming cash off the top of a benefit take whether it’s true or not. I’ll your brother you’re robbing the benefit he’s been killing himself to organise. I’ll tell the Terrasen kids, and Hunt and his guys, and they’ll all pull their sets tonight, and we’ll do the benefit somewhere else. How does that sound? Do you still think you can take six hundred covers at the door if Tamlin and his acoustic guitar are the only thing you have to offer?”

Eris, to be fair to him, didn’t even flinch. “Azriel, please,” he said. “The extra hundred was always going straight to the benefit. What do you take me for? I even talked it over with Lucien.” Eris smirked and Azriel blinked.

“Why didn’t you tell Rhys that?” he asked through gritted teeth.

“He didn’t ask,” Eris said. “He assumed the worst. He really doesn’t like me.”

Azriel’s knuckles tightened in the shirt. “I don’t like you,” he said.

“Keep telling yourself that, Az.” Eris tipped his chin, lips centimetres from Azriel’s. “If you really believed it, I doubt you’d even be here tonight.”

Azriel’s grip loosened, his hands splaying, and then he was gripping Eris around the waist, crowding him against the desk, forcing him up onto it until he was standing between his legs. This close, the pine and resin scent of his skin was dizzying. Azriel could never work it out, if Eris wore some sort of cologne he’d never encountered before or if this was just Eris, the olfactory upshot of being a sanctimonious environmentalist. Whatever it was, it drove Azriel wild.

“Please,” he said, lips hovering over Eris’s. “Please shut the fuck up now.” Then he caught his lips in his own, forceful and familiar, a burning intensity behind the kiss that never banked no matter how much they did this, no matter that there’d been nobody else for Azriel for months now, not since he’d discovered that nothing and nobody else compared. He pushed his tongue against the seam of Eris’s lips and felt them part, felt the tiny moan at the back of the other man’s throat like the vibration of his drums.

His drums.

Somebody was playing his fucking drums. And he recognised the beat.

He pulled himself off of Eris’s lips. “That fucking Danaan guy is playing my drums again,” he said. He tried to disengage, but Eris had locked his legs around him. “Let go, babe, I have to go murder somebody.”

Eris, arms around his neck, forced Azriel to face him again, leaned in and purred against his lips. “I love when you’re all fired up like this.”

Azriel almost let himself sink into it. He almost let himself have it, since he wasn’t going to get any more tonight. The band would insist on hanging out after the show, probably with the other bands and some of the fans they knew. Rhys and Feyre would have another one of their tedious after parties at their tediously perfect townhouse, and there was maybe a better chance of hell freezing over than that they would ask Eris to come. There was less chance of him turning up of his own accord, and even if he did, then they might have to explain themselves, explain this to everybody else. And there was no explaining this. There was no way any of them could understand.

So, this was all Azriel was getting tonight. He gave into it for just one more minute. He gave in to the taste of Eris’s tongue in his mouth, and the silk-smoothness of the skin under his t-shirt, of the hard insistent press of him against Azriel’s leather pants. And then Ruhn Danaan crashed his high hat loud enough to hear through two walls and a stairwell, and Azriel tore himself away from his boyfriend and dove for the door.

“Let me know if you want to see me later,” Eris said, before he could disappear. Azriel let himself look back once. He didn’t know how to say it, that he always wanted to see Eris. That he couldn’t later, because his friends hated Eris and he couldn’t even blame them for it.

“Sure,” was all he said instead, and then he ran for the stairs.

Chapter 2 on ao3 now: https://archiveofourown.org/works/56976637/

(updating to Tumblr soon)

#azriel x eris #azriel #eris #acotar #maasverse #fanfiction #romance #forbidden love #angst #acotar fanfiction

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suilamhainsposts · 8 months ago

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This might be the best Azris fic I have read! I want this to be true! And I am dying for the next chapter!!! Snarky Eris? Angst Az? Feyre being a “dose” (annoying).

Obsessed!

Enemies, all too familiar