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fatesundress · 2 years ago

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⭑ for the love that used to be here. tom riddle x reader

summary. you and tom are the only muggle-borns in slytherin, until one day he isn’t.

tags. angst, afab reader who is referred to as a witch a few times and rooms with girls but i don't think i ever use she/her pronouns or say the word girl/woman, biggest warning is that this is SO long (idk what compelled me to write a year 1 – post-hogwarts fic but here we are twenty thousand damn words later), blood purity and bigotry, dumbledore is greatly offended by the bonding of two orphans until he can capitalise on it, frequent wwii mentions (specifically the blitz), book clerk tom, MURDERER TOM… ministry reader, kissing, smut once they’re 21/22 May all the minors in the room exit at once, more angst, sad ending kinda, me spreading a very personal and very nefarious tom riddle agenda that is canon to ME but probably only like two other people

note. i need a shower and an exorcism after writing this shit. i'm exhausted. i don't even remember half of it. but i'm also SO stoked, this is my little (very large, frankly) 100 followers celebration! i've only been on here for about a month and the love has been so crazy so thank you mwah mwah mwah ♡

word count. 21.8k (i know... i KNOW)

You learn quickly that your shade of green is not the same as theirs. The rest of them are emeralds, even at that age — they glitter with their parent’s polish. You are flotsam, sea-sick, envy green; the putrid boiling stuff that brews in your cauldron when you look away for a second too long, and, really, it’s more of a stain than a colour at all. There is a fraction of a second where you find something powerful in that. You are not an easy thing to remove. And then it’s gone, because they want to so badly.

You learn, with a bit less tact, that you doesn’t actually mean just you; that it’s you and him whether you like it or not.

He evidently does not.

“It has to be completely fine,” Tom says to you in Potions, his voice small then but just as practised.

You narrow your eyes. “‘Scuse me?”

“I said the powder has to be completely fine.”

“I heard you completely fine. I know how to read.”

He stares blankly at you before returning to his own station, and that’s that.

It isn’t unheard of for muggle-borns to be sorted into Slytherin, so you’ve been told, but one glance around your common room and you can see it’s pretty damn rare.

There’s Tom Riddle, there’s you, and there’s a seventh-year girl whose knuckles are always white like she’s spent so long with her hands balled into fists that they don’t know how to do anything else. Tom Riddle is a prat, the girl is too old and unapproachable even if she wasn’t, and you are very good at being alone.

That decides it. Flotsam still floats.

Everything is — fine. It’s fine for months; you have no one and need no one and sometimes you catch a jinx in the back of Charms that zips your mouth shut or bends a foot the wrong way (a cruel reminder of how much more these people know than you) and your broom occasionally pivots so sharply the Flying professor has to stop you from careening into a wall and breaking enough bones for a week’s worth of Skele-Gro, but it’s fine.

…It’s just that he’s insufferable.

The boy is eleven years old and he speaks like he’s stealing glances at an invisible lexicon between every word, more refined than any of the orphans you grew up with which makes you wonder which sort he’s surrounded by, and you take it upon yourself to theorise in passing if you could ever scare him badly enough his real voice would slip and he might just appear human for once.

Only it becomes clear when you’re stirring awake in the Hospital Wing after a mysterious bout of dragon pox (conveniently, all the pureblood children developed an immunity after catching it young) has rendered you bed-ridden and pockmarked, that you don’t think anything can scare Tom Riddle. He’s suffering just as well in the bed beside yours to keep the contagion to the two of you, and he’s all cold, eddied rage under sallow skin and beetling bones.

“They’re going to kill you,” he says after three days of silence, when the room is dusted in moonlight so thin it’s like squinting through cinema noise or mohair fluff to try to see him.

You blink at the vague shape of him. “What?”

“If you don’t hurt them back, eventually, they’ll just kill you.”

In hindsight, it’s an assumption so hastily bleak only a scared child could make it.

I want to hurt them, you try to say, but for what follows you cannot: I want to hurt them but I’m not good enough to do it.

You roll over and pretend to sleep, and in the morning, you hurt them anyway.

It’s Avery who’s unlucky enough to be the first to test you when you’re three assignments behind in Transfiguration, still a bit groggy from your last dose of Gorsemoor Elixir, and actually, physically green. He tugs your hair and stings your cheek with the promise of “bringing a bit of colour back to your face” and it’s sort of funny how banal it is compared to the other transgressions you’ve been dealt — that this is the thing that makes you bare your teeth, grip your wand in a hand that still can’t hold half of it, and send Avery flying across the room with a Knockback Jinx.

Tom sits with you in the Great Hall for dinner that night, and he never really stops.

You practise spells by the Black Lake between classes and he’s anything but kind about the ordeal, but you teach each other. You end your days with singe prints and sore wrists and you often take more damage than he does, but sometimes, as spring settles in with warm tones (apple and jade and moss — all the greens you’d never imagined), you leave with less bruises than he does. It hardly feels like friendship. It feels much more like purpose.

When summer comes you don’t write to him, and you don’t expect he will either. You don’t suppose you’ve actually written a letter in your life. Instead you try new wand movements under your quilt every night and wait for August’s departure on a big red train.

You sit together when the day does come. He asks you if you’ve been practising. You frown and tell him you’re not allowed to use magic outside of school.

Second year is nothing but monotonous, antiquated theoretics. Most everyone complains. You don’t see why they should — they’re already aeons ahead of you — but that means you finally have a chance to catch up in your less-than-school-sanctioned meetings with Tom while the rest remain practically stationary.

Deputy Headmaster and Transfiguration professor Albus Dumbledore is imperceptibly less soft with you than he was last year when you make the apparently poor decision to sit beside Tom on the first day, and you file the subtle shift in demeanour into some mental cabinet to review later.

You find workarounds with the librarian, Madam Palles, inclined to sympathy for the poor, orphaned muggle-borns to grant relatively unfettered daytime access to the Restricted Section so long as you keep it tidy and none of the books leave the library. That’s where things get a bit more interesting.

For a month you remain innocuous as can be. You browse through rare historical tomes and foreign biographies that would charge more galleons than you can conceptualise, and you never leave so much as a tea stain on the parchment. You smile at the Madam when you return the key each night, and walk back to the dungeons with your hands behind your back. It is, of course, totally unrelated that a month is what it takes for Tom to master the third-year curriculum’s Doubling Charm. An entirely separate affair when you meet him in the most secluded alcove of the library, slip him the key, and stifle your grin as he duplicates it perfectly.

You discover Christmas break is your favourite time of the year. Nearly all the purebloods go home. The Slytherin dormitories are effectively halved.

It’s two weeks of earnest, uninterrupted work and sleep without fear of waking up with jelly legs or whiskers.

Madam Palles, most nights, makes a slight, drowsy effort of searching the library for leftover students before she casts the lights out and closes the door. Then, it belongs to you and Tom.

You’re splayed rather ridiculously over one of the big reading chairs on Christmas Eve, Lore of Godelot in hand, enthralled by a chapter detailing his controlled use of Fiendfyre through the power of the Elder Wand.

Tom is cross-legged and sat straight, his brows furrowed in concentration.

“What’ve you got?” you ask, leaning over to answer your own question.

Tom as good as rolls his eyes, holding up the book to give you an easier look.

“Magick Moste Evile?” You scrunch your nose. “Bit much, don’t you think?”

“It’s the stuff they’ll never teach us.”

“I wonder why.”

He steals a glance at your own book and smiles in that smug way that makes you want to slap him.

“What, Tom?”

He shrugs. “You might want to know you’re reading stories about the author.”

You look down. Lore of — Godelot wrote Magick Moste Evile?

It shouldn’t really be surprising. Three chapters ago your book was recounting his months in Yugoslavia grave-robbing magical burial sites.

“Whatever,” you mumble, “It’s just a biography. Least I’m not reading the words out of his mouth.”

“Well, they’d be out of his quill.”

“Oh my God, Tom, shut up.”

All good things must come to an end. Term resumes and your hackles are back up.

Abraxas Malfoy, Antonin Dolohov, Walburga Black and the best of the worst of your house have returned, sleek-haired and insatiable and deranged, truly, in such a manner that you don’t think you can be blamed for the instinct you feel every time you pass them to lunge like a wild predator or run like wild prey. All Tom does, though (and so you follow, because he’s standing with you and who has ever done that?) is meet their gazes with equal assuredness. He never seems bothered. He never seems animal. You are still all hammering heart and heavy lungs, and you are learning not to see the world through the eyes of someone who’s only ever had their fists to fight. You have magic, you remember. You’re good at it. You could hurt them, if you really wanted.

Not much is different that summer than the last. The war is hard. The food is hard to chew. You chip a tooth. You’re too afraid to fix it with the Trace on you, but you still smile because you will, and everyone seems put off by that. What is there to smile about?

You suppose, for them, it’s a question with few answers.

For you — you’re back on a big red train musing about the functions of muggle warfare with Tom Riddle, chucking a useless card from a chocolate frog out the window and moaning about how you wasted the sickle you found under your seat.

He’s gotten very good at ignoring your theatrics and going right back to whatever it was he was talking about. And you note, unrelatedly, he almost looks like he’s learned how to open the windows at Wool’s. (You dare not suggest he’s doing something so ludicrous as sitting in the sun too, but this is a start.)

Dippet, or the Minister, or whoever it is that’s in charge of the practicality of the curriculum, has become fractionally less stupid in the last three months.

You don’t have to rely on nights in the Restricted Section or weekends at the Black Lake to actually learn something anymore. Of course, without the assistance of those illicit extracurriculars, you wouldn’t be able to match up to your peers the way you are this year, but it’s nice to duel with dummies instead of motioning your wand vaguely over a desk, and you and Tom still climb the notice boards in rapid succession.

They hate you for it. One of your roommates makes a pointed effort each night to glare at you from her bed like those jelly legs are back on the table, Orion Black (two years younger but just as nasty as his cousin) nearly trips you on your way to Divination, Abraxas Malfoy develops what you think borders on obsession with Tom, and for once it feels almost offhand to not care about any of it.

You’re beginning to think even at its best, Hogwarts is remarkably insufficient. This leads you to books mercifully unrestricted so you can read about a few of the other magical schools for comparison. Beauxbatons is renowned for providing most of the worlds alchemical developments, Uagadou’s early propensity for wandless magic makes it unfathomably more practical than Hogwarts, Durmstrang (though you scoff at their violent anti-muggle sentiment) teaches the Dark Arts as something beneficial rather than unforgivable, and — what do you learn here? Even with the hair’s-breadth of magical leniency you’ve been allowed this year, it’s no surprise so few recognizable names in wizarding history are Hogwarts alumni.

“Let me have a look at that,” you say to Tom one evening, when he’s peering once more over the pages of Magick Moste Evile. He’s a purveyor of knowledge in all forms, but he always seems to come back to Godelot in the end.

He raises a brow, handing it to you like your intrigue doubles his. “No more reservations?”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself. I’m only curious.”

“Curiosity—”

“Killed the damn cat, I know.” You glare at him through the pages. “I think that’s you, in this case though, since you’re the one in love with the bloody thing.”

He shakes his head as he reclines in the low light of the Restricted Section, muttering something that sounds like “ridiculous,” or “querulous,” or something else unimaginably fucking annoying.

You might be wrong. Retract your last quip and expunge it. If Tom’s in love with any book, it’s the behemoth dictionary he’s been spitting stupid adjectives out of since he was eleven.

But Godelot’s musings on the Dark Arts are fascinating enough that you can understand the appeal. He’s no wordsmith, and you appreciate that in a way you’re sure Tom deems regrettable, but his points are straightforward but thoughtful in such a way you can read in them how he was guided by the Elder Wand through everything he did. There’s a stream-of-consciousness to them. Something doctrinal you’re surprised to enjoy for all the obligatory English creed they washed your mouth with at the orphanage.

“Find what you’re looking for?” Tom asks, combing with little interest through the tomb you’d put down in favour of his.

“I’m not looking for anything. I’m just…” You sigh. It’s almost painful to say. “I think you were right, and — oh, shut up, don’t look at me like that — I don’t think we’re learning anything here. Not really; not as much as they do at other schools.”

“Of course,” he says blankly. “Hence this.”

This — restricted books and furtive duels — should not be necessary.

“You know that’s not gonna be enough. For the rest of them, maybe, but not us.”

He tenses how he always does at the reminder of his difference. And you get it. Sometimes in moments like these you forget the reason you’re here in the first place. It isn’t just the rebellious divertissement of two academically eager students, it’s… survival. What future do you have as a penniless orphan in wartorn London? What future do you have as a muggle-born Slytherin who’s apt with a wand when there are a thousand more your age, just as skilled and twice as pure?

It isn’t enough to be as good as them. You have to best them, and you have to do it forever.

The night stumbles into an exhaustive silence because you both know it’s true and it’s a bit too heavy right now. The answer isn’t in this room. Just you. Just him. So you sit in the dark and you stare through that muffled nighttime noise playing tricks on your eyes. The worst of the world can wait until morning.

The worst of the world has impeccable timing.

A fault of both sides of the coin; the muggle world is a travesty and the wizarding world is just a bit fucking late, really.

So there’s the newspaper. It’s October first and the date reads September tenth. School owls are a joke and you can’t afford anything better.

And it’s a dirty, ashen grey. It smudges your green if you ever had it at all. You were born to this and you will return to it always.

BOMB’S HAVOC IN CROWDED PUBLIC SHELTER

MOTHERS AND CHILDREN AMONG THE CASUALTIES

DAMAGE CONSIDERABLE, BUT SPIRITS UNBROKEN

All you can hope to do is pass the paper to Tom and wonder without words what you’ll go home to.

The answer is very little when the summer clouds your vision with dust and you stand dumbly with your suitcase in front of nothing at all. You’d tried your best until your departure to keep up with muggle news, but it had remained, routinely, a month behind with the owls. By the time June arrived you were still holding your breath through May. Tom had attempted to reason with Dippet for summer lodgings at the school but you were both denied in light of the exquisite mercy — the bombs have stopped! The Blitz has ended! Go back to the aftermath and make do with the craters.

It’s a bit ironic that Tom’s orphanage survived and yours didn’t. At least you can finally see what all the fuss is about.

In truth, it’s more strange than anything. You feel unreasonably like you’re impeding on a part of him that has never belonged to you (if any of him does); that place where you intersect but never draw attention to. You remind yourself you had no choice in the matter. The system puts you where it wants to, and these days the options are slim. But it’s — the walls are amber-black tile and plaster, lined with sanitary-smelling hospital beds and a cupboard per room. Per room, you think; you’ve got one of those now, and with only one girl to share it with.

You figure the reason for the extra space is probably not one you want to know.

Anyway, you don’t actually see Tom for two days. The caretakers bring you a tray of dinner that’s vaguely warm and a bit too salty and you sleep off the debris you think you breathed in that morning, half-sated and sun-tired.

But then you do see him, and he’s in these funny uniform shorts and a thick blazer and your greeting is an offhand joke about the scandal of his knees that he doesn’t seem to appreciate. He eyes your muggle clothes while you wait for your own set and you know you really don’t have any room to judge.

He doesn’t, or at least doesn’t say he minds your relocation.

You spend half the summer waking up in the middle of the night to acquaint yourselves with the London tube stations, and the other half in whatever crevices of the orphanage you aren’t harangued by Mrs Cole every five seconds, which are far and few between. She seems to have decided fourteen is old enough an age to worry about your intentions unchaperoned, like it’s the bloody 1800’s, and admonishes you and Tom relentlessly despite only ever finding you quietly buried in useless books.

You begin to miss Madam Palles and her invaluable pity. Everyone’s an orphan here. No one’s sorry.

“What’s his deal?” you ask one stuffy afternoon, reclining in your creaking seat to prop your legs on the desk.

Tom knocks them off (he’s so well-mannered that you sometimes push these little gestures of impropriety just to bother him) and glances at the target of your question. Some broad, blond boy who skitters down the corridor a shade paler than he arrived. You’ve yet to properly introduce yourself to anyone you don’t have to, so names are muddy when you try to apply them to faces.

He shrugs, but there’s a flash of something in his expression you’re fascinated to realise is unfamiliar. “He’s an imbecile.”

“...Riiiiight, but that isn’t a proper answer.”

You smile. Legs return to table. Timeworn Oxfords muddy the surface. Tom scowls.

“There was an altercation last year,” he says tersely, “he’s rather fixated on the matter.”

“An altercation.”

“Very good, that is what I said.”

You narrow your eyes and he sweeps your legs off the desk again, gaze catching the unmistakable ribbon of an old bullied scar on your shin.

“And I suppose you’re above such incidents,” he muses.

You cross your arms and huff. He always wins games like these.

You’re grateful when you return to Hogwarts in one piece after your final night of summer is spent underground, and the certainty of knowing where you’ll rest your head for the next ten months cannot be understated.

But the worst thing has happened, and you blame it on the flicker of a moment where you missed Madam Palles like it was some jubilant, accidental curse to ever miss anyone. A foreign thing you remind yourself never to do again.

She’s only gone and jinxed the locks to the Restricted Section so they cry like newborn Mandrakes when Tom’s replica key clicks in place.

For a second you both stand there looking stupidly at each other. Getting caught was a fear two years ago; you’d almost forgotten it was still possible.

Tom is quicker to collect himself. He grabs you by the arm and casts a Disillusionment Charm, and you don’t burst running out of the library like two blurry suncatchers reflecting the candlelight as your instinct heeds; you cling to the shelves and you slither silently to the door. (You’ll make a joke about it when you can breathe.)

Madam Palles the Traitor comes heaving into the library in her nightgown, a blinding blue light baubled at the end of her wand, and it’s really just theatrical at this point to use Lumos bloody Maxima when the basic spell would do the job just fine.

“Has she suspected us the whole time?” you say on gasp once you’ve made it to the dungeons.

“Perhaps someone else has,” Tom suggests.

“What? Malfoy?”

You think it’s a good first guess. It could have been any of the Slytherins, upon consideration, but Malfoy seemed most fixated on Tom last year and it wouldn’t surprise you to learn he’d been observant enough to follow you to the library and notice you don’t leave with the other students.

But Tom quashes the idea. “I’m doubtful. Malfoy is attentive, but Madam Palles is hardly partial to him.” (He had, in second year, set one of her books on fire while studying offensive spells.) “I suspect it was someone with more influence.”

Only no one has more influence than Abraxas Malfoy. The rest of the Slytherins follow him like lost pups. But then Tom might mean —

“A professor?”

“It may be.” He says it like he’s already decided his suspect.

He is, as always, and ever-infuriatingly, correct.

It’s that file you tucked away for later, reoccurring when you return to Transfiguration in the morning like a second epiphany: Dumbledore.

He assigns the term’s seating arrangements, which he’s never done before, and there’s something in his tone when he pairs you with Rosier that feels intentionally like not pairing you with Tom. You don’t think it’s paranoia clouding your better judgement, and by the way Tom’s gaze hardens as he takes his seat beside Malfoy, neither does he.

Dumbledore is suspicious for a number of reasons. He disappears for weeks at a time. The Prophet writes articles on his sightings in Austria and France like he’s an endling beast. He’s being sighted in Austria and France — two notable countries in Grindelwald’s ongoing war. Perhaps ancillary, you’ve decided the charmed glass repositories he uses to hold his old artefacts are the same ones encasing the least permissible books in the Restricted Section. And if that isn’t paranoia (which, you’re willing to admit, it may be) then you assume he has them so proudly on display because he wants you to know.

You consider it a warning.

Tom does not.

“Just give it up,” you hiss over a game of wizard’s chess, “I bet we’ve read every book in there twice already anyway.”

His jaw ticks as the sole indicator of his annoyance, and he takes your rook. You scowl.

“Tom, that man thinks you’re devil-spawn. You know he’s just waiting for an opportunity to catch you doing something wrong.”

“So?”

It sounds so petulant you think he’s been possessed by his eleven-year-old self. Then you think he was a lot wiser at eleven.

“So?” You make an aggressive move with your knight. “So don’t give him one!”

He stares at the board and his breath is just a trace sharper and you hate that you know him like this and no one else. You wonder if he knows you like that too, but resolve with ease that he does not. You’re hard frowns and lewd jokes and trousers torn at the knee to bare scars with stories you wish you could forget. There’s no mystery there. Tom is nothing but — gordian knots and fixed expressions and little patterns to learn like the rules of this stupid game between you. You must know Tom Riddle by every atom or not at all. And that isn’t a choice, really. You’ve never known anyone else.

“Are you stupid, Tom?”

You glance at the board. He’s got Check. A terrible, true answer.

“No,” you finish. “Then don’t act like it.”

Your king glances at you and you nod. He falls. The game is resigned.

Tom acts stupid.

Dumbledore knows.

It all happens very fast.

You strike Tom harder in the arm with Confringo than is likely necessary that night, and he returns the favour with a Knockback Jinx that thrusts you into the shallows of the Black Lake.

You gasp. The cold water feels like it’s swallowing you whole when it strikes, an envelope sealed around you and licked shut for good measure. Everything holds to you, and it’s fucking November. Your senses are so overwhelmed that you forget to murder Tom the instant you sink in. You forget to do much of anything.

You wade trembling out of the lake when sense returns and Tom huffs, peeling off his robe to treat the burn on his arm.

“You—idi—iot,” you mutter, trying to find the incantation for a warming charm but the words get stuck between your chattering teeth. “You stole a re… stricted book.”

Tom glares daggers at you between his poor healing job and you scowl, mincing through the grass and grabbing his arm. “Fucking imbec-cile…”

You’ve done enough damage that if he were anyone else you’d be proud of yourself, and somehow, simultaneously, if he were anyone else you’d be able to manage a pinch of guilt. But he’s Tom, and you know him by every atom, so you cannot be proud, and he’s Tom — he retaliated by tossing you in freezing water and now your clothes are clinging sodden and heavy to every inch of you, so you certainly can’t be guilty either.

“I borrowed it,” he says tightly. As if that means anything at all. And then he takes his robe and drapes it spiritlessly over your shoulders. “You could attempt communication before curses.”

“I could attempt communication,” you scoff, uttering a charm to partially close the gash on Tom’s arm, “Fucking h-hypocrite. I did communicate. You lied.”

“I —”

“Omitted information? Withheld the truth? Watch your mouth or I’ll steal your fucking dictionary, Riddle.”

You swear a great deal when you’re cold and mad, apparently.

“I won’t be caught.” His calm is infuriating. “It would hardly earn expulsion regardless.”

“It doesn’t matter! He knows it’s you! He was staring at you all class!”

“So nothing novel then.”

“D’you want me to blast you again?”

His lips form a flat line. No. That’s what you thought.

You sigh, clutching his robes in your fists to quell your trembling. “What’d you take, anyway? We never touch the encased stuff.”

That is, you assume, why Dumbledore was vexed enough about the whole thing to mention it in class today. A highly valuable book has gone missing, from a repository you dare conclude belongs to him, and he has to pretend all the while not to know it’s Tom who took it. You are out of the question. Theirs is some delicate vendetta you can’t begin to unfurl.

“Nothing anyone should miss,” Tom says, a complete non-answer as he stops to murmur a warming charm you could probably manage yourself by now.

“Tom.”

“It was an encyclopaedia. It’s entirely in Runes. I suspect it will take months for me to decipher.”

“God’s sake,” you groan. He really is exhausting. “I think Dumbledore’l take his chances and loot your dorm before that happens.”

Tom wipes a stray droplet of water from your cheek. His fingers are soft. “We should return. You look half-drowned.”

“I am half-drowned, dickhead.”

And you accost him in hushed tones the whole walk back. Runes, Tom, really? Threw me in the damn lake over a Runic Encyclopaedia? He accosts you just the same; You burned me first.

It does, in fact, take Tom months to decipher the Runes, and he’s quite secretive about it. He won’t let you see the book, won’t tell you what it’s about, won’t indulge your queries on how far he’s gotten or if it’s worth the way Dumbledore bores his eyes into the pair of you in the Great Hall with nothing but the glass of his spectacles to soften his censure. You consider — well — you consider taking your chances and looting his dormitory.

The day everything changes starts the same as any.

You muse over breakfast about muggle news and how the way Tom holds his wand when he casts defensive spells is too sharp when it should be circular. He argues. You soften the criticism by telling him his offensive magic is stellar but you’ll always beat him in defence if he doesn’t swallow his damn pride and listen to you for once. (So, really, you soften it very little.) He doesn’t take Divination so you don’t see him until Herbology that afternoon and he’s silent enough during the hour you share with your wormwood plant that you know he’s done it sometime between breakfast and now.

Tom has cracked the book.

It’s late spring and the night takes longer to settle than it did in the winter. Errant sunbeams still sparkle on the water when you meet him by the lake, and it’s warm enough to forgo a coat.

“Are you going to tell me what it’s about now?” you ask without preamble, arms crossed over your chest as he approaches.

He hands you the book like it’s worth something to you without his explanation, but you’re intelligent enough to gather something from the illustrations of two twined snakes embroidering the cover.

“I should have suspected it sooner,” Tom says before you can comment. “By the way Dumbledore acted when I told him… I should have known he would have wanted to keep it from me.”

“Tom, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“It’s an Encyclopaedia on Parseltongue and its known speakers.”

You flip through the pages and none of it means anything. “Parseltongue?”

“The language of serpents,” Tom supplies, and the two of you walk along the edge of the forest. “It’s almost exclusively hereditary.”

“Okay, so, what — you’re trying to learn it anyway?”

“I have no need.”

You frown. “You… you already know it.”

“I always have,” he says, and there’s something almost unrestrained in his voice. He’s proud in a new light, and it takes you a moment to understand and you’re not sure why exactly it makes your heart sink, but —

“You’re not muggle-born.”

“No, I’m not. And Dumbledore knows.”

“So, he —” You try not to sound crushed because why should you be? Why should it matter that he isn’t some exact reflection of you? He’s at your side, he’s still there, he’ll always be there — “How does he know?”

“When he came to Wool’s to inform me I'd been accepted at Hogwarts. I hadn’t known anything, certainly not that speaking to snakes is emphatically rare, so I asked him. He said it was ‘not a peculiar gift.’ Perhaps to keep my interest at a minimum.”

“Why would he lie?”

“Because it isn’t just that I’m of magical blood. I’m a descendant of Salazar Slytherin.”

You can’t be faulted for laughing. It’s not often Tom makes jokes, let alone funny ones.

“That’s good, Tom. Morgana used to have tea with my great-great-hundredth-great-grandmother, so that works out nice.”

He sighs, taking your hand and leading you further into the woods.

“Are you trying to murder me?”

“I might.”

“You’d be the first suspect.”

“No, I wouldn’t. You’ve far too many enemies.”

Not by choice, you start to scold, and then he stops, not so far into the Forbidden Forest that you’re afraid, but far enough you understand this is not something he’d chance showing you in the open.

He closes his eyes and whispers, and it’s — decidedly not English. And you know the sound of a few other languages, at least; this doesn’t sound like words at all. His consonants are pointed, his S’s stretched, the syllables repetitive but separated by a difference in cadence someone less perceptive might not notice.

It shouldn’t be surprising; it’s exactly what he told you, but it startles you how much it reminds you of a snake.

“Tom?” you murmur, unsure at the prospect of speaking some ancient, unknown language into the air of the Forbidden Forest, and, underneath that, still reeling with the knowledge that this is real at all. You’ve pinched yourself a few times to make sure.

There’s a low susurration in the grass, wet with dew that catches the moonlight, and you gasp, clinging to Tom’s arm when you see the blades part in helices for the space of an adder.

“It’s all right,” Tom says softly, almost elsewhere, his eyes zeroed in on the snake. “It won’t hurt you.”

You’re still by the balance of his arm and some petrifying awe as he extends a hand to the grass and the adder coils around it, weaving upward to his shoulder.

“Oh my God. Oh my God, Tom.”

The adder points its beady gaze at you, and Tom whispers something else in that strange language before it retreats in agreement or compliance or whatever could come close to expression on the face of a fucking snake, and maybe you’re dreaming this despite your pinching. Maybe you’ve lost your mind.

“Hope you didn’t just tell it to bite me,” you try, and it comes out half-choked.

He smiles. It’s partly for you and partly for this venomous little thing on his shoulder, and that’s a bit startling. Tom Riddle smiles for adders and you and not much else.

“Should I?”

And all you manage, for whatever reason, is, “Don’t be like them now that you’re not like me.”

It’s out before you can stop it, welling from a small, scared place that embarrasses you to return to. A hospital bed when you were eleven. The walls of a bedroom ravaged by bombs.

Tom’s smile fades. “We’re nothing like them.”

The thing is, neither of you know that’s the day that changes everything.

You celebrate your fifteenth birthday in the Deathday ballroom with Tom, a stolen dinner pastry, a green candle, and a few sad ghosts. You try to learn how to dance. Tom thinks it’s silly. You tell him that’s only because he’s upset he keeps stepping on your toes.

Summer blisters when it comes.

Some of the children take jobs as mail-sorters and steelworkers and you clasp for whatever you’re (one) allowed and (two) capable of, which isn’t much. You’re both old enough at the end of the day to explore London on your own, opting to spend as much time away from the orphanage as Mrs Cole allots, but you only have knuts and pennies and you warn Tom it would be unwise to swindle muggles and risk a letter from the Ministry. So you work where you’re needed and you eat the rationed nonsense you always do and you miss Hogwarts terribly. It’s much the same: you’re together, you’re hungry, and you’re nothing like them.

And then it’s different: Tom makes Slytherin Prefect, is suddenly tall, and you wonder in fleeting moments if his face has always suited him this well.

A stupid remark. You fervently ignore it.

Fifth year begins and you have almost the same number of electives as you do core classes, Tom has duties in his new role that take much of his spare time, and despite popular belief, you and him are not a mitotic entity, so this splits you up more often than it had in previous years. Which is fine. You still have plenty of things to talk about during meals and between duels, and you reckon you’ll share DADA until you graduate.

But in his absence, your attentions are forced elsewhere, and you should be grateful they land on something potentially promising.

It’s like Transfiguration just clicks for you this year. You’ve never been the greatest at Transformation (importantly though, you’ve also remained far from the worst), but fifth year launches you into Vanishment and something about that feels like a perfect equation. There are no complicated half-numerals and objects stuck between inanimacy and being — just unmaking the made. Nothing or not. You’re fucking excellent at it. You glean the theoretics fast and then the practise comes like breathing. Even the purebloods struggle as you Vanish Dumbledore’s Conjured garden snakes in brilliant tendrils of light. You exult unabashedly when you brush past them on the way out of class — who was it that didn’t belong in Slytherin?

You say the same to Tom and he rolls his eyes, but the amusement is there.

“Think you can talk to my snakes for me?” you tease, nudging him on the path to Hogsmeade.

“If they’re yours, I doubt they have anything worth discussing.”

And Dumbledore is… a hue nearer to the man you remember from first year. He praises your improvement and smiles when you can’t hide your giddiness as if equally impressed.

He doesn’t shelve people the way Slughorn does (you’re dismayed to find Tom has been invited to join the Slug Club and you have not) but you think if he did you’d be rapidly climbing your way to the top. Maybe get put in one of those neat little repositories he keeps all his best treasures in.

Dumbledore does, however, offer additional assignments for those who are interested, and tasks you with a few if you’re up to the challenge.

You always are.

The Tom-Dumbledore-Encyclopaedia debacle is apparently either resolved, or your part in it forgotten.

Tom humours you when you’re both singed at the fingers from duelling, yours dipped in the lake while he buries his in the cold moss, about how Abraxas takes the seat beside him at every Slug Club dinner. He tells you he pretends to be very interested in the Malfoy’s business affairs and their stock in the Bulgarian Quidditch team’s win this coming spring. He tells you he finds it amusing to let Abraxas think he can make Tom his pet. Tom says he considers searching for Salazar Slytherin’s fabled Chamber of Secrets and showing Abraxas what a real pet looks like. You smack him in the arm.

He’s had an ego forever. He just has a few too many reasons for it now.

And maybe that’s why you push harder in Transfiguration, dedicate the majority of your studies to it, spend your Saturday nights scrutinising advanced techniques while Tom makes nice with Potions experts and politics with people who don’t even know what he is but like him anyway. It’s patronising, of course — borderline fetishistic; not a real like — but it scares you. Tom Riddle would not allow himself to be anyone’s pretty mudblood show pony if he didn’t have an ulterior motive.

Everything changes but the observable truth that he is still insufferable.

You’re lucky to see him twice a week if it isn’t in class, and the way it starts is so slow you don’t even fully understand what’s happening until Christmas break when Abraxas stays a few extra days and leaves by Dippet’s Floo instead of the train.

You don’t dare ask where Tom has vanished to in that time or why the hell Abraxas Malfoy would willingly subject himself to unnecessarily extended time at school with all his lackeys gone, and it isn’t because you don’t want to. It’s because he won’t tell you himself. It’s because you’re terrified the answer will feel like a broken promise, and you’ve come to realise (it’s been there for so long; such an obvious, tiny thing that you’ve never stopped to really dissect it) that it’s quite difficult to know someone at every atom and not love them a little bit.

You’re suddenly aware of the risk of it: you love him like an inextricable piece of yourself, and, well, you’ve seen war. You know what amputation looks like. You’ve seen the remains of structures designed to stand forever, and you’re strong like them — casts and gauze in all the weak spots because you remember the pain of breaking them — but those were blows dealt without the complication of loving the bombs behind them.

Tom is the green on your robes, the dragon pox tinge you sometimes think never truly faded when you look in the mirror too long, and all the shades you never imagined. Apple, jade, moss. The beginnings of emerald. (No, he couldn’t be that.)

You wonder what the world would look like if he stole those colours back, and it’s much worse than some brutal decimation; it would leave you with too much. You would just be you without him.

So you love him into June like you always do, and you pluck his Prefect badge off on the last day of school and tell him it makes you jealous like a joke when it’s half-true.

It’s raining when you walk to the train together, miserable for what should be summer but not at all remarkable in Scotland. Tom wipes it from your cheek. Your wrists are sore from vanishing bits and bobbles all night while you still can, never truly prepared for three months without magic, and you curl into your seat as soon as you’re in it. Tom wakes you up when you arrive back in London, startling you to find that you fell asleep at all.

It rains a lot that summer. There’s nothing much to see in the city and you can’t get anywhere else (you note: the Trace cares little about broomsticks but you can’t afford one of your own and flying might be the only thing Tom is bad at) so you’re stuck to the library again with a noseful of old paper and a certain prose that magical literature cannot replicate. You theorise a lifetime of reckoning with the mundane forces one to be more creative.

Perhaps it’s the cold that makes you sick. Perhaps it’s the state of your meals. Either way, your final weeks before sixth year are hell. Biblical, blazing hell.

The nurses aren’t sure what it is — another influenza epidemic you’re the first in the orphanage to catch — but they isolate you immediately and there’s not much care they can offer.

You hear Tom arguing with one of them outside your door but can’t make out the words. Everything is dizzy, sweaty, halfway to unconsciousness but without its relief. You’d take dragon pox over this.

Some days later (though you can’t be sure because it feels like bloody centuries), he’s at your bedside, and you think even if you were lucid enough to ask what horrible thing he’d done to change the nurses’ minds, you wouldn’t.

But you know he’s not beyond breaking wizarding law, because he’s muttering healing spells with a hand to your damp forehead, and you hazily find yourself reaching for him, trying to shake your head no.

“Not allowed,” you mumble. Your throat is sore and your nose is stuffy. You sound terrible and you probably look worse.

Tom is slightly blurry but you think he’s staring at you. You know if he is it’s with the utmost incredulity.

“Not allowed,” he repeats slowly. It’s very easy to picture him clenching his jaw. “I wonder, if the Trace is so exact that it can detect all forms of magic, it can’t also detect malady. You’re burning — and I’m to consider whether saving your life might be illegal?”

He’s angry. He’s angrier than you’ve seen in a long time; and you can actually see it now. His magic courses through you and your vision clears, bit by bit, until your depth perception steadies and you realise he’s closer than you thought. His jaw is, in fact, clenched.

You move to catch his wrist and manage it this time. “Tom.”

“Don’t argue,” he says thinly.

“You’ll get sick.”

His face is far too neutral for the way his fingers stroke your damp cheek. “Hm. Then it’s a good thing you’d break the law for me too.”

Of course he’s right — you love him. Which makes it a good thing he doesn’t get sick.

Some of the younger children do. The fever comes overnight for a girl who wasn’t in the orphanage last year, and it takes her by the next.

When you get back on the train to Hogwarts, the virus is circulating Britain and you’re livid.

What Tom said is true; you consider the Trace’s precision and the details of the laws on underage magic — how one of the technicalities is that a young witch or wizard may be absolved of the consequences if the circumstances are life-threatening. You think about how it supposedly doesn’t care about broom-riding or Portkeys or Floo travel, and if the Trace is that complex, surely it understands sickness.

You only wonder if the Ministry would understand it. There haven’t been any epidemics in the wizarding world since Gorsemoor cured dragon pox in the sixteenth century, and when there isn’t healing magic there are antidotes and Pepper-Ups and herbs that muggles simply don’t have. The fatality of a fever of all things is not something you imagine could be comprehended by the sort of people who sent you and Tom back to London in the wake of the Blitz.

Of course, the Ministry hasn't written to you, you haven’t been forced in front of a representative from the Improper Use office, and you have no real reason to be upset.

You are regardless.

It shouldn’t even be a thought: you immolating into oblivion protesting rescue because one of you might get in trouble for it.

A world you’ve never much cared for is blanketed in ash and its people are dying and you can’t help them. A girl is dead. You’ll return next summer and there will certainly be more.

Life is for the magical, you find. The muggles can burn.

It’s what makes you start to panic this year, knowing you’ve only got one more after it. You have no idea what you’re going to do after school, and it doesn’t help that Tom doesn’t appear to share the sentiment. He’s got Head Boy in the bag and when he isn’t with you he’s with Abraxas, who can surely provide him connections if whatever game Tom is playing at works (and you have no doubt it will), but it’s like you said in third year: that isn’t enough for you.

You remember with a small ache that you no longer means you and him.

And then — it makes sense. You feel incredibly stupid.

“You told him, didn’t you?” you ask Tom the first opportunity you can get him alone, in the glum blue light of the Deathday ballroom on your way back from supper.

He sighs like it’s a conversation he’d hoped to put off for longer. “You’re referring to Abraxas, I presume?”

“You’re referring to — yes, you prick, I’m referring to Abraxas. Of course I’m referring to Abraxas, or are there others? Dolohov and Nott seem unusually enthralled by you, now that I think about it.”

“And for a reason I’m supposed to be aware of, this is an error on my part. Should I be apologising?”

“Why did you tell him, Tom?!”

“Why?” he deadpans.

You throw your hands up. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

“Shall I provide you with my itinerary as well? Would you accompany me as I tour the third-years around Hogsmeade? Or can you do me the favour of trusting me to make my own decisions with the nature of my ancestry?”

“You’re keeping something from me and there’s a reason,” you say, stepping closer to him, “and forgive me if I want to know what it is when you were willing to tell me you’re the Heir of Slytherin and you can talk to snakes. What — what could possibly be bigger than that?”

Tom returns your approach with one of his own. His eyes are steady, dark, thick with lashes and you can’t reminisce on the details of the rest of him because that would be strange for a friend to do. Stranger to do it now, when you’re angry with him and there’s two sleeping ghosts in the corner and he’s framed by deep indigoes like the ripples in the Black Lake and — you’re doing it anyway.

To be short, he’s close, he’s very beautiful, and sometimes you despise him.

“Trust me,” he says again, without the derision of the last time. “This will change things for us.”

You frown, but it’s a weak upset in contrast to the explosion you came in here willing to make. There were at least twenty questions you meant to ask and you only managed one.

You are not his keeper. You know that.

“Change them for the better, Tom,” you say on a sigh.

He blinks, and you think he’ll respond with a nod or a slightly offended ‘of course’ but he does not. He blinks and he just keeps looking at you. It’s disarming. It probably resembles the way you often look at him. There’s a rationale somewhere; you never see each other anymore, life is so incredibly busy, maybe he’s forgotten what you look like.

And he does nod, finally, but he does it with his thumb brushing the corner of your lip.

What? Sorry. What’s going on?

He pulls it away like he’s heard you. “You had something.”

You’re almost positive you did not.

Transfiguration this year brings Conjuration, which is an advanced and welcome distraction, and even more exciting when you consider no longer having to Vanish things you have no idea how to bring back. Dumbledore’s is one of three N.E.W.T classes you’re taking — Defence Against the Dark Arts and Alchemy besides. It’s easily your favourite.

You share it with eleven other Slytherins and twelve Ravenclaws. Four of them are muggle-born, and it’s hard to describe the ease you feel among them because you don’t think you’ve ever had anything resembling ease with anyone but Tom.

Your schedule is more crammed than it’s ever been, but it’s good. Two of the Ravenclaw girls invite you to Hogsmeade every other weekend, you share butterbeers when you can afford one, you study until you collapse, you take Dumbledore’s extra assignments and consider trying out for Chaser on one of your more restless evenings before waking up in the morning and resolving there is such as thing as too much of a good thing. Best not to get ahead of yourself.

Your contentment is remedied quickly.

Someone is found unresponsive in the dungeons. Dippet makes an announcement at breakfast that the boy isn’t dead, rather, petrified. No one is quite sure the cause, but the Headmaster warns a few minor precautions, suggests a buddy system, and says that after dinner studying should remain in everyone’s respective common rooms rather than the courtyards or library.

You know next to nothing about petrification, but the victim is muggle-born, and you suspect it was the result of a poorly performed statue curse by one of the many blood zealots in your house. The whole thing makes you hold onto your wand a smidge tighter, but you’re adamant not to let it drive you to paranoia like it would have a few years ago.

Tom nods at your theory when you manage to escape to the Black Lake together in November.

“That isn’t unreasonable,” he says. High praise.

You sink into the moss, sighing. “Do you think there’ll be more?”

He looks out onto the lake, the lapping waves, the crystalline beads that furrow them, midnight algae and flotsam you don’t think you belong to anymore.

You peer up at his silhouette in the dark. “Do you think whoever did it will do it again, I mean?”

“I don’t know,” he says finally, and after another pause: “but I don’t think it would be you.”

“How’s that?”

“No one would be senseless enough to try.”

And he sinks beside you with that, breath shaping the cold in steady, rhythmic clouds while yours are scattered. His robes brush yours and you take his arm with a sleepy hum, tracing patterns in the stars until your eyes feel heavy and he insists on taking you back to your dormitories.

One of the Ravenclaw girls, Marigold Wright, distracts you with a spare blue scarf and an invitation to her next Quidditch match. You watch from the stands and cheer as she catches the snitch to beat Gryffindor.

It’s a bit strange — having a distraction — having a friend. Mari is kind, smart, a good study partner who’s as keen on stepping into the advanced theoretics of Human Transfiguration a year early as you are. She’s funny in a vulgar way, introduces you to all her friends, shows you the best way to sneak into the kitchens, and you sometimes wonder if she was sorted wrong, but — her methods are creative, and she’s definitely intelligent. She’s also definitely not Tom.

You see less and less of him and more of her, Dumbledore, the Ravenclaw common room and the pages of progressive Transfiguration methodologies. He sees less of you and more of Abraxas, Dolohov and Nott and all the other purebloods, Slughorn’s soirées and Prefect meetings that cut into meals.

It happens again.

Second floor lavatory. A girl called Myrtle Warren. She isn’t petrified.

There’s a vigil the following week and her parents are there, two muggles whose sobs wrack the Great Hall even as the students clear out. Flowers descend from the charmed ceiling, little bluebells and white chrysanthemums.

You cry that night. You can’t remember the last time you cried.

This time, you don’t have to seek Tom out. He catches you on your way back from Alchemy and brings you to the Deathday ballroom with a melancholy glance in your direction that you don't hesitate to follow. You realise it’s an odd place to continue to end up in, but no one else goes there and you suppose that makes it yours.

You’ve seen Tom skinny and sickly and olive green, but today his eyes are circled with veined violets and the lack of summer sun this year has whittled him grey once more. He’s still beautiful. He’ll always be beautiful. But he’s tired and — sad — and for the six years you’ve known him you aren’t quite sure what to do with that.

You don’t spend too long pondering it. You just hug him with the dawning newness of a thing like that; a thing you’ve never done, and never really thought to do. (You ask yourself in bewilderment how you’ve never thought to do it before.)

He’s warm. He’s uncertain. He doesn’t reciprocate immediately.

And then he does, and you understand without caveats or concerns that you stopped having a choice in your destruction the moment you chose him. He’s home, and that’s going to ruin you one day.

Your arms tighten around him and his around you, the rhythm of his breath holding you to earth when you begin to float away. Nothing makes sense in this moment but the mercy that in all the death you’ve seen, you swear to God you’ll never see his. As long as you’re alive, he must be too.

And there’s something to be said about the innate self-slaughter of loving a person (of loving Tom Riddle, especially): that it’ll cleave you in two, that you’ll say feeble things in his embrace that you should be above saying, like ‘I’m scared’, that his hand will find the back of your head and he'll tell you he knows, that that should not feel like enough but it will be. You’ll clasp your hands under black robes and hold this singular embrace together by the faulty adhesive of your fingers. Maybe you’ll cry again, like your body can suddenly comprehend its capacity for it and is making up for lost time.

The first sign that something is wrong, more than the obvious grievance of the death itself, is the Ministry’s happy acceptance of Rubeus Hagrid as the culprit.

The boy is maybe fourteen years old, half-blood — half human, mind — and no one has a bad word to say about him other than he likes to keep eccentric pets. Which leads you to wonder what pet he possessed with the ability to petrify one student and kill another and what cause he’d have for it in the first place besides two terrible, miraculous accidents.

That question draws an even stranger path. Mari says over butterbeers (on her, bless her soul) that she read somewhere years ago that Gorgons can induce petrification, but that she doesn’t remember much else.

One of the boys in DADA says that his father’s an auror, and heard from him that Hagrid’s pet was some sort of arachnid. Tom deducts five points from his house after class with a scowl on his pale face, muttering about conspiracy.

The second sign that something is wrong is that only one of those things would need to be true for the entire case on Hagrid to be called into question. If Mari’s memory serves right, how the hell did Hagrid come into ownership of a Gorgon? (Could Gorgons even be owned?) If the auror’s son is worth your credence, then what species of arachnid is capable of petrification?

You take to the library.

Unsure of where to begin and hesitant to draw attention, your research lingers into Christmas break and stalls some of your extracurriculars in Transfiguration. Tom is busy enough not to notice the new step in your routine, and you’re grateful not to have him breathing down your back, telling you you’re looking in the wrong places or you shouldn’t be looking at all.

The third sign is the end.

You wish to retract it all. There are time-turners and memory charms and potions that could dizzy you enough to manipulate the truth; there is anything but this. You’d suffer the consequences for the bliss of loving him with one more day before the ruin — you’d write it down to remember through the fog: look at him, duel him without wanting to hurt him, kiss him to know that you did it at least once, have him, be had. You never will again.

He’d shown you the adder. He’d joked about the Chamber of Secrets. He’d spent months disappearing with Abraxas, earning the trust of the sons of the Sacred Twenty Eight.

And he’d killed Myrtle Warren.

So it’s statue curses and Gorgons and Tom — speaking to serpents when no one else can, buttressed by pureblood boys who want people like you dead.

Don’t become like them now that you’re not like me.

He’s something else entirely.

What do you do in a moment like this? Panting into an empty library at a revelation you wish you could unknow, fingers digging into the hickory of your desk — another memory carved among the initials and hearts; how do you stand from your chair and leave like the world outside this room is the same as it was when you entered? There’s nothing to orbit. You are cosmic debris, tea dregs in a barren cup, flotsam.

You stand; and you tell no one. Not even Tom.

His presence in your life is so infrequent that you don’t even have to come up with excuses for your distance until three weeks after your discovery when you’re paired together in DADA to practise stretching jinxes.

You almost laugh. He’s standing beside you, tall (lanky like he was when he was a boy if you look long enough) and serious, and you love him without knowing who he is anymore. You’ve skirted corners to avoid him and sat with Mari during lunch and breakfast like he’s some scorned lover to escape confrontation from and not someone who held you through a grief inflicted by his hand.

“You look tired,” he says, inspecting the daisy you’d been tasked to elongate.

You glance at him. You are tired. It’s exhaustive, bone-deep, aching like nothing you’ve ever known, and maybe that’s why you can look at him and smile sadly instead of thrashing against his chest screaming for what he did. You suppose it happens enough in your head to satisfy. When you can sleep, you sleep to the thought of it. The waking moments are just blank.

“Mhm,” you hum, transfiguring the daisy stem back to its regular length.

Tom observes it with curious eyes. “You’re getting good at that.”

“I’ve been good at it.”

His lips turn, a small frown before he puts it away. You make the observation that he’s tired too; there are still bags under his eyes and his hands tremble ever-so-slightly with his wand when he loosens his grip on it.

His own doing and still you flicker with some relentless hope that he's drowning in regret.

“Sorry,” you say. A ridiculous thing. Do you intend to slowly push him from your life with weak disinterest and diverging academic avenues? As if he were something extricable. He’d never let you.

You’ll have to confront him, and that’s a revelation that holds its weight on your chest until you think you'll suffocate under it.

You’re in the blue light of the Deathday ballroom with a face you've never worn before when it happens, deep into spring, and you know then that you were wrong all those years ago.

He sees all of you.

Takes you in in the flash of a second and maybe it’s your quivering jaw that reveals you or the flint of betrayal in your eyes waiting to be struck and lit. Yes, you were wrong — Tom Riddle knows you at every atom too.

“Are you going to let me explain?" he asks before any hello. His jaw is tight but there’s nothing else to go on to judge his disposition. He's settling into impassivity like an animal drawing its shell. You will not be allowed in if you're going to make it hurt, and you might be the only one who can.

“Explain," you copy with a hard exhale, “Just tell me it wasn’t you. That’s all there is to say."

He stares at you. There’s nothing there.

“Tell me, Tom.”

Your breath catches on an automatic please but you don’t want to offer him that.

“I cannot.”

Then make me forget, you want to scream. Let it be summer. Let us work for pennies and breadcrumbs and be no one together.

It’s late winter and it’s too cold.

“You killed her,” you say quietly.

“If I told you I did not wish for it, would you even believe me?”

“What are you… so it was an accident?”

“There was — an opportunity presented itself that may never have come again; that does not mean I don’t find the nature of it regrettable.”

“Regrettable.” You’re laughing or crying or both, and you must look unwell. Halfway out of your mind.

He’s so composed in the face of it that it only makes you more incensed.

“You told me to change things —”

“You killed someone! Can you understand that?”

“You nearly died,” he hisses, “and if I am to apologise for recognizing it only as the first of many times, I will not. If I am to apologise for doing whatever is necessary to prevent it, I will not. The hand we were dealt will not be the hand we die to — so yes, I understand it. And one day so will you.”

“Don't," you spit, and your anger must look pathetic under your welling tears. “Don't you dare tell me that this was for me.”

“Do you want me to lie?”

“What could her death possibly bring me, Tom?”

“Her death is the first step to —”

“God, stop dancing around the fucking question!” Both hands have wound their way to your head, clutching at your skull like the brain matter might spill through one of the cracks he’s wearing down. “Just… tell me.”

“You recall Godelot's work," he says stiffly. The question of it takes you by surprise, peels the moment back like the rim of a fruit and you're left uncertain.

All you can do is nod, arms falling to cross over your chest.

“There was one form of magic he refused quite concisely to impart. I searched the Restricted Section for days, and under Dumbledore's watch that was not an easy thing to do."

You stole from him, you're urged to remind him, but it's something you'd say with a nudge of annoyance and a roll of your eyes. Such admonishment is small and far away.

“I found it at last in one of the repositories," he goes on, “Secrets of the Darkest Art."

“...What?"

“It's called a Horcrux,” he says. “Murder, by nature, splits the soul. The Horcrux simply makes use of the act; puts the soul fragment into something imperishable so that it is protected, rather than abandoned. In turn, your life cannot be taken. By malady, by magic, by sword — the vessel is destroyed but the soul lives on.”

You blink, feeling dizzy. “Myrtle was the sacrifice.”

“Myrtle was there,” Tom remedies.

“How lucky for you.”

“The circumstances could be ameliorated if one were to be made for you. I would have preferred it be someone who deserves it.”

“For — you’d do it again? Again, Tom?”

His brows crease, and even his upset seems contrived. There’s this barricade he’s placed that you, in all your infallible knowing of him, cannot puncture. It’s agony to begin to question what he could possibly be keeping from you in a confession like this.

“You killed someone, Tom. You — I would never ask you to do that. I would never live at the cost of someone else."

“No, you would not,” he agrees, though he shakes his head like it’s incredulous of you. “Do you think, even if I knew it were certain, a summons from the Ministry would have stopped me from saving you this summer? Do you suppose the threat of punishment would cause me to waver at that moment? I know it would not hinder you. So, you have your lines and I have mine — you never needed to ask.”

And now it hurts. The emptiness clears and you can't stand yourself for crying, but you do. It comes out in ragged, breathless sobs, clasped behind your palm as you turn away from him.

You've loved him since you were eleven. It's always been you two — it was always supposed to be you two. What is there to say to him? He's blurring in your periphery like in the midst of your sickness, and there's nothing he can do to heal you this time. Your vision will clear and Myrtle Warren will still be dead. He'll still be a stranger in the face of the boy you love.

“Why," you whine, a wet, hollow stain in your voice you've never cried enough to hear before. “Myrtle was — wasn't — uh —" You swallow, hysterics severing your words. You can't really think right now. Your body wobbles and your head feels puffy and hot. This might be shock.

Tom scowls like it irritates him to watch you push yourself, like this is just the unfortunate effect of you depleting your energy in a duel, not eating correctly, treating yourself carelessly.

Of course you can't stand or talk or think. You're you, contemplating a life without him.

“Sit," he says in frustration. You smack his hand away when he reaches for you, but the world has turned a shade darker and you're slipping into it.

He tugs a chair towards you with a silent charge and a reprimand, and your body doesn’t possess the wherewithal not to collapse into it the second it’s under you.

After a moment you can speak again, shaking hands steadied by your knees. “Did you… did you think I wouldn't find out? You know, the only thing that can petrify someone besides a serpent is a Gorgon. And — where would Rubeus Hagrid have found one of those?"

“I thought I would have time.”

“To come up with a good lie? Something I’d sympathise with?”

He bites his cheek. “Evidently the particulars matter little to you.”

Fuck him. “Fuck you.”

“Very cogent.”

“No, fuck you, Tom. We could have — we only had a year left and then we could — we could've done anything we wanted." You're crying again. You don't have the energy to be embarrassed. “And you chose this."

He’s indignant as he steps closer. “With what money? For what life? We are better than all of them and it’s never mattered. It never will; you know that. You told me that. You’re angry now, but you must know the truth of it. I would not forsake you. I would not lose you.”

You blink up at him, mouth stuck with some cottony feeling and cheeks stiff from crying.

“You have lost me, Tom."

He stills as if suspended. Some maceration must follow but it doesn’t.

You stand on weak legs to look him in the eyes. You wonder if he can see the love in yours. You wonder if he knows you will walk away despite it. (Of course he does. You’ve never lied to him.)

You think about how his fingers seem to always find their way to your cheek and you put yours to his. The bone there is sharp, but the skin is soft. Boyish.

There isn't a word for a goodbye like this. It shouldn't exist and so it doesn't. You just leave.

You fail your N.E.W.T courses. Quite spectacularly.

Mari sits beside you on the train with a soothing hand on your shoulder, and doesn’t ask what’s rendered you into a comatose husk since March. There’s no crying. You chew numbly on soft caramels from the trolley and stare out the window onto the hills.

That summer is spent in your bedroom unless you’re forced elsewhere. A new girl with skin so white it’s nearly translucent sleeps in the bed beside yours, taking meals on trays like you did in your first days here, tracing the cracks in the tiles, humming to herself in the dark. She makes you feel less pathetic for doing much the same.

You’d been right in your assumption that there would be more dead upon your return, and wrong that there would be more empty rooms. There are always more orphans being made.

And then you receive a letter. It isn’t delivered by owl (only for secrecy, you assume, because there are no muggles who’d be writing to you) but it’s stamped with a vaguely familiar crest. Not Hogwarts’ waxen seal, but something undoubtedly magical. A cockroach and a cup, you think, squinting. Transfiguration.

You tear the envelope open and pull the letter out.

It’s from Dumbledore. Some of it melds together, but the key words stand out.

Spoken to Dippet… Exceptional promise… N.E.W.Ts… May be reconsidered… Upon dispensation… Be well.

Be well.

You are not. You are something half-drowned and half-burned, never enough of one to quell the effects of the other. Sunlight is sparse through your side of the orphanage. On the radio, they warn a pattern of one bomb every second hour. The only other warning is the sound when they fly overhead, and if you can’t run fast enough —

You write your answer in a crowded tube station with a spotty ballpoint pen. Tom is there, looking between you, the dust, and your shaking hands as if to say: tell me I was wrong.

Some of your letter melds together but the key words stand out.

Thank you, Sir. Whatever you need.

It’s a shock that you live to seventh year. It’s a shock that you do it without him — though he watches, and in his gaze you feel regressed. You’re alive, yes, but there’s something there… his dead weight, death-grip; his haunting. They always speak of the dead as something heavy. Something that holds onto you even after it’s gone.

You find that to be true.

Dippet’s condition that you remain in Dumbledore’s N.E.W.T class is that you achieve more than the standard requirement. Essentially, your final exam will be much harder than everyone else's: Human Transfiguration, mastery of petty Transformation (through the means of Wizard’s Chess pieces), Conjuration and Vanishment of various delicate objects — all done nonverbally.

Even Dumbledore seems sceptical, but it translates to more rigorous practise rather than resignation, assignments he doesn’t even task to Mari, though she’s just as good, and you can’t begin to understand why he cares so much.

“I’ll entrust you with these while I’m away,” he says before Christmas break, sliding a sheet of parchment your way with a flick of his wand.

You frown, unfolding it. His instructions are always short now — you’ve learned to decode his meaning well enough without much exposition.

Teacup to gerbil — to cat, and inverse.

Inanimatus Conjurus spell (cockroach and cup, as instructed) to be Vanished when perfected.

Study Antar’s Doctrine. Miss Wright will act as your partner.

Due February.

It’s far too much to be done in that time. “Sir?”

Dumbledore lugs a messenger bag over his shoulder that appears small, but he carries it in such a way you suspect it’s magically extended. He smiles wistfully, pushing his spectacles up the bridge of his nose. “You know, I often regret how much this war asks of me. A consequence of my own doing.”

Right — Grindelwald. Sometimes you forget between awaiting the next muggle paper. War is everywhere.

You nod. “I hope… Good luck, Sir.”

Another half-smile as he twists open a jar of Floo Powder, and then he shakes his head with something you almost decipher as amusement. A brittle sort. Tired. “Good luck to you.”

And then he’s gone, in a swath of green flames that do nothing to inspire any desire for Floo travel in you.

Antar’s Doctrine is simultaneously prosaic and grandiose. They read like excerpts of a journal and you yawn into them over your morning tea, stirring amongst the first-years, who are the only people at the Slytherin table you can stand to sit with. Your blood status is apparently nullified by your age, and the worst they do is look at you funny. You aren’t sure what Abraxas’s — Tom’s (the new hierarchy never fails to stagger you) — lackeys would do if you sat with the other seventh-years instead. A part of you longs to know. They certainly don’t bother you in class the way they used to, you aren’t tripped in the corridors, but you wonder how far Tom’s influence can stretch. He is the Heir of Slytherin, and he’s earned them. But you are nothing.

You’d like it if he would let them hurt you. You think the incentive would be enough to hurt him back. And God — God, you want to. You want to hurt him almost as much as you want him.

You practise through the doctrine with Mari, as Dumbledore directed. When you’re able to sever Antar’s egotism from his abilities, you can see why Dumbledore would recommend his book to you. It feels like slipping through a crack in glass without shattering the whole thing. You weave in and back out, and Mari grins when she returns from the shape of a teapot to her body without you needing to utter a word to do it.

In the back of your mind, you’re aware what you’re doing is nearly unprecedented. It’s spring, you’re months away from eighteen, muggle-born, and mastering nonverbal Human Transfiguration like it’s a Softening Charm. Mari tells you you’re the smartest person she’s ever met. It makes your cheeks go hot to hear such open praise, worse when you snap out of the thought that you believe her.

Grindelwald falls. The school celebrates in whispers until the evidence is in front of them — Dumbledore, returned without a scar, a new wand in his hand — and then they’re cheers. The feast that night is a great one, and he toasts to you from the end of the staff table, a discreet tilt of his cup before he takes a sip and returns to converse with Professor Merrythought.

You take from your own, and your eyes land on Tom, spine of his goblet tight in his hand. He’s looking at you like you’ve affronted him somehow. You could laugh — by choosing Dumbledore. Of course. As if it was a choice at all.

But if it bothers him… if it feels anything at all like the betrayal you felt, then — good.

You drink, and don’t look away.

By the time your N.E.W.T.s arrive you have a renewed confidence that you’ll succeed, even with the obstacle of performing each exam wordlessly.

There are only twelve students who came out of your sixth year class, so to divide resources for the tests is no grand task. You’re given a Wizard’s Chess set, a desk with assorted vases and goblets, an intricate epergne (you had to whisper to Mari to learn its name), and a Ministry worker borrowed like some laboratory mouse. You suppose it makes sense, though — you’re all capable enough of Human Transfiguration not to mutilate anyone, and performing on a classmate could obfuscate the results. It’s far easier to Transfigure someone you know than someone you don’t.

You start with the chess set, Dumbledore and the Ministry worker observing you as you turn pawns to knights and rooks to kings, the minutiae of the pieces drawing sweat to your brow. They change, and change, and change, and you don’t mutter an incantation once. The Ministry worker puts the set away and directs you to the glass. You Switch the vases with the goblets, Vanish them, and Conjure them again. The Ministry worker takes notes. Dumbledore nods affirmatively at you and you can exhale. The epergne is the hardest; so kitschy and elaborate you don’t know where to start when you’re tasked to Transform it into an animal.

An animal — like that isn’t the vaguest instruction you’ve ever received.

You look at it on the desk, mirrors and glass and gold on protracted arms, and you go for the first thing you think of because the Ministry worker is staring at you like you’re inept and you see it in his eyes — this is the muggle-born one, this one can’t do it.

You’re better than them. You can do it forever.

The epergne spins at the dip of your wand, and emerges more than an animal. A big glass tank appears in its place, round and gold-rimmed, water lapping at the sides. Inside it is a jellyfish. Emerald green, bobbing, tentacles and oral arms coiling against the glass like the limbs of the epergne had spanned its centre.

The Ministry worker swallows. Dumbledore smiles.

“And — and back?” the worker says, like that will be the thing that stops you.

You point again, mouth tight with irritation, and reverse the Transformation. A droplet of water smacks your face and you’re lucky to be so hot you can disguise it as sweat. You suspect even an error that small would cost you a mark.

You wipe it away. A strange thing happens; you imagine Tom brushing the water from your cheek at the Black Lake. You imagine his fingers in the rain.

The Ministry worker steps closer with a shameless frown. He tells you to turn his hair red. You do. He regards himself in the mirror and scribbles something down. He tells you to turn it back. You do. To grow him a beard, to change his clothes, to make him taller, shorter, this and that — all read from a list he does not appear enthused to recite. You do it all.

He shakes Dumbledore’s hand when it’s done, duplicates his notes for him to keep, and follows the other Ministry workers through the fireplace when everyone’s exams are finished.

You find out you’ve passed with an Outstanding on your birthday.

Mari drags you to the Three Broomsticks to celebrate, butterbeers on her. (They always are.)

“Can’t believe we’re about to graduate,” she says into her cup, froth on her upper lip.

You sigh into your own, partially giddy and mostly nervous.

Mari squeezes your face between her thumb and finger so your frown is puckered. “Chin up, genius. You’ll be excellent.”

You push her hand away but can’t help a small smile. “Outstanding,” you correct.

“Outstanding!” She bursts out laughing. “Bloody ego on you now…”

“Well, I am the smartest person you know.”

“I take that back.”

She pushes out of her chair with a slightly inebriated wobble. “Going to the loo. Don’t touch my chips.”

Your hands raise in surrender, and you steal only one when she’s gone.

You aren’t the only ones here to celebrate. (Your birthday and your mutual achievement, yes, but the Three Broomsticks is filled wall-to-wall with seventh years drinking their final nights at school away.) There’s music charmed to reach every corner, even yours at the little alcove hidden from plain sight. It’s nice to watch from here — the stumbling, the kisses meant for mouths that land drunkenly on cheeks and noses, the barkeeps that roll their eyes as soon as they turn away from all the newly adult customers, not yet learned or careless in their drinking manners.

It is not nice to be occluded from plain sight in such a way that you don’t notice Tom Riddle until he’s inches away from your table. It is not nice that no one else notices either.

On instinct you don’t make any impressive exit. He slides into the booth next to you and your brain short circuits for a moment at the warm familiarity of his presence beside you. Then it occurs that it’s been more than a year since this was remotely commonplace — that you cannot forget the reason why.

There’s not much time to decide whether you want to be vicious or indifferent or to debate on past precedent which would bother him more. You haven’t attacked him despite being concealed enough to do it unnoticed, and you haven’t shoved furiously out of the other side of the booth.

Indifferent it is.

“Can I help you?”

“You’re causing quite the stir,” he says, taking one of Mari’s chips.

You’re allowed. It’s infuriating when he does it.

“Am I?”

“It’s enough to fail a N.E.W.T level class and be expressly petitioned back, but to have a special criteria set for your exams and manage an O on top of it all…” He inclines his head as if to appreciate your face so close after so long. You should not let him. “You are incomprehensible. It terrifies them.”

“They’re afraid of the wrong mudblood, then, aren’t they?”

Indifference effaced. You’re angry.

He seems to have come prepared, and shrugs your scorn off like a scarf you would have forced him to wear winters ago. “Of course, they have no reason to suspect Dumbledore might have ulterior motives.”

Ulterior — you certainly hope he isn’t suggesting this is based on anything but your merit, but then — you couldn’t begin to understand why Dumbledore cared so much, could you? You’d made brief inspections of his disdain for Tom in second year, his waning shades of kindness and the matter of his stolen encyclopaedia, but you hadn’t… you hadn’t thought at all about how his dedication to your progress only begun after you’d stopped sharing a class with Tom, how it had developed as you began to drift from one another in fifth year and accelerated in sixth after the first petrification and Myrtle’s death. How Tom had worn you down with a weighted glare at Dumbledore’s little toast.

It wasn’t because you had chosen Dumbledore, you realise. It was because Dumbledore had chosen you.

“Why don’t you worry about your pets, Riddle?” you snarl, “I’m sure there are bigger problems with your lot than my exam results.”

Something in his face shifts at the name. You swell with distorted pride.

He mends the reaction by looking you over in more detail, his features schooled into something he must know you can’t deduce. You try not to squirm under the intensity of it.

He reaches almost mindlessly for your collar (there is nothing mindless about it, you’re sure) and smooths the fabric gently with his fingers. “I always liked you in this colour.”

You blink. His thumb just barely brushes against the skin of your neck before retreating, and your mouth falls open.

“Don’t do that,” you say. Truly a sad attempt. Your repulsion is more with yourself than him, and that’s not at all right.

Where is Mari?

“Your friend was at the bar, last I saw her.”

You stare at him with wild eyes. How the hell — ?

“You were always easy to read,” he supplies, and leans in so you can follow his line of sight to the tiniest sliver of the bar visible between two columns, where Mari looks deeply engaged in conversation with Leo Ndiaye, one of the Gryffindor Chasers.

You take a sharp, exasperated breath at her antics. She might be more in love with the competition than the boy himself. They’d never last without Quidditch to bind them, but you can’t fault her for wanting a bit of fun.

“Well then —”

Right. Tom hasn’t actually moved away. You turn and his face is just there.

His eyes dart forthwith to your mouth, and — no. No, he won’t be doing that and neither will you.

“...I’m off to bed.” Stop talking to him like he’s your friend, you think miserably. Stop looking at him like he’s your —

“That would be wise.”

He’s still looking at your lips.

No one else is looking at you at all.

It could exist in just this moment, you deliberate; separate from everything else.

Except nothing about Tom exists in its own moment. He’s all over you all the time, skin and bone and soul. You hope you still have a place in the broken fragments of his.

“So I’ll be going now,” you say again.

“I haven’t protested.”

But he’s leaning in, and he has to know that’s impedance enough.

“But you will.”

His lips touch yours. “Yes, I will.”

You grab him by his shirt and you’re kissing him. You’re kissing each other like either of you know what the hell it means to kiss anyone, but you’ve learned the rest together, haven’t you? Your noses bump and you don’t care. You just need to kiss him, and — God, you make some noise against his mouth and the hand cupping your face spreads to capture more of you, greedy and wayward — he needs to kiss you too. It’s a horrible thing to know. It leads you to pose too many questions.

The need must have begun as want, and when did the want begin? How long has he looked at you and wondered what you’d feel like to kiss, touch, mark? (He’ll never have the latter. You swear that.)

You’re pulling away in intervals. “You don’t have me, you know.”

“I know,” he responds, lips on the corner of yours.

“You still lost me.”

“I know.”

“I hate you.”

He pauses for a moment. “I know.”

You kiss him again. Long and soft, memorising his cupid’s bow and the tip of his tongue, and when one of his hands moves to your waist you part from him like you’ve been burned.

“I —” You resist the urge to touch a finger to your lips, standing abruptly from the table and adjusting your shirt. Your body feels like an evolutionarily faulty vessel, too easy to please, though you can’t imagine it responding to anyone else this way. Or perhaps your mind is the problem. Not wired well enough to resist an evidently bad thing. “Goodnight, Tom.”

You thought there wasn’t a word for your goodbye, but that’s it. So simple it sinks you. Goodnight, Tom. I’ll dream of a morning where I wake up beside you, but you won’t be there.

He grabs your hand before you can go, licking his lips and it haunts you to think he’s savouring you. It stings a place deep in your chest you’d spent all year trying to heal.

“My door is always open,” he says.

He lets you go.

You graduate with Mari’s hand in yours, and you aren’t afraid.

Dumbledore requests that you stay for the summer to help him prepare for the first year’s curriculum in the fall. It’s a ridiculous opportunity for someone your age — free lodgings and a stellar impression on your resume, and — you can only accept it with an ire you haven’t felt since the spread of influenza in muggle Britain.

If he’s offering you lodgings now, he could have done it all along.

It sends you down a horrible train of thought while you move your things from the Slytherin dormitories to a little chamber a few doors down from the staff room; Tom will be removed from Wool’s this year. Will he stay at Malfoy Manor? But Tom is still publicly muggle-born — Abraxas’s parents would never allow it. Will he find a job, a flat? Will he swindle muggles once he turns eighteen and the Trace is no longer an obstruction?

You think of him often. You think of his offer.

My door is always open.

Plenty of doors are open to you now. Why should you want to go back to his?

Still, the Second World War ends in November and you feel like you can breathe at a depth you never could before. The school doesn’t celebrate like it did with Grindelwald. No one but you seems to care at all.

It’s a tempting door.

The year passes in a blur of graded papers and lessons Dumbledore sometimes involves you in and sometimes does not. Most of the first-years care little for you, but there are two Slytherin muggle-borns who look at you like a new sun to orbit. Everything is worth it for that.

You see Mari when you can, and find she’s training with the Italian Quidditch team, who apparently are smart enough to care more about skill than blood. She says she misses the complexities of Transfiguration, but any career in it was always going to be yours. Smartest person she knows, she reiterates. Biggest ego too.

The next summer Dumbledore informs you of a posting at the Ministry. Something small with a smaller wage. He emphasises the weight of his personal recommendation, but that you won’t be respected unless you claw tooth and nail for it. You don’t take long to consider a chance to make an actual income with an actual career doing something muggle-borns simply don’t do before you’re nodding assuredly and asking him what you need.

Better clothes are first, and all you can afford until further notice. You take to Gladrags with intent to purchase for the first time in your five years of wandering in the shop with eyes bigger than your wallet, and the owner looks at you with distrust when you slide her your sickles.

The Ministry job is truly, infinitesimally, insignificant.

It’s far down in the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes. You’re a glorified secretary, and you recall the few times you’d worked as a mail-sorter during the war. It’s some sick irony that you’ve landed yourself in a pile of paper once more.

But the money, though offensively scant to someone with better options (and it’s infuriating the options you deserve), is more than you’ve ever had, and within the next year you’re able to leave the castle and take a cheap room at an inn in Hogsmeade. You’re close enough to Dumbledore to aid him when he needs you, but far enough to feel like your school days are departed, and you need not worry about memories lurching unexpectedly at every corridor.

A sick part of you still reaches for your mouth sometimes to remember what it felt like to be kissed. That part of you wishes for Tom. You could kiss him into oblivion. You could find a way to make it hurt him back.

My door is always open.

Then you’ll slam it bloody closed.

Mari invites you to her first professional game and you cheer for her in the stands, a green, white, and red scarf around your neck in place of her old blue.

She wins and you get drinks in a muggle pub. You kiss a man at the bar. You go home with him. His hair is dark, but not dark enough. His lips are soft, but the shape is wrong. He makes you feel good, but you wonder if in another life, the dream is true; you roll over in the morning to Tom beside you, and he makes you feel better.

When you can find time between the monotonous demands of your job, you’re in the Transfiguration classroom, staying behind to help the Slytherin muggle-borns with their Switching spells.

It’s one stupid accident the next fall that changes things.

A muggle bank has been robbed, and whatever idiotic, panicked witch or wizard was behind it apparently found themselves incapable of getting the deed done with a simple Imperius Curse (you can’t imagine, based on the scene, that they’re above Unforgivables), and somehow ended up leaving the building half-charred and teeming with at least six bank tellers Transformed into birds, two chirping into the floor tiles with broken wings.

“Renauld’s on it, though,” your coworker says when the news finds your department.

“Renauld?”

He’s a year older than you, a pureblood with parents in high places, and endlessly fucking hopeless.

“Well, yeah —”

You push out from your desk, files fluttering behind you. “Renauld will expose the whole damn wizarding world if he touches that building.”

“But McCormack sent him.”

“Where is it?”

“I… McCormack said that —”

“Where is it, Flack?”

“Um. Um, near King William, I think. Moorgate or, um —”

That’s good enough. You toss the Floo Powder into the fireplace and go.

The place is a mess. You don’t even have to look for it. There’s some ward around the street, bouncing muggles away like an invisible end to a map they don’t even register is there. At least that’s handled right.

But you slip through it and curse under your breath at the muggles trapped inside the wards. They’re like fish prodding at the dome of their bowl, and some run up to you demanding explanations when they see you unaffected by it. You brush them off — Obliviation is not your strong-suit — though you do shout at a pair of DMAC wizards uselessly standing guard outside the bank.

“What the hell are you doing?” you ask on approach. “Renauld’s supposed to handle the inside, yeah? You deal with fixing them.”

You point toward the frantic muggles, and the officials just regard you with vague confusion at your presence. “Renauld said —”

“Oh my God! Fix. The muggles.”

You afford nothing else before pushing past them to enter the bank.

It’s quite impressive, actually; Renauld, the result of generations of foolproof breeding, is waving his wand around like he’s just stepped out of Olivanders for the first time.

“Heal their wings,” you say without greeting.

Renauld jumps. “What? What are you doing here?”

“Heal their damn wings. They’re easier than human limbs and healing magic’s the only thing you aren’t completely shit at.”

“Who authorised you?” he hisses.

“I did.”

In hindsight, it should have gone horrifically wrong. Your wand could have been taken and your life might have been over in all ways that matter, flung back into the muggle world where you’ve always been told you belong.

But Renauld vouches for you. You Transform the walls, you fix the burns, you mend the bank to something presentable. A muggle robbery — dangerous, financially tragic, but believable. And your suggestion to heal the injured bank tellers in their animal forms might be the thing that saved them. When Renauld mends their wings and regenerates their blood, you Untransfigure them, and the other DMAC officials alter their memories with haste.

You were completely out of line and utterly right.

It isn’t something people like you are allotted.

Your probation period is dreadful. You hide in your room at the inn most days, Vanishing little stained panes on your window to feel the warm breeze of air before you Conjure them again. You help grade papers, though Dumbledore is displeased with you and the night is a silent one. He assures you curtly that he’s doing his best with the Ministry to amend this.

And… he does.

With Renauld’s help and the corroboration of the other DMAC officials, you’re back at work by the start of the school year.

It’s a slow process — almost eight months of meaningless paperwork — before the next incident occurs and you’re hectically ushered to the scene like a belated understudy. And then it happens again. And again. And again.

There’s really no choice but to promote you.

Your heroics are torn from a Gryffindor cloth, so says Flack. You urge him never to say such a thing again.

By your twenty-first birthday, you think about Tom almost exclusively in your sleep. You’re much too busy to think about him anywhere else.

The summer is warm and Hogsmeade is lively. You’ve vacated your room at the inn for a little house on the outskirts of the village, decorating it how you like — discovering what you like. You’d never had a chance to find out before.

Mari visits when she can once you have your fireplace connected to the Floo Network (you yourself prefer Apparating) but her name is slowly working its way from the Italian papers to the British ones, and she has so much to tell you there isn’t possibly enough time in her days to tell it. There’s also the matter of Leo Ndiaye, who has, recently, gotten on one knee and proposed to her. If there had been a bet on them ending up together, you would have been out enough galleons to put you in debt.

After especially gruesome days at work, you and a few colleagues make a habit of getting sherries at the Siren’s Tail, complaining that sometimes the nature of your work is akin to an auror’s but without the notoriety and pay.

“Oh, please,” says Emilia Alves, twirling her straw, “You seen the shite the aurors are up to lately? I’d rather be a bloody Unspeakable.”

“You’d have to be able to keep your mouth shut for that, Alves.”

Emilia punches Renauld in the arm.

“What are the aurors up to?” Flack asks.

“I dunno much. There was a murder all the way in Albania, s’posedly. Reeked of dark magic.”

“Nothing new,” you join, and then frown. “Why’s our Ministry dealing with it though?”

“I dunno. I got word from Hillicker that the Albanians didn’t know what to make of the mess. They’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Hillicker’s not a source,” Renauld scoffs.

“Yeah? How about you ask your daddy for something better?”

“Alves, I’ll have you know —”

You lean in over the counter. “What do you mean they’ve never seen anything like it?”

She grins. “Why? Storming a bank robbery wasn’t exciting enough for you?”

You roll your eyes, taking a drink.

That ought to be the end of it. One extraordinarily lucky incident to push you up the career ladder was rare enough — there is absolutely no way digging around a case that has nothing to do with you or your department could ever end well.

But something about it itches.

You make nice with Hillicker. She’s a year younger than you and far too kind for her own good, and she gushes freely about her husband’s work as an auror (they must be a perfect match for him to gush freely about it with her). It’s a bit manipulative. You have no excellent excuse for it, but… ambition, and all that, you suppose. Flack’s Gryffindor theory is studded with holes.

You are green, through and through.

Emilia’s updates are meaningless when you garner so much information that you’ve already heard everything she has to say over drinks, and at this point her and Hillicker might be a step behind you. Emilia still only knows about Albania; peppery little details of half a story. Hillicker discusses an assortment of murders with no real string between them, and Dumbledore regards you with cool heeding when you bring up the matter with him.

You see him little nowadays but you’ve never been close in any true sense, traces of resentment budding over the years like rainwater collects on glass until the stream finally slips.

You visit Hogwarts mostly for your Slytherins, fourteen or fifteen now, unafraid of the distinction of their blood.

And then there’s one night after you turn twenty-two where drinks take place at yours for a change, Mari and Leo included and happily wed. You have no sherries but your ale is just as well, and it’s only you and Renauld who are sober by the time everyone else is vanishing into the fireplace and going home.

That makes it much worse when you sleep together.

There’s no excuse of having had a glass too many — so sorry, I’ll be on my way then, and him stumbling over his trousers to get out of your hair. Of course, he does that anyway, scratching the nape of his neck when he reaches your doorway in the morning.

“Thanks for the — well, you have a nice home — I do think I should —”

“Yes.”

“Right.”

“Oh!” He turns around at the last second. “Er — I know you’ve become a tad obsessed with… Hillicker mentioned another, anyway. Hepzibah something. Killed by her own elf, the aurors suspect.”

“Oh,” you echo, sheets pulled up to your shoulders. “Thanks, Renauld.”

“I thought you might like to know. Don’t be daft about it.”

You’re incredibly daft about it.

There’s something reminiscent about Albania in this case that wasn’t there with the others. The tide of dark magic ebbing across the scene, the cherry-picked information released in the Prophet, the claim of an old, dumb House Elf who poisoned her mistress like the Albanian peasant killed in some insoluble accident.

The itch exacerbates.

You see him in your dreams again. He peers over Runes in a stolen encyclopaedia, he whispers to an adder on his shoulder, he kisses the corner of your mouth and it isn’t enough. He kills you, again and again. You kill him too.

You wake up and he isn’t there.

It’s a new low when you’re invited to the Hillicker’s anniversary dinner and you end up digging through the drawers of their study halfway through the night.

The Albania file offers nearly nothing. There was the charred residue of dark magic imprinted on a hollow tree in the fields of the peasant’s hamlet, but nothing detailing more than a blank imprint of the Killing Curse in his eyes. Still, you tuck the knowledge away for the file of one Hebzibah Smith, whose tea did indeed have traces of poison, but whose den was also ripe with a layer of darkness that didn’t line up with the Ministry’s tale of senile elf.

And then there’s the forgotten matter of her being a purveyor of ancestral artefacts. The file doesn’t recount whether any are missing, since the woman was wise enough not to proclaim all her possessions to the world, but it’s something. A scratch.

You travel to Albania that Christmas. The neighbours in the peasant’s hamlet have skewed memories, so they provide little help, but the man’s house was left almost untouched.

You tear the place apart and Transfigure it back together when you’re done.

All you find, in the end, is a scrap of an old envelope in a suitcase.

R.R

It could be that it’s old. The cursive seems ancient enough. But you swear the letters have the distinct shape of quill ink — too artful for any pen — and maybe that wouldn’t matter if it weren’t for half a wax seal stuck to the torn edge of the envelope. Stained but silver, the barest hint of two ribbons, a crest, and the letter H.

You return to Hogwarts posthaste.

It’s snowing in the courtyards and you waddle with a duotang under one arm to pretend you’re here for something scholarly, an array of excuses prepared in case you run into Dumbledore, but you don’t.

The Grey Lady is as beautiful as she’s rumoured to be.

You ask her about her mother, and she’s silent, an expression on her face like you’ve struck her.

“Is it found?” she whispers. The snow floats through her.

Your heart hammers as you consider how to approach this. She thinks you know more than you do, which means there’s something to know.

“Yes,” you say. And you dare further with the context you know, “In Albania.”

“Oh,” she hums. “Oh…”

And if she means to say more she doesn’t seem able, washing away through the balusters, then the walls. You think of your house ghost and what he did to her, and you feel sorry for a second.

Madam Palles expels you from the library the moment you find what you’re looking for, and you rush past a throng of staring students to the staff room fireplace. It’s too far a walk to the border of the castle wards to Apparate. You bite back the preemptive sickness, get swallowed by the flames, and go home.

There are blanks to fill in but you do it easily. Rowena Ravenclaw’s diadem. Hepzibah Smith and her assortment of unregistered artefacts. The stain of dark magic. Something so rare not even the aurors recognized it.

But you do, because he told you.

You wonder on your search to find him what object he used when he killed Myrtle Warren. Nothing special, you think — maybe even the closest thing he could find. These murders involved more preparation. He got to mark them however he wanted.

It’s almost disappointing to find him here. In a little flat over Knockturn Alley with a view of charmed coalsmoke and the brick wall of another shop.

It’s as tidy as his room at Wool’s, the only dirt the irremediable age of the building itself. The whole place looks almost slanted, large enough only for the bare necessities; a kitchen, a toilet, a bedroom that looks more like a closet, and a study/dining room/den you can’t imagine he hosts many gatherings in. You rescind the mere thought. Whatever gatherings Tom Riddle is having these days, you’re sure you can’t begin to imagine at all.

You wait, legs crossed on an old loveseat, fiddling with your wand.

The door clicks open when the snow has turned to hail and there’s no light but the few scattered candles you’d lit on the mantelpiece.

It strikes you only when he’s standing before you that it’s his birthday.

You’re in Tom Riddle’s flat, on his birthday, adorned by the orange glow of half-melted candles, and you know everything.

He eyes you carefully, a hint of surprise at the sight of you after four years that even he needs a second to recover from. And then he's even, inscrutable Riddle again, and you dare to think, come back.

“I placed wards," he says, hanging his bag on a rack by the wall.

“I thought your door was always open.”

You see his posture change from just his silhouette.

“Wards never work in Knockturn,” you offer additionally, “not really. There's too much conflicting magic; one border cuts into another; leaves a little sliver behind if you’re smart enough to find it. You should know that."

He turns to you. You take in a moment to acknowledge how he's changed. It's hard to see in the curtained moonlight, and it seems unreasonable to imagine he’s grown, but you think he has. An inch taller, perhaps. Two. Maybe the dress shoes. His arms are bigger under his button-down, but not enough to consider him muscular. His black hair isn't as perfect as you remember, and you suspect a long day of work undoes his curls. You always liked him better that way in school, after a night duel at the Black Lake, his robes askew and his hair a mess. Evidence that you were the only one to dishevel him. Now you were — what? Did he even think of you anymore? Yes. You'd always think of each other.

“Duly noted. What are you here for?” He tries your surname like a foreign language.

You cross your arms, and you're acutely aware that he's observing your changes too. You're not the matchstick witch he once knew. Your emotions are cultured now, taut to mirror his. You wear dull, formal grey, and that glowing green tinge that should be gleaming on you is under a thick carapace. That’s for Mari, Flack, Emilia — even Renauld. Not for Tom.

You wonder if he knows it was Dumbledore who put in the word that got you this uniform. You wonder if he resents you for it.

“There’s been talk at the Ministry," you say finally, “A string of murders. Whispers of something — some dark magic they don’t understand. And you know they're careful about things like that after Grindelwald."

“A string of murders... Hm. That might imply you understand a connective thread. Is there some sort of accusation being made?”

“Oh, I'm sure you'd be flattered by accusations. There’s not enough there, as it stands. Just whispers." You sink more comfortably in the seat and the springs make a concerning sound. “But I know you."

His hard, sharp gaze falters for a moment. You watch the flames dance behind him, the firelight playing against the lines of his shoulders, and feel your heart skip a beat. “Who else is speculating?"

“No one." Your fingers brush over the book spines on the coffee table. “I guess their attention hasn't been drawn to a book clerk yet, even if you have taken residency... here." You say it with no shortage of disapproval.

Knockturn was never where Tom belonged. You'd once imagined a flat together in muggle London, taking the telephone booth to the Ministry together, changing the world together. It's a wish that's a lifetime away now.

“Is this a warning? I assure you, I don’t need the condescension.”

“I'm not warning you," you scoff, “I — I'm seeing you. God knows I'll probably never get the chance to do that again once you get yourself locked up in Azkaban, which you will."

You sound exasperated. You sound half-pleading. “What are you doing, Tom? Is this — this is really what you want?"

“Yes."

You shake your head. “I don't believe that." And then some of that fiery spit returns to you, and you feel like a child again, stuck in the London tube stations holding his hand at every plane that flew overhead, scowling that you needed his reassurance. Scowling that you were afraid.

“Well, your conjecture is ever-appreciated. Shall I lend you mine? Shall I congratulate you on your revolutionary position at the Ministry? Or is it Dumbledore I should afford my thanks?”

“I earned this,” you hiss.

“You deserve it,” he amends. “But do not lie to yourself and pretend that’s why you have it.”

“Fuck you.”

He smiles. “There you are.”

“I don’t need your congratulations, Riddle. Dumbledore doesn’t need your damn thanks. But,” you say, biting back the snarl that wants out, “you could thank me. After all, I could turn to the Ministry any minute with the truth of your heritage. I could tell them about Myrtle, the Horcrux — Horcruxes.”

The humour dissolves from his face and you despise the immense glee it brings you.

“Oh, did you think I didn’t know? Didn’t understand the connective thread? You are sentimental under all that… fucking posturing, you know. I’m sure it’s all very romantic to you — making Horcruxes out of Hogwarts artefacts. Shame it’s such an insult to your intelligence.”

“Very good,” he says after a long, terse silence. You’re sure he’s thinking just the opposite.

You hum, meddling with your nails. “So what’s your plan?”

“I’d need a Vow for that.”

You laugh. “I’m not that desperate.”

“You’re also not an auror, are you?” He tilts his head appraisingly. “And yet you’ve found your way here.”

“How many do you plan to make? How many people do you plan to kill?”

“A Vow.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Tea, then? Biscuits?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t. I read in the paper the other day about a poor old woman who had her tea poisoned.”

“Hm. Terrible shame.”

Your fist clenches around your wand. “Is it paying off well, Riddle? It must be a good life if you’re willing to split your soul to hell and back to have more of it.”

He smiles at the barb in your words. “You never were good with subtlety.”

“I wasn’t trying to be subtle. This place is horrific.”

“I was referring to your inability to see more than what’s directly in front of you.”

“Oh, really? And what more should I see than a boy who’s very good at getting weak men to bow and do very little else? I’d try to see the bigger picture, but I reckon it wouldn’t fit in here.”

Tom regards you colourlessly. You are slate, Ministry-grey, impermeable like palace portcullis.

“I suppose I should have killed you.” He says it with the nonchalance of a forgotten chore. He says it like you’re a stain.

He doesn’t say it like he feels any terrible urgency to remove you; and you think, this time, you’d feel more powerful if he did. You think it’s far more debilitating to sit here and be looked at like he regrets wanting you alive more than he wants you dead.

“Yes,” you concur, “I suppose you should have.”

You place your wand down on the table and scoot your chair away for good measure. “It’s never too late to rectify your mistakes.”

Tom, for a moment, looks surprised. That makes you feel powerful. You’d take more of that.

“You have wandless magic,” he tries. A weak recovery.

“Scout’s honour, Riddle.”

He doesn’t move for a moment, then fixes his wand in his hand and rises, doused in the same inscrutable calm that always used to drive you mad. Now something in you gleams with the knowledge that he only ever looks like this when he’s trying not to look like anything at all.

He steps closer and it gleams brighter. It trembles inside you and you know, distantly, that this is insane. You’re weighing your life on a childhood trust that was shattered years ago, and you don’t think you’ve ever been that good at faith, but he’s approaching you and that gleam you feel is reflected in his eyes and you just… know. Your spilled blood once crawled with his. There’s no undoing that. Half of you is made of the other.

“I should have killed you,” he repeats.

It’s a murmur. Stilted. Angry, even. Angry that you made him this and there’s no fucking rectifying it — what a joke that is. What an immensely you thing to suggest.

“Yes,” you agree.

It’s a breath. Low. Proud, even. Proud that you’re his only mistake and he’s going to make it again.

Tom kisses you. It’s a murder of its own kind. You kiss him back, and — you were always going to kill each other like this, weren’t you? It’s you and him whether you like it or not.

There should be no love in it. You know that. Love is far behind the both of you, stifled in a gasp at the back of your throat on your eighteenth birthday and the soft, selfish hands of a seventeen year old boy. This is mutual destruction. Spite and teeth and skin that’s cold under your fingers.

He was your first in everything but this.

You push back at him and feel the hunger, the need in him, like a flame as he kisses you deeper and harder, and you find yourself losing yourself to it all over again, like you're back in the dark alcove of a pub where you told him goodbye, pushing to extend the juncture. And then he lets out a hitched, gravelly sound; not a moan but enough to make you shudder.

You pull him onto the sofa and crawl onto his lap.

“How long?” he asks thickly.

You don’t have to ask what he means. You bite against his neck, nails under his shirt as you struggle to pop the buttons open. There must be a violence in all your want for him because if there isn't it's just loss. It's just another thing you'll give him without taking anything back.

“Sixth year," you pant, “in the Deathday ballroom when we fought for the first time. You — ah — you put your thumb on my mouth. Since then."

You hear a sharp intake of breath, and his hand moves up your back to pull you impossibly closer. His voice is ragged. “Should I tell you how long I’ve wanted you?"

You shudder a breath. “Since —" And it's a bit hard to talk with the way he's rolling your hips — “Since when?"

His lips twitch into a mirthless smile, hands spanning your thighs as you start to rock against him. “When you burned me, and I sent you into the lake."

You swallow, agonised by the slow pace his grip forces you to keep when all you want to do is go faster.

“Your uniform was terribly wet,” he says, mouth tracing your jaw. “Did I ever apologise for that?"

“N-no.”

He tuts, the hushed sound warm and deadly on your neck. “Bad manners. I must have been distracted."

Oh. Oh, you think. It seems pointless to flush in the position you're in now, but the knowledge that he wanted you then and you hadn't even known is... all the more devastating.

But you shiver at the question of how he’d wanted you, in what amount of detail, in what precise way. You almost want to ask. See it for yourself.

You don't think you'd manage the words. He’s hard underneath you and your head wants to lull toward his shoulder but a big hand holds you from one side of your jaw down the length of your neck, his tongue laving up the other. Instead you’re balanced only by his hands and his mouth, rolling against him because it’s all you can do like this.

He’s marking you, you realise with a gasp, and your fingers bury in his hair to remove his mouth from its descending assault on your collar. Not that. You’d sworn against that.

Your fingers return to his buttons and he copies you by finding yours, pulling at the fabric tucked into your trousers until it’s discarded entirely. You press your hands to the planes of his chest and watch him, your mouth agape as his eyes linger on your chest.

His heart is pounding and he must know you’re about to comment on it because his lips are on yours again and he adjusts his position and your fingers dig into his shoulders at the delicious new feeling of him pressing into your thigh.

You move for his belt. He moves for your zipper. It’s some sort of race, whatever you’re doing, and you’re at an unfair advantage when you’re still fumbling with his buckle when his hand is already carving a slow path to the band of your underwear. You're scalding under the journey of it, little stars pricking you under every new inch he explores.

He dips in and your eyes wrench shut, grasping frantically for his wrist.

“Shh,” he says softly, caressing your cheek with his spare hand, thumb finding your mouth how it did all those years ago and you want to curse him. The fucker knows exactly what he’s doing.

You shake your head, chest rising with heavy breaths as you return to his belt and scrabble to unbuckle it.

“So tense,” he murmurs. The hand at your cheek draws over your lower lip before it falls to your back to hold you closer. “Rest now.”

And his fingers trace you where you want him most, brushing past your clit as he pulls his face back to watch you.

You sink into the feeling, still swaying on his lap, a half-efforted attempt at finding friction in the hardness between his legs that feels fruitless because it won't be enough until he's inside. Your hand just grips onto the fabric of his unzipped trousers and stays there. It’s a pause. An obstacle on your path to him that you need just a moment to recover from before you’ll make him feel just like this. Better. Worse. It’s hard to tell which is which.

He’s stroking at you now, pleased by the way you lurch against him with every touch.

You have to recover, you have to make it even, you have to… you…

A finger presses inside and you moan.

“You came back to me,” he whispers, close enough to be kissing you but there’s just the stutter of his breath. It's a fucking religious thing to say, the way he does it.

“Doesn’t make me yours,” you breathe.

He shakes his head. “I know. You’ll still take it though, won’t you?”

Oh, fuck.

He makes a sound of approval. “Good.”

Good. Fine. Your hands slip from his zipper to the meat of his thighs, pushing yourself forward so the shape of him is firmer against you, and Tom slips another finger in.

You’ll take it, won’t you? Yes.

Maybe you don’t need to tear him at the seams (though you want to) to make it even. Maybe this is punishment enough. That he can have you like this and it still won’t make you his, that he’ll give you everything and you’ll lap at it with half the greed he possesses.

You ride his hand, clutching his shoulders, rocking your hips. You take all of it, and it builds something delirious inside you, that it’s him doing this, his perfect fingers, the shape of his lips, the soft dark of his hair when you find your hands in it again. The feeling makes you stutter, and he has to move you by the waist himself to keep the momentum when you can't do it yourself.

He’s painfully stiff, pushing up against you with a degree of self-control that feels like it can only end disastrously for the both of you, and you start smattering kisses down his cheek. You tilt his head back and lick a stripe down his neck. Rest now, you'd say if you could.

But he adds a third finger and your head falls, a cry planted in his collar when you come, and you don't think you say anything.

Tom holds your legs steady, guiding you through it like this is just another one of his studies. You are what he knows better than anything else, and still he wants to learn more.

“Look at you,” he mutters, dipping you back to press his lips down your chest, unclasping your bra while you’re still breaking, the sensation swelling again when he takes a nipple into his mouth.

“Tom,” you try to say. Your mouth is the sticky sort of dry that words refuse to come out of.

“Will you give me more?”

Give, not take. You fuss into a stolen kiss, grappling again with his trousers, pulling them down until you can palm him through his boxers.

He hisses, gripping your wrist like he hadn’t just done the same to you, and then he’s pulling you up and off the couch, trousers discarded with what must be magic because you blink and they’re gone. Greedy boy. (You have no room to judge.) Your back is to the wall an instant before his fingers are on you again, pushing your underwear down your thighs until it falls at your feet like they despised to ever part from you.

You arch to feel him press against your stomach, pushing off the wall so that you can meld to him but he just closes in on you to do it himself.

He goads the heat from you when his fingers push in again, still wet, coiling how you like, where you like —

“Want you,” you protest shakily, hand on his abdomen.

That must kill him a little, because he curses under his breath (a thing he never does) and the immediate absence of his touch is cruel when he goes to free himself from his boxers. You reach for him without thinking as he does, and he pins your hand beside you when your fingers so much as graze the length of him.

You sound frail, but you have to ask. “Is this how you wanted me?”

A cruder version of you would go on. Is this how you pictured it? Taking me against a wall? Have you waited for it all this time?

And you don’t belong to him but you’re so incomprehensibly, contradictorily his. You’ll want him forever. He could do anything, and you’d be his. You could haunt him into his lonely eternity, and he’d be yours. Then, you suppose — haunting him makes him yours by principle.

Maybe you already do.

Tom practically growls into your mouth, pressing against you and — God, it’s skin on skin. He's right there. You could push forward and —

He slides in. You cry out at the feel of him inside you, the angle of it like this.

“I wanted you,” he says lowly, your legs wrapped around him, “everywhere.”

You’re gripping him so tight you think he’ll bleed under your nails and somehow you still feel on the brink of collapse when he thrusts deeper.

“I thought mostly of your mouth,” he rasps. “It felt depraved to imagine it wrapped around me, but then I thought of you splayed out before me instead. That maybe you’d like it if it was my mouth on you.”

You whimper.

“Would you like that?” he asks, hands spanning your hips to snap them into his, like you are a piece removed from him he seeks to reattach.

If you wanted to answer you couldn’t. You’re clinging to him and the rising surge inside you, carved between your legs like something sweltering and unfixable. It rushes in and he pulls out of you. He pushes in and you cry for the release of it, the moment the wave lurches over the edge, but he won’t let you have it.

“But,” he says, and your eyes want to roll back at how heavy his restraint is, callous in the tone of his voice, some leash at his neck he must tug himself lest you take it from him — “If I knew how well you’d take me like this, I would have thought of it much more.”

Taking him, again — you don’t feel at all like that’s what’s happening. You feel possessed. You are buoyant in his arms: his and his and his.

“You can — uh — you can — ”

"Hm?" He brushes down the slope of your brow, your cheek, back to the edge of your mouth, wiping a trail of saliva from your chin. “Poor thing.”

And he slams into you again, drawing a mewl from you that slices your unfinished thought.

You clench around him, flames wild and fluttering at every contact of his skin on yours, and there are too many to count. Too many points where they intersect, just some blend of bodies connected at every curve.

“You’re going to give me more,” he says, like it’s an epiphany when you already told him you would.

You remember then. What you meant to say. “You can take me too.”

You feel him twitch inside you, his pace stilling for a moment, and the thumb on your lip slips into your mouth. Your lips close around him and he curses again.

He fucks you with a finger in your mouth and his teeth clamped over your shoulder, soothing the sting with his tongue. His pace is too slow when he drags his free hand between your legs, but you understand its purpose well enough that the mere recognition almost destroys you.

He’s patient in bringing you to the edge because there's time here. A slow agony that severs you from the rest of the world until it splits you down the middle. And he may not ever have it again.

You have to promise yourself he’ll never have it again.

But the movement of his fingers against the same spot he’s hitting inside you is too much at once, and you won’t last. You drool around his thumb. You let him mark you. You can see on his neck you’ve marked him too. And you hope impossibly there’s a scar. You hope the little death you coax from him claims him as yours for eternity, keeps him even when you're gone. You tighten, lurch for the edge, and make him mortal once more.

Tom holds you there, your cries reverberating as he sinks another finger in your mouth, and then he’s gasping at your neck, peeling back to look you in the eyes when he spills into you. Your eyes screw together and he releases the sounds you make by holding you by the jaw instead.

“Look at me,” he says, and for the strained need in it you do.

You come down to earth and you kiss him, wetness dripping down your thighs as he pins you to this moment. You love him. You’ll always love him.

He brings you to his bed after and you let him, legs surrendering their grip on his waist as you pull apart. You pant into the cold linen of his pillow. Everything smells like him. There’s something empty now; the reason you came today; the reason you left four years ago.

You love him and it isn’t enough. Not even to look at him, the sleepy hint of the boy you knew in his eyes, and know that he loves you too.

“Goodnight, Tom,” you say, finding home in the warmth of his chest.

You’ll dream of a morning where you wake up beside him, but you won’t be there.

#tom riddle #tom riddle x reader #tom riddle x you #tom riddle x y/n #tom riddle fluff #tom riddle smut #tom riddle angst #(the trifecta)#tom marvolo riddle #voldemort #voldemort x reader #tom riddle imagine #tom riddle oneshot #harry potter fanfiction #wizarding world #ftltutbh

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azriellls · 1 month ago

Text

az x f!reader — torment

summary: azriel can’t stand the torment of loving you and being unable to show it; pairing: az x fem! reader • warnings: none, just angst. food?

Cassian’s laugh, so rich and full, pulled you out of your reverie; spoon still in hand, your untouched porridge atop it long gone hard and cold. For the past ten minutes, you’d been trying and failing to get down the breakfast spread out in a buffet before you: bread and butter, seasonal fruits; all courtesy of Rhys’ stocked townhouse kitchen. But every time you tried to eat, the leaden weight in your stomach grew heavier. The absence of one particular male at the table was a tangible, physical thing.

But your surroundings snapped back to you then: the faces of all the people, bar one, that you loved the most in your war torn world. Feyre, to the right side of Rhys, had her hand lovingly placed atop his, but her eyes were flitting to you at short intervals with an increasing, almost motherly, concern.

You could tell within seconds that a private conversation flowed silently between the two of them. Knew it as surely as you knew it was about you. About what to do next, and how.

Indeed, you couldn’t remember the last time you’d laughed as fully, as heartily, as Cass.

With a slight shake of your head as if to refocus, you spooned in your mouthful of oats. Chewed, swallowed. Did it again. Again. Again. Again.

Across from you, beside Cassian, this time Morrigan caught your attention. Out of everyone in your found family, you often felt she understood you best: that your trauma bond was one that ran so unspeakingly deep, between two females that had been broken and made themselves reborn.

Now, her eyes were tender, painfully so, as she sought out your own. Beneath the table, her shoe clad foot bumped yours, and you took the message as if her voice had spoken in your very own head. Come on.

It wasn’t chastising. Never would Mor, a sister to you in soul if not in blood, be chiding. Food was fuel, and they all knew it, too. Had fought enough battles, enough wars, to know it.

And the Cauldron only knew what they’d face today to make you regret not agreeing.

Still, Cassian and Amren continued their sniping back and forth across the table; what they’d been saying, you couldn’t have said, but the rumble of voices was a sure — albeit distant — comfort.

There was still most of the breakfast spread left, a veritable feast with no chance of going to waste when surrounded by such warriors.

Or, as you and Feyre liked to say, an excess of Illyrian babies.

You shut down the thought as you deliberately didn’t think about the one conspicuously absent.

As if it was a physical thing, you knew your sorrow bled out into the room; knew it was pretence that kept your friends laughing, and joking, and talking into that deep quiet.

As if on cue, Cassian and Amren’s bickering slowed, then died out altogether.

It wasn’t until that scent caught you in the gut that you realised quite why it had.

Azriel’s presence took all the air from the room, the townhouse, the world, as he took one step over the threshold. Around him, his shadows were an extension of himself: that inner darkness you knew lingered in him, that you loved dearer than your own self.

Of course, he’d known you’d be in here — those lithe whorls of living night never missed a trick, especially not when it came to you.

So it was a surprise, a shock hit to your gut, when Az’s broad frame filled the doorway, and he walked in, swift as though born on a wind, and made to the seat beside yours.

It had been a month — longer, even — than he’d been this close. Than he’d been within range of even speaking. At every chance, he wouldn’t deign to say a single word; would leave a room, no excuses needed when it was him, just because he knew you would soon enter it.

No one, as far as you knew, could discern exactly what had gone wrong between you —you certainly couldn’t. But you did know how they spoke about it in your absence, and it never sat well. Even though you knew it was for love of you both, it didn’t work to lessen the sting.

The proud, stubborn insult of it. Of being what they had to discuss.

The pains the others took to restart conversation almost brought you to tears, your heart been hammering against your ribs like a struck bird of prey trapped in its cage.

Between you and Azriel, tension thickened and wrought the air heavy with its taste. His shadows twined around his shoulders and you knew they whispered to him; could swear you sometimes felt them watch you — speak to you — as they did him.

One breath in, one out. With impossible focus, you looked anywhere but at the Shadowsinger, holding fast to the deep timbre of Rhys’ voice, and Feyre’s responding, light laugh.

The easiness between them, the intimacy that came so readily, so naturally —

You couldn’t help but turn your eyes to the male seated beside you, hoping for something, anything, some sign that he was there, just that he cared for a second —

All at once, the room changed. Azriel’s chair was pushed back with the ease and assurance of the warrior he’d always been. His tall frame seemed to fill the whole room as he stood from the table and crossed to the doorway.

He didn’t utter a word as he left, as his scent was carried on a phantom wind.

But you could’ve sworn you heard that whispering, heard it pull at something deep inside your core, deeper even than your heart as he walked from the room. From you.

Your family met your eyes, guilt and disappointment twin aches on their faces. No no no. You couldn’t stand their pity.

Even worse was the genuine sorrow not only for you, but for who they’d lost as well.

When was the last time the seven of you had eaten together, a full meal? When was the last time you’d laughed together like you used to, as a unit, as a family?

You couldn’t bear to keep count any longer.

•~•

Azriel hadn’t made it three steps out of the dining room before he could’ve fallen to his knees. He might have, were it not for him knowing that you all watched his back receding from view — he knew, even without his whispers, how acutely you all mourned his presence.

But what could he say, or do? Azriel had thought of going to Rhys, of telling him — confirming to him — what he suspected he likely already knew. That was, judging by the way he’d met his eyes just before you turned his way.

In that one look, every unspoken word between the two brothers had passed. It was a flat, unyielding look, tinged with a sympathy he couldn’t stand. Toeing the line between brother and High Lord wasn’t always easy, and it never was now. Not with this.

Not with you, his mate.

And when you’d turned your head, those wide searching eyes so damn trusting, so achingly hopeful as they sought out his own —

Your scent had lifted up from your hair with the movement, and that had been Azriel’s undoing.

He’d had to get out of that room before his heart caved in on itself. He’d had to get out, get out, and now that he was he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think around the ache in him —

Not even his shadows, in their swift stealth and silence, could quiet the voice in his mind; a child’s voice, his voice. Unloved unloved unloved.

Every day, every time — those words, and that same voice.

So if this was the price he had to pay then so be it. He would pay it, and be done. He knew exactly what he didn’t deserve.

Would never deserve.

Because if you found out the truth, if you knew for one second what you actually were to him —

He’d rather be the one to do the leaving than be left.

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checkoutmybookshelf · 2 months ago

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Cauldrons, Zombies, and Samhain, Oh My!

I can't say that I have any particularly strong feelings about Halloween, but sometimes reading and holidays match up, and if Joanne is spending her Samhain wishing like hell zombies weren't a thing she has to deal with, I can yammer about how awesome it is to watch her hate on dealing with zombies. Let's talk Cauldron Borne.

This is your obligatory SPOILER WARNING. No fair saying I didn't warn you that there would be zombies and spoilers past this point.

So after having taken the promotion Morrison offered her at the end of the last book, Joanne's social life has exploded and we open with a Halloween party that she's co-hosting with her fencing instructor, is attended by most of the SPD, and also includes Edward "Thor" Johnson, Joanne's boyfriend with a big sexy truck. Put a pin in the boyfriend, we're gonna need to come back to that. The other big key point about this book is that it's where Joanne realizes that she is getting a handle on her shamanism. She's got a better sense of her abilities than in past books, and she has more than the little bit of knowledge it takes to be dangerous. So when she and Billy catch a homicide that has some spooky origins, she's actually making plans and acting instead of just reacting. It's a great change, and honestly this is where Joanne really starts coming into her own.

This is ALSO the book where Joanne figures out that of all the spooktacular creatures she could be dealing with, Zombies are her least favorite. And given all the sensory details we get about them from this book? They're my least favorite too. Monsters should have the courtesy not to SMELL if they're going to murder you.

However, that gets a bit ahead of myself. Let's start with Joanne and Billy, because he is undoubtedly our MVP secondary character in this book. Detective Billy Holliday sees dead people, and has since the tragic, accidental death of his sister Caroline when she was eleven. That's all fine, it makes him a damn good homicide detective, and he has built himself a happy, stable life with his wife Melinda--who is literally days from giving birth to their fifth child. It is this gift of seeing ghosts that lets Billy know that a whole bunch of very pissed off ghosts erupt from the party cauldron and try to possess people.

One of those ghosts is Matilda Whitehead, and 13-year-old who was murdered in 1900. She leads Billy and Joanne to a string of semi-centennial child murders that connect somehow to the murder of a security guard who was securing the Cauldron of Maltholwch--better known as the Black Cauldron--which has of course been stolen. So Joanne and Billy have to a) solve a bunch of related murders and b) find the dang Cauldron. With the help of a lot of ghosts and Suzanne Quinley--grandaughter of Cenunnos, leader of the Wild Hunt--they do. But not before the guy who stole the Cauldron tries to use Joanne as a test case to make sure he can bring his wife and daughters back to life.

Joanne tries to self-sacrifice by jumping into the Cauldron to destroy it, but Billy cold-cocks her and jumps in instead. At which point it is revealed that Caroline's ghost has stayed with Billy his whole life to protect him. Which is lucky, because only Caroline can destroy the Cauldron by finally going to her rest. Billy and Joanne are yote from the exploding Cauldron, and Melinda goes into labor. Our bad guy has a grief heart attack, and everyone is happily ever after at that point.

So let's dig in a little, shall we?

Joanne, Thor, and Morrison

So. For those of you playing along at home, Joanne had a choice at the end of the last book. She could take a promotion to detective or she could take a chance on a relationship with Morrison. In one of the most heart-wrenching but correct decisions I have ever seen a character make in a book, she took the promotion. And sometime between books, she started dating the guy who was hired to replace her all the way back in book 1.

Morrison is deeply cool about ALL of this (so much so that it got its own post), while still carrying one hell of a torch.

Unfortunately, it takes less than five chapters for it to be really, really damn clear that Thor is not cut out to be the side of the relationship that runs for cover or trusts the other side to protect themselves. In fairness to him, at over six feet tall, good with cars, and ripped as hell, he probably hasn't HAD to walk away from many fights in his life. He's probably very used to being protective. But if you don't have magic, you can't face down the magical enemies and win.

This sits poorly with him, and the miniute Joanne says she is walking into an objectively dangerous situation, he pitches a tantrum because he can't go badass with her. They literally break up over this, and everyone but Joanne saw it coming. I'm pretty sure THOR saw it coming. He wanted to be the protector, but that was just never going to be the dynamic.

Which is something Morrison SUPER understands, because Joanne goes to say a "just in case" goodbye to him before she walks into danger. And I don't honestly know what possessed Morrison to push the issue and ask WHY she was really in his office. He could absolutely have let her hide behind "Billy told me I had to ask your permission before walking into a dangerous situation" because it's plausible deniability for everyone involved. Hell, I'm fairly sure BILLY was expecting Morrison to forbid her from going. But Joanne walks into the office and goes, "Hey, so, I'm walking into this situation. It'd be better if you didn't order me not to. Cool?"

Morrison is just barely cool with it. He, in fact, turns purple about it, but he lets her go. He trusts that she's got this. And when she gets sucker-punched and hung over the cauldron by a serial killer, he strong-arms Cernunnos himself to get him, Billy, Gary, and Suzanne to Joanne this very second. (God I want to see that scene...we don't get it, but it would be INCREDIBLE.)

Morrison knows how to stand beside and trust a partner. He also knows when protection and help are useful rather than infantilizing and actively detrimental, so points.

And he somehow manages to do ALL of this while respecting Joanne's choice. Even when she is having trouble with her own choice, he's just...there. Letting her figure it out, and stepping in when it's necessary to make sure she doesn't end up sacrificed to an ancient Celtic cauldron.

Suzanne Quinley

Miss Suzy Q. is back! Our girl was a minor character in book 1, and since the events if that book has been living with her aunt in Olympia and coming into the powers that are her heritage as a demi-god. She can see through time, guys, and it's as awesome and terrifying as you might expect.

This new precognitive ability is why Suzanne turns up in Seattle: She has seen Joanne's death and she wants to prevent it from.coming true. Along the way, Suzanne ends up revealing herself to just be RELENTLESSLY impressive. In the face of waves of zombies (starting with insects and graduating to small animals and finally to humans) and an adult who is curled in a ball on the ground shrieking (Joanne REALLY is not ok with zombies), Suzanne picks up the shotgun full of rock salt, fires into the crowd of zombies, and orders Joanne up. She also threatens to shoot Joanne to buy herself time to run, but she's 14 and being chased by zombies, so I genuinely do not blame her. Luckily, Joanne gets the hell up, so Suzanne gets to just keep blasting zombies as they make their way back to Petite.

Honestly, this whole scene in the cemetery is freaking incredible. A+, no notes.

Suzanne also gets to ride with the Wild Hunt to Joanne's rescue, where her magic gets EVEN CREEPIER. Billy and Morrison have guns with which to shoot undead Celtic warriors, Gary body slams one before nabbing Joanne's sword to use. Suzanne just straight up Benjamin Buttons them out of existence. It's the creepiest thing I have ever considered in terms of ways to dispatch zombies, but it is damn effective.

Archie Redding

Our big bad for this book is way, way more tragic and human than I had been trained by the series so far to expect. Archie Redding was a homesteader in the 1800s who took.his wife and two little girls and trekked across the continent toward California. Tragedy strikes when they're traveling out of season and get caught in an avalanche. Redding is thrown clear, but his family does not survive.

And who happens upon him in this moment of tragedy and vulnerability? A freaking banshee with a magical solution to preserve the bodies until they can brig them back to life. And all its going to take is murdering a kid every fifty years to buy the lifespan and preservation. So Archie full-on murders kids every fifty years until he sees his chance to steal the Cauldron of Matholwch and use it to reanimate his family.

He murders his fellow security guard to get it out of the museum. He tries to murder Joanne as a test case to see if it'll work on his family. There are literally dozens of bodies buried under the pool in his back yard.

And all of it ends up being for naught, because the cauldron only gives his family a minute of life. On top of that, it's not even his family's souls that come back, it's three new ones. Archie got played by the banshee and it's master, and a bunch of people died over the one hundred and sixty-odd years this saga took.

Archie ends up dying of a heart attack while Joanne and Bily are busy destroying the cauldron. While Joanne could have brought him back to face justice, Morrison leaves the choice to her, and she leaves him be. There was nothing about forcing him to live and endure the criminal justice system that would have made anything better, so she leaves him dead. It's probably the kinder option, but that doesn't make it an easy choice. Especially since Archie is more tragic than evil.

The Freaking Cauldron

Ok, so for being an inanimate object, the Cauldron of Matholwch has a hell of a presence in this book. Death magic tends to have more attitude than other types of magic in fantasy in general, and this is no exception. It's seductive and creepy, and it does FUNKY things to your free will. Like funky to the point of being its own anti-destruction loophole, because the very nature of its magic means that no living human goes in of their own free will, which is how you do a sacrifice to destroy the thing.

Billy and Caroline are the loophole for the loophole, but holy cow there's something...sticky and oppressive and heavy about the cauldron's magic.

It's a REALLY cool item, and the fact that it gets us headed toward the Celtic side of Joanne's magical heritage--plus some foreshadowing about Brigid and the Morrigan--is a ton of fun.

Daniel Doherty

Ohhhhhh Daniel Doherty...this poor little insurance adjuster really goes THROUGH it this book, and he almost deserves it. He pops us early on in the book because he's trying VERY hard to deny Joanne's claims about the damage Petite suffered in the last few books, or even accuse her of insurance fraud. Since this is Petite on the line, Joanne has no patience and seriously almost gives Doherty up to the zombies in the cemetery.

He is a skeezy, sanctimonious, dyed-in-the-wool corporate stooge, and frankly he deserves the scare of his life. Literally one of the highlights of this book is once Joanne gets Doherty and Suzanne out of the cemetery and safely back to the police precinct, Doherty asks her what the hell happened. Joanne's response is, and I quote:

"What do you want, Mr. Doherty? Do you want the truth? If I tell you it's what you want it to be, an incredibly well-realized film production, are you going to go home and write up our madcap race out there as a liability and refuse me my insurance claim?"

Like...damn girl, I'm with you on insurance men being the absolute worst, but even I think that's cold. Although if my baby's well-being was on the line, I'd probably be that blunt too.

For fans of the series who want to see how Doherty handles this long term, there is a free short story called "Ghost Rider" that handles this and low-key crosses over with a pair of brothers who also have a car fetish and monster hunting legacy...

There wasn't a ton of Gary in this book, or even as much Morrison as I'd have liked, but this is one of my favorites in the series purely for how well it handles zombies and for how it handles death magic. Not to mention the always fun dynamics between Joanne and Billy, and a bit of a wrap to the arc Billy's had going for these first five books. As per usual, I cannot recommend this series or this author enough!

#the walker papers #cauldron borne #joanne walker #ce murphy #urban fantasy #zombies #books and reading #books #books and novels #books & libraries #book recommendations

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itsswritten · 1 month ago

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Cauldron-born | Part 2

Pairing: Azriel x fem reader

Word count: 4.1K

Summary: When an unexplainable energy pulls the Inner Circle to barge into the Day court, they're all shocked at what they find. But it's Azriel who can't help wonder if his dreams have finally been answered.

Part 1

A cackle pierced through you as Cressida looked upon you with a devilish glint.

“You believe you are a witch?” Her tone caught you off guard. Her patronisation questioning everything you had ever held to be true. Surely you were? It was the only thing that made some sense. Your brows furrowed tightly as you regarded the woman who had offered you shelter and refuge over the past few years.

Her laughing died down, her beautiful skin perfect by the ruins and spells she’d used for centuries, not displaying a single crease visible upon her flesh.

“Oh child what an easy life this would have been if we were more akin.”

You sat upright with a jolt, the murmuring of a dream— a memory whispering at the corners of your mind. Your heart swelling with the familiarity of someone you missed, despite her disposition, her cruel tone, that mean glint in her eye— you missed her. But as you felt the plush sheets beneath your body you knew you were no longer in the witches cottage at the corners of The Middle.

You had left that plagued land a while ago now.

A soft rap roused you from your thinking. The usual wake up call must have been the noise to stir you from your slumber in the first place, a familiar rumble of a tone behind the oak doors.

“Come in,” you replied softly. Your feet swinging off the side of the bed, as you walked towards the large curtain that hung from the high ceilings to the dark obsidian floor beneath your feet.

It should have been cool to the touch under your toes, but the house had a magical way of ensuring your comfort— always.

You heard the bedroom door swing open, your back to the welcomed guest as your fingers dropped from the luxe curtain fabric you had just pulled, inviting the warmth of the morning sun into your rooms.

“Blessed be my morning star, did you sleep well?” A deep sing-song tone bellowed into the room, a playfulness dancing on his words.

You cringed under the greeting, choosing not to turn to show your disdain at his choice of greeting and nickname. The sun was only just rising, sending splintered beams of light across your bedroom floor and walls.

“Helion, must you greet me in such a way?” He could practically hear the way you rolled your eyes and cringed at his words. You hadn’t turned to him yet, your gaze settling on the tops of the city below that the curtains had just revealed.

The view from your bedroom had changed more frequently in recent years. No longer the welcomed view of your childhood— the farm fields you grew up in, the misty fog that covered the northern part of the continent that you had always found comfort in.

No longer the harsh winding forest, dark trees that looked more like creatures that lurked outside the witches cottage— Cressida’s home— if you could even call it a home. Her den, rooted in The Middle.

No longer the glistening golden rooftops of Day, the sparkling white walls that danced the sunlight off the buildings in a way that made the whole court shimmer.

Instead, the panes of glass showed three mountainous peaks, dusted with snow in the distance and a city below— Velaris, the city of starlight.

Or the city of slumber. You were not well acquainted with the routines of the Night court residents. Them usually rousing from sleep well later into the day. However it did make your mornings quieter.

The auras of people settled in sleep, their noise, their colours dimming as you watched the kaleidoscope of energy dance lazily along to rooftops. It would be beautiful, if it wasn’t so loud.

You winced slightly at the sight, the lights and colours nudging on your mind. Poking and prodding a little harder than they had yesterday. It had been several days since Helion’s spell. A string of wryds to help contain your ability— dim it down, to subdue it, make it more bearable— but the spell was wearing thin.

Ever since that night—that fateful night where you almost left this world— your ability had been at a loss. Something that had always been as easy as breathing, as easy as a crisp night breeze filling your lungs, was now overwhelming and terrifying. If it wasn’t for Helion and his spell cleaving you're not even sure you’d still be here, in fact you’re certain it would have consumed you.

As beautiful as the auras of the world were, if you couldn’t control it— it would be the death of you.

“How are you feeling?” You had finally turned to Helion now, his question lingering in the air.

How were you feeling?

You could see, feel, taste Helion’s energy in front of you. A golden glow, so fitting for the High Lord of Day. It beamed within him like an orb of sunlight. You couldn’t touch it though, not like you used to, not like when you were a child and you used the naively play with creatures auras like a toy. Not like how Cressida had taught you to toy with people’s auras which was far from play.

That sense of control had broken, leaving jagged scars across your body to match.

Your hands, almost subconsciously went to touch the rugged scar that ran from your shoulder down to your torso. It tingled under your thoughts, but you pulled your hand back. Not allowing another moment to be wasted on what had happened and the marks it had left on you.

That was why you needed Helion and his spells. He had a way of dimming it with his own power, making it easier for you to navigate your day-to-day without being utterly consumed by the noise and colours of everyone else.

“I feel okay actually,” you had responded, your eyes moving up to the lines on your friends face. He smiled softly at you.

“This is the longest you’ve been without us having to spell cleave, but today—“

“Today could be a noisy day,” you finished his sentence, understanding what he was implying.

Tody, you were to begin training with the Valkyries.

“Those priestesses are already a bundle of emotions when they pass you, I think resealing the spell would be wise. Amren agrees.”

Well then, it wasn’t really up for debate.

You cocked a brow at Helion before moving towards the table in your room. That was now adorned with breakfast, courtesy of the house of course. Helion folded his arms across his broad chest. He still wore the colours of Day, white and pristine, glittered in gold jewellery along his wrists, earrings bejewelled with sunlight themselves. Grand and beautiful, just like him. However he looked so out of place against the dark background of the Night interior. As ornate as the House of Wind was, Helion didn’t fit.

No, he belonged among his own court, but the High Lord of day had left his court to accompany you. That in itself was such a large display of loyalty. You swallowed your guilt as you sat at the table, spreading butter across the warm toast and taking a bite.

“But of course the decision is always yours to make y/n,” Helion spoke, his tone as warm as the butter melting upon your breakfast.

They only wanted what was best for you, you knew that. Reminded yourself in moments like these. But you couldn’t help the feelings that slipped up to the surface. Since you’d come to the Fae courts and discovered who you were—what you were. Every piece of guidance came with a weight you felt like you couldn’t refuse.

You were the Mother’s daughter— Blessed be— you had status, respect, power— to do as you please, but that came with a responsibility that felt too heavy to bear. Every decision you made had to be considered, because it didn’t only affect you but the entire world and the peoples and creatures within it.

That meant, even if you wanted to try and push another day without the spell. See how far you could go as the spell thinned, you couldn’t risk it. As it wasn’t only you who it would endanger, but every living thing.

When Helion had found you— a shattered version of yourself— he’d spent the time piecing you back together. Perhaps out of duty to begin with, but somewhere along that journey a genuine friendship grew. However that would never negate from who you were, and what you were born to do— what your life’s duty was to be, and what he, what Amren, whatever everyone else on this island needed to do ensure you accomplished it.

“Let’s reseal the spell,” you muttered before taking another chomp of your toast, a softer look on your eyes this time. “…after breakfast.”

Helion smiled warmly, joining you at the table as he had done now every morning since he saved you.

The simmering of the fresh spell lingered on your skin, Helion’s magic coursing an invisible shield around you. The spell acting as a filter to the aura you were always so sensitive to.

The early days of his spells were always the nicest, at least they were nowadays. After building your tolerance back up with Helion, the first week of his spell usually lasted with minimal discomfort. He always had to be near though, his rooms were only down the hall to yours.

Sometimes your tolerance was less, or someone or some creature’s aura louder than usual that you needed him to reseal. It was why for the past year he’d essentially been attached to you at the hip, like a doting father or brother. And then there was Amren— doting wasn’t the word you would use. But she was always there too now. Out of duty of course, the way she’d collapsed down to her knees in your first encounter revealed how strongly her loyalty would lie to you.

Or lie to what you stood for.

Amren, the ancient one knew what your existence meant. Felt it in her bones, remembered the murmurings of stories and prophecies she listened to back in her own adolescent years. She knew what was coming, and knew how important it was that the Mother’s daughter had her ability under control.

So here you were, stood before Helion and Amren like a girl on her first day of school. Helion tightened one of the straps on the leathers you had been told to wear. He couldn’t attend the training class, only approved males were sanctioned so he would stay the floor below. In a waiting room. A handful of books already tucked under his arm.

“Stop fussing over the girl,” Amren snapped, her expression as hard as it always was. Despite her being utterly devoted to you and your protection, that dedication did not come with a slither of a smile.

You may have found her scary, if she didn’t remind you so much of someone you missed.

Helion gave you a knowing look before playfully winking at you. His large hands coming to squeeze your shoulders.

“How do you feel?” He asked, ignoring Amren at his side.

“The world is quiet once more,” you replied in a slightly chipper tone that garnered a smile from Helion.

He tapped the top of your head, “If we need to reseal, or something triggers it you leave right away, okay?”

You nodded in response along with a hum in agreement. This training was supposed to do the opposite of just that, however there were concerns. After the inner circle had barged their way into the Day Court a month ago, after Helion revealed who you were— a lot had changed.

Your belongings— which wasn’t very many— were packed up, along with you and Helion as you were practically shipped to the Night Court. You realised when you arrived how this had always been Helion’s intention. Why he’d taken the time to tell you the names of the Night Courts inner circle all those months ago. It was because they held significance in your journey.

The Night Court was safer, Velaris having an ancient spell that had protected it for so long. Amren was to teach you, she had knowledge that even Helion’s libraries didn’t share. There was Rhys too, with his mind and magic who was a crucial part to play in you regaining control of your power.

And now there were the Valkyries, who you were to train with.

You leaned against the railing of the rooftop, your eyes dancing upon the still sleeping city. It was quieter now, thanks to Helion. No noise and colours probing into your mind.

It was peaceful, and yet so lonely. When you had full control of your ability, back when it felt like an extension of you. You could slip in and out of it with ease, danced with it, sung with it. Now, it felt like a headache that could only be dulled with Helion’s magic.

“It is the mind-stilling which is a priority in your training. I believe it could be key to you regaining control over your abilities. You will train with the Valkyrie’s everyday until you master it.” Amren spoke. You didn’t turn to look at her, your eyes still gazing onto the cityscape below. Your mind wandering to what the people below were up to, what they may have been dreaming of. Thinking back to a time when your life was much simpler, when the most daunting part of your week was whether one of the village boys would fancy you.

You stopped yourself there. Stopped yourself from indulging and reminiscing in the past. The continent was so far away now, as was that version of you.

“What if it doesn’t work?” You turned to Amren, concern evident in your tone. The sun kissing your face as your brows furrowed.

She was sat in the shade, back against the cool stone wall of the house, “It has to.”

A silence settled between you both. Amren was right, this had to work because Mother be damned if it didn’t.

Nesta cringed as she watched the priestesses fuss. She had told them to be on their best behaviour, but in the presence of a living deity the females couldn’t help themselves.

They blushed and whispered, giggled and muttered words of prayer, some even curtseying as soon as they stepped onto the rooftop. Rollings of ‘Blessed be’ harmonised from their tongues and even Gwyn’s eyes widened in the presence of you. The female looked ready to burst with excitement.

There was something about your presence that was otherworldly, not just in your beauty but in the way you moved among the earth spoke of grace. Nesta couldn’t believe her eyes when she had found out you’d grown up on the continent on a farm and then The Middle— with a witch! And yet there was a regality that existed within you that couldn’t be taught, it had just always been, you had been born with it, cauldron-born to be exact.

You stood in front of them all, your own embarrassment from the fuss evident in your averting gaze. Gently— with delicate grace— you bowed your head towards the priestesses, responding appropriately with a whispering “Blessed be,” which only seemed to elicit more noise from the females. Enough noise that it took you a beat to notice the gust of wind that blew across your face as a shadow blocked out the sun for a moment. With a thud two large Illyrian males landed in the middle of the rooftop balcony.

Helion’s spell had been working fine till now, not a whisper or a simmering of aura— till you saw him.

Felt him, scented him.

In a flurry of steps you found your back pressed against the railing on the rooftop. The very presence of someone causing your feet to stumble back, hands clutching the railing tightly in a blur of a moment. He was here. The very male you often found yourself dreaming of when your mind wasn’t caught in the past.

Azriel.

Amren had launched from her place, she had been watching you so closely that even just a tremor of difference she would notice. But it wasn’t just Amren who had stepped towards you, the Shadowsinger himself had taken several large strides since landing as if he’d also always been watching.

“Do I need to get Helion?” Amren asked with an urgency in her tone.

Your breaths were shallow, your gaze falling to your feet as you tried to focus. You had been caught off guard, in the silence of spell you hadn’t expected any noise at all. You hadn’t been affected by the lively group of priestesses, Nesta’s silver aura hadn’t been licking at your mind or even the thousands of people in the city below hadn’t affected you.

But him. He had triggered something, somehow.

Azriel looked upon you with a concern that felt heavy. Hesitant as he stood only a step behind Amren.

Had he startled you? When him and Cassian had landed? Azriel couldn’t deny he had rushed to this training session, after spending the month on a mission. Rhys had sent word that you were to begin training, and the swell in Azriel’s chest was enough to have Cassian trying to keep up to the Spymaster on their entire flight home.

Azriel’s eyes wandered over you, his shadows whispering their own concerns. They had noticed your nerves, just as he had noticed them during his first encounter with you. It was his job to notice the little things, his duty as spymaster to notice the things others couldn’t, but even he couldn’t explain why he felt so attuned to you.

The morning breeze gently blew across your face, pulling the pieces of hair that were loose from your braid. You had calmed yourself, calmed yourself enough to raise your head to the audience on the rooftop. He could see you now, fully, for the first time in a month, and Azriel forgot how to breathe.

Divine.

He thought it was his shadows that whispered it, but maybe it was his own thoughts too. You were the most beautiful creature he’d ever laid his eyes on— angelic and saintly.

Divine was the only word for it.

Divine, divine, divine. His shadows sang.

“No, I am fine,” you finally replied to Amren. She looked at you sceptically, a look in her face that told you if you were lying then there would be hell to pay. You repeated yourself though, stepping away from the railing you had pressed yourself against.

You couldn’t bring yourself to look at him, not yet. Not after what he had just triggered, that tightness in your chest was new and overwhelming to say the least. It was different though, to the way auras usually felt that left you with confusion and questions to why the Shadowsinger felt, smelt, tasted so different to everyone else.

You were grateful for the male beside him who decided to speak. “Sorry we probably startled you, just dropping from the sky like that— we tend to do that sometimes.” It was Cassian who had spoken, a warmness in his tone that reminded you of Helion. There was a twinkle in his eye of light-heartedness that seemed to dissipate the unease that had settled among the group.

You offered him a soft smile that only seemed to spur him on. His tone bellowing as he outstretched his arms in introduction, “I’m Cassian, and this is—“

“Azriel,” you finished his sentence for him. Not being able to stop yourself from saying his name out loud. Not being able to stop yourself from finally looking at him.

“Right, Azriel. You’ve already met,” Cassian replied, a look in his eye as he glanced between his brother and you.

It wasn’t fair. Wasn’t fair how much lovelier he was than in your dreams— which you didn’t think could be possible. The handsome lines of his tanned face, the dark hair that fell in loose curls and those large wings that were tucked behind his back. Your eyes dragged across him, finally landing on his own gaze. How it brought you back to that first moment you met him—how he had trapped you in his gaze back in the courtyard of Day.

“And I’m Gwyn,” the words had practically burst from the red-headed female. Her deciding now was clearly the right time to introduce herself, not that you minded. In fact if she hadn’t you may have just stared at the Shadowsinger all day, “…and I think I can speak on behalf of us all, but it is truly an honour that you wish to train with us.”

There were some murmurings from the priestesses then, as if in agreement and even Cassian tipped his head in bow towards you.

There it was again, that weight you held. Crushing and terrifying, they put you an a pedestal, showered you with adoration you weren’t too sure you deserved. With subtle strain you forced a gentle smile onto your lips.

“The honour is all mine Gwyn,” and you meant it. The people on this balcony had earned that praise more than you ever had.

“She just said my name,” Gwyn whispered in disbelief to her friends, her cheeks going rosy at the recognition. Nesta simply rolled their eyes, Emery teasingly nudged Gwyn with her elbow.

But it was a sentiment Azriel was still stuck on too. You had said his name, knew his name— knew him. His name on your lips was like a song, a melody you serenaded him with. His shadows had felt it too, your recognition of their master causing a stir that had them wanting to reach out—which they would have if Azriel didn’t have them on such a tight leash. Azriel only tore his gaze from you when Amren spoke up.

“Enough about honour and names,” Amren snapped, her eyes not landing on you but the the two males who had just arrived. They understand her stare, her tone, the waft of her had as she strode back to her spot in the shade.

“Right let’s start ladies, find a space and we’ll begin with stretches,” Cassian commanded, his tone authoritative that had the females moving into motion. Even Azriel snapped himself from his thoughts, collecting himself as he stalked towards one side of the balcony.

You followed suit, following the motion of the other females and finding yourself in amongst the group to begin. You noticed though how Nesta had come to your left, Emery flanking your right, and Gwyn directly behind you. As if creating their own shield. Perhaps a statement to the swooning priestesses— regardless, you were appreciative.

Stretching began, and you copied Cassian’s movements in front of you. In sync with the other females around you. Moving your muscles in a way you hadn’t for a while, stretching the aches you didn’t know were there. Cassian stood in front of the group, bellowing whenever the stretch would change.

The movement was welcome though. You’d always had an active life. Growing up on a farm, tending to the crops and harvests had been your way. You weren’t new to the ache of a hard days work. Then you’d spent your time in The Middle, with Cressida who had an unrelenting method of training you.

“I’ve heard you’re not a novice?” Nesta asked you as the group was split in two. One side had been pulled to practice mind-stilling, the other, your group, had been given wooden staffs to practice more physical exercises.

You took the staff in your hand, curling your fingers around the rod. Nesta wasn’t referencing your past though. She was asking about your time in Day, you hummed in response with a nod. “I trained with Helion’s sentries for a few months,” it helped…for a while. Your progress had soon dropped off though, plateaued, which was why you were here. To see if the Valkyrie way of training would help in any way.

Nesta nodded in response, before tapping your staff twice with hers. “Show me then,” she moved into a defensive stance and your brow quirked.

It was a challenge, she had been the only one who had dared, the only person to treat you with some semblance or normalcy— and it made you smile.

a/n: well here is part 2, I’m sorry this has quite literally taken months to get this instalment live, so I really appreciate any of you who might still be around to read this! I do think this has the potential to be a slightly bigger series than I first anticipated, but I guess that’s my fault for giving our mc the coolest back story ever 😅 anyway enjoy my loves 🤍 - Lottie xx

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briaberri · 7 months ago

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I think Elriel are carranam. I don't think SJM is the most profound writer for character depth and world building, but she's indisputably intentional. Not a breadcrumb dropped without a reason. How giddy were we all when we pieced together Lucien's paternity because he cleaved in the Hybern throne room?

Elain and Azriel have these hints in spades. His naming of her Seer gift lifted the spell of murk from her mind. She emerged from his shadows to do what he does best: knife in the dark assassination (unless we really think she traipsed, lollygagging across an epic battlefield -- even Frodo couldn't do that, y'all -- and intuitively found exactly where Hybern was about to kill Nessian in the woods on the other side). Feyre imagines a painting of a bridge between them, linked by a sharing of power via Truthteller.

They instinctually trust and mind each other's needs. There are a dozen breadcrumbs about their attunement. I'm imagining this saga is about to get so real -- imagine the world-shaping possibility of a team who can See and Hear into the Unknown. Between Elain's mysterious Cauldron might, Azriel's ages of contextual knowledge keeping secrets of Prythian, and their ability to traverse unnoticed as no others can... worlds are about to change.

#elriel #azriel x elain #elain x azriel #elriel supremacy #acotar #carranam #fanged beast #the seer and the shadowsinger #fawn x shadowsinger #cauldron born #elain the seer #azriel spymaster

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b0xerdancer-writes · 9 months ago

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Baring Teeth

Azriel x Archeron!Reader

Summary: Azriel and reader are mates, after what has felt like a lifetime to them with how fast life has seemed to move Azriel finds himself wanting what his brothers have, his mate having been through hell and back is willing to give him whatever she can.

Warnings: Some smut scenes, death, violence, war, torture, blood, inappropriate language and jokes, this is entirely an 18+ work.

Word Count: 14,099

Notes: This was meant to be that Azriel baby fever fic from the get-go, but I got sidetracked, it gets there eventually. Lemme know if you would like to see a part 2!

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If you asked Azriel he was anything but a jealous male, if you asked his mate however she would tell you it was circumstantial at best.

It had been only a handful of years since my sisters had destroyed the cauldron and the king of Hybern but life seemed to want to fasten its pace. I couldn’t say I didn't blame it for wanting too either. Being born between Nesta and Elain always had its challenges, my mother favored Nesta as the first born and both of my parents always doted on Elain for her sweet, caring, and gentle nature; I had always just been there neither parent cared what I did and that was amplified when Feyre was born. I used the opportunity to learn something unique for my family, how to wield a sword, to fight, to kill. I used the opportunity to learn from guards, sell swords, mercenaries, and what teachers were available to me.

So when my family lost all of their money I announced I’d be working as a sellsword, Nesta had thrown a fit about it but at this point she threw a fit about everything. I had a small amount of gold stashed for myself so when my parents finally decided to marry me off I’d run and buy all the things I needed to start my career as a sellsword, or mercenary, or just whatever I ended up becoming; I’d announced I was going into town and slipped out the door with the bag of coins strapped to my waist. I had bought a few furs, a good quality sword that would get me through till I could buy a better one, some bags I was able to strap across my body, and some easy traveling clothes, and some small pieces of leather. I knew if I was going to be gone they would need some way to be able to get food; I split my coin down the middle and used half of what I had left to buy them food, the other half I’d save for travel expenses.

I dropped the food off with my sisters and father, then slipped back out the door after a quick goodbye and made my way towards one of the nobles' nearest estates. One of my teachers had written to me when he found out about my family's misfortune and told me he was stationed there and would recommend me to the lord he worked for, all I had to do was show up. I Showed up like he said, not to the front door but to the side door, the servants quarters and there I was greeted by my teacher and some other for hire guards who all coaxed me in with pats on my back and one went to fetch the head of staffing. It was an easily acquired job with a recommendation from my teacher and the other guards that had greeted me at the door, an even easier job to perform with good pay; simple patrols and hunting shifts at 50 gold a day.

While I was there the barracks became my home, the other sellswords and mercs became family and before I knew it I was going out with them on the days we were released and getting drinks and celebrating. I had a pretty good stash of gold saved up, kept it in a nice bag that my belt strapped through and kept it firmly against my hip, I would write to my sisters and send them 10 gold once a week to help keep them fed. If I sent more I knew Nesta or Elain would commandeer it and use it on useless things, they could at least stock up on a good amount of fillers like rice or barley with 10 gold.

They never wrote back, it was probably a good thing in hindsight. Had any of them mentioned Feyre being taken by the fae I would have gone right after her, but there was no mention of it to me until I got a letter from Nesta one day saying they had been moved into a new estate and father’s fortune had been restored by some sheer dumb luck. I wrote back congratulating them but making them aware I had no intention of giving up my post; then the next letter came written by Nesta again it had said something was wrong with feyre, telling the story of what had actually happened while I was gone. It had told me that Feyre had been taken by some fae monster that then she had returned after that first letter had been sent to me but had to leave again to go after some male she loved, but that this time she called the same male she left for the first time a monster and had appeared at the estates doorstep with three males on her heels and asked for us to hear them out. I didn’t bother writing back, Nesta had sent that letter the same day. If I took a horse I’d be at where they mentioned their estate was within two hours, so I stepped down from my post and was told if I ever needed it to come right on back to them; I set out towards my family's estate with a large fur on my back to battle the chill winds, when I arrived a staff member took the horse and showed me inside.

Nesta was the first to greet me, pulling me in for a hug and telling me how proud she was that I made something of myself; she told me how tense the atmosphere had been since Feyre showed up with the males, that feyre was now a member of the fae and she had somehow been changed into one of them. I had nothing against the civil fae but we were close enough to the wall some strays would slip through and tear apart weaker humans, I had helped the barracks crew take down some rogues that slipped past the wall on a few occasions; nothing big, nagas as I had been told were the most common ones we faced.

Stepping into the room elain squealed and buried herself into my side and the fur I wore, I heard Feyre call out to me with hesitancy as her eyes raked over the small scars the littered my exposed skin from the fights in the woods or sparring accidents; I motioned her over and pulled her into a hug, fae or not she was still my family and still my baby sister. The fae behind her had introduced themselves and their positions, they seemed to have no qualm with me but with Nesta and Elain. One wrong comment sent Elain into tears while she profusely apologized to Feyre, the two had their moment but it didn’t set right with me; yes they were in the wrong for doing nothing while Feyre hunted almost daily for them and I was off working, but they very obviously realized they had fucked up and were in the wrong. It did not mean they got to insult my family and I made sure they knew that, one of the males the tallest with the biggest wings there that I would later come to know as Azriel, seemed amused with my wild and protective temper and applauded me for it.

They later left with promise to come back soon, I busied myself with the guards and servants we had around the estate by leading patrols and hunting parties myself; I stayed out of most of their business so the next time I saw them I had just returned from a hunting party, dragging a decent sized deer to the kitchen. The tall male found me there in the kitchen caught off guard when he found me there, sleeves rolled up and cloak tossed to the size with a butcher knife in my hand while dismembering the deer; he had introduced himself to me then, as Azriel, and offered to help. I tossed him the hide and asked him to bring it out back, string it up on the dry rack. He agreed, I’d get around to curing the skin of the hide after I finished drying and preparing the rest of the meat; when he returned I had already stored all the meat away and was by the sink basin washing the deers dark blood from off my hands, I looked up at him from the corner of my eye and watched as his breath hitched and he quickly excused himself from the room.

Nesta was the one who collected me when the queens were on their way, a new member had joined us in the living room that I had not recognized but she introduced herself as Mor; I stood silently like a guard myself when the human guards joined us, silently judging them as my sister and ‘her mate’ as she had called him explained to the queens what they needed. The meeting was surprisingly quick, the queens leaving just as quickly as they had arrived. We ate dinner together like a family that night, Azriel made small talk with me about my skills and training; I had to admit to myself that I found it endearing no one else even my sisters cared or dared, I wasn’t sure which it exactly was with them, to ask me about it.

They left the next morning, and life returned to normal once the servants themselves returned; Oftentimes I got incredulous looks for being in the back working on my pelts or sparring with the dummy I had ordered set up when I returned to the estate, other times the children of the servants were more than ecstatic to ask me of tales I had experienced within the woods. I had ended up using that deer hide in my cloaks, something about it was sentimental to me, though I couldn’t quite place why.

A few weeks later, my nerves were on end, like the times when the entire barracks would ride out together hunting a naga or other rogue beast and we weren’t quite sure where they were lurking. I didn’t bother changing out of my armor and cloak. I should’ve trusted my gut that night, as I was unable to find sleep easily and only able to fall asleep with my blade at my side and a dagger under my pillow. I awoke to screaming from down the hall, Elain’s scream, I burst out of my room blade in hand knocking a few of them off their feet as the door collided with them.

One thing that had been instilled into me over the time with my teachers was the fact the bigger you looked the more intimidating you could be, my piled furs and cloak were an extension of that teaching; a large black wolf pelt was my crowning piece on my shoulders the, the deer hanging over my shoulders under that like a shawl.

The fae turned to look at me in the faint light and darkness of our home, needless to say the illusion I was aiming for had worked on them as I heard several yell, “Beast!”, in alarm at me. And beast I was, I had taken down and decapitated several of them before they finally apprehended me in my war path to get to Elain and Nesta, the latter I realized had been gagged and I saw blood on her face; ever the fighter she was I had seen one of them holding her nursing one of his hands over the other and had surmised she had bitten him, and taken a chunk from his hand. I’d have to applaud her eventually for that, it was genius thinking and she was always so much smarter than she let on. They doused us with some sort of potion or substance that swept Elain under immediately, Nesta fought off the sleep as much as she could but after a few seconds went under herself; I fought against them straining and struggling, teeth bared, fighting off the sleep that coaxed me at the edges of my mind till they had to use another dose to put me under.

I awoke to chaos. So much was happening. Azriel and Cassian were insanely injured but still trying to fight the bane in their systems to crawl to us. Feyre bawling. Two males and a female I didn’t recognize beside her. The male I had been introduced to as Rhysand was in pain himself. A large male in the center of the room. Two guards either side of Elain hauling her up. A large thing that didn't seem natural in the center of the room. Nesta had three guards around her. I had seven. The seven I realized were on edge around me, made uneasy by me. Made uneasy even though I was restrained in any way they could think of. I felt like a beast surveying its options of prey to hunt.

The large male in the center, realizing all of us were finally awake, finally introduced himself as the King of Hybern, a name I recognized Azriel’s family talking about at the meeting. The King introduced the strange object as ‘The Cauldron’, Azriel had mentioned it was something akin to a god to them. Not natural indeed. He motioned for the guards to bring Elain forward as he explained his plan, the guards raised her over the large pot; she screamed and thrashed in their grip, red marks and bruises already appearing on her skin. I saw red. I shot forward, catching all the guards around me by surprise as they scrambled to get ahold of my restraints and chains; they stopped me just as Elain went under, my arms were pinned behind my back by a chain and I snarled, insults and threats falling from my mouth. I heard Nesta react similarly yet not as violently as I was, seemingly stunned by everything going on, or maybe it was just her cold mask refusing to let the King and our enemies see how much she was fazed.

The king simply let out a dark laugh. “The feral beast bares her teeth.” It was meant as a condescending remark.

They pulled Elain out of the cauldron and I jolted forward towards her again, catching the ones holding my chains off guard and several of them fell to the floor from the sudden jerk forward that caused them to lose their footing. One of the males at Feyre’s side mumbled something I didn’t catch thanks to the blood pounding in my ears, and my attention caught on him and the blondes beside him; he straightened eyes, or eye, wide and he stumbled back. I turned my attention back to the so-called ‘King’, promises of death dripping like venom from my teeth; I barely caught the fact Rhys or maybe it was Mor had pulled Elain to their side of the room.

The King tilted his head at me, an amused smile on his face as he spoke to me. “You want to behave like a beast? So be it.” He turned his attention to the seven around me. “Get her in that cauldron I don’t care how.”

A chorus of yes sirs surrounded me and the chains began to dig into my skin as they tried to pull me towards the over-sized cooking pot. I had just started to lose my footing when a weak call came from my right, giving me just enough motivation to regain it.

“Fight them! You’ve taken down worse things than them! They are nothing compared to those Nagas in the woods! Come on! I believe in you! Show them those techniques you told me about!” Azriel had braced himself on one elbow wincing against the fae bane in his system.

I nodded and braced myself the best I could, the guards stood on the other side of the pot as me and I turned slightly as I let out a snarl like smile. They looked between each other in worry as I dug my boots into the ground and hauled ass the other direction, dragging one of them too close to the cauldron they tripped, losing control of the chain and fell in screaming himself. One of the others dropped a chain to the floor, giving me more breathing room, to help the screaming male out of the pot; he trashed on the floor ripping his armor off exposing his skin that had begun boiling and simply falling off.

The others tightened their grip on my chains but were distracted by the horror of the scene, the one that had helped him out screamed and began throwing up. I heard Nesta cheer behind me, and I turned my attention to what seemed like the now weakest guard holding my chains; I charged forward, the male screamed in horror as I caught him off guard and took a page out of Nestas book and sunk my teeth into his throat. Just as I was expecting the guards on the opposite side pulled violently and assisted me in pulling his throat out, I wasn’t going to go down easy, and by whatever gods did exist it was going to be violent and bloody. He grasped his hollowed throat and tried to scream as he collapsed and I spit the wad of torn flesh towards the King’s feet; I was down to four guards , but what I didn’t account for was the backwards motion created by the other 3 guards.

I had collided with the side of the cauldron and howled out in pain, the guards took the opportunity to haul me up; I tried thrashing but every time I moved pain shot through my body. Unable to struggle against the water as it pulled me in I snapped at the guard trying to push my head under’s hand, taking a few fingers with me as I finally submerged.

It was dark for a moment, then I was in an open room able to stand on my feet and move without pain. I heard shuffling somewhere opposite me, the more I moved forward so did it; till I was face to face with a giant beast, black and golden brown, eyes that seemed to look into my soul, and grand antlers with flesh hanging from them. The sickening feeling like I was looking in a mirror sunk into my chest, when I moved the beast moved.

Then it finally spoke, yet it didn’t at the same time. Something ancient I couldn't understand or speak. Yet intrinsically I knew what it was asking me. That if my true nature was like that of the beast itself, that I should just give in. That if I did I would bring all my enemies to their knees, take them all to their graves. It asked if I would accept that part of me, asked if I would accept its offer of power. I nodded, and it stepped forward lowering its head to my level. I stepped forward meeting it there in the middle of the never ending, ethereal space. It pressed its head against me, and then I was taking a large gasping breath as I felt my bones break and reforge, a blinding pain before I could see detail so much sharper then I had been able to, could hear everything as every sense in me heightened. I felt stronger, felt faster, like one of the beasts I hunted in the woods with my friends in the barracks. Then I felt the inky thickness of the Cauldrons water again, I could see my own hands and claws as I reached out and felt the cool metal; I felt the chains around me tighten again ever so slightly before they fell away as I began to haul myself from the black water. It sloshed and spilled over onto the floor as I emerged, blacker than the depths of the shadows that followed me through the woods in the late hours of the night.

I swallowed a breath as I hauled myself over the edge of the cauldron and finally collapsed on the floor; I used my hands to keep me from fully collapsing as I kneeled there and looked up at the King, a deadly promise in my eyes as I snarled a simple “Your head will be mine and I’ll enjoy every minute of it.”

My hair hung in my face, droplets of black water slowly fading to a normal color as I dried, and he smiled in amusement. “Once a beast always a beast.”

I took a breath and looked down at the puddle on the floor, my firs were still wrapped around me though sopping wet but it wasn’t my obviously messed up appearance that shocked me, but the eyes that looked back at me that did. Thin slits like the beast I had seen within those waters stared back, the color still my own but so much different. I heard Azriel call out for me in a strangled noise, I turned my attention sharply towards him to find him looking devastated; I wanted to comfort him, he was such a good male and I was in so much pain I was exhausted, I hauled myself shakily to my feet barely able to make it to him as I collapsed at his side. Nesta called out to me as my vision began to fade, and I saw Cassian lurch forward despite the threat to his life as he screamed for her. I lost my vision just ;as she was going under’ the simple threat to the king, so much calmer than my own, made me smile before I passed out.

I had despised waking up in places I was unfamiliar with, I shot up with a growl before wincing and clutching my side. A small female attempted to calm me down to no avail, till I heard Azriel’s weak voice through the haze.

“Hey Wildling, woah, woah, they are just trying to help. They’re our healers. You're in the Night Court, remember me telling you about this place?” He was on a cot in just his leather pants, a large white bandage around his waist, chest, over one shoulder, and around his massive wings.

I nodded and looked around slowly, all the fae were looking at me terrified and on edge, like they would run from the room at the slightest growl from me.

“Sorry, just caught by surprise.” I mumbled and looked down at the bandages around my own waist, they covered my chest and entire torso.

I didn’t really care about modesty, you live with men for long enough especially mercs and sellsword men that you stop caring, and they stop caring about your own body. Many times I hade changed into my uniform or hunting clothes in front of them while we were all getting ready for the day's assignments. I scanned over the bandages no blood leaked through but everytime I moved It hurt, everytime I took too deep a breath it hurt.

“I��m sure from your experience you can gather what happened?” Azriel’s voice was soft, and a comfort. I wouldn’t admit it, yet anyways until I found out everything that was going on, but I had started to consider him a friend or maybe something even more; I mean those wings were fascinating and from the time we aparred in the back he had experience and when my knee had met his crotch in a low blow, after all who fought fair anymore, he was well endowed.

“I’m one of you now, aren’t I? Elain and Nesta too, just like Feyre.” I quirked a brow at him and he nodded.

“And as for your injuries, what do you assume happened?” He quirked a brow right back at me, a test of my knowledge like we had done with sparring.

“Broken ribs? That pull back had to have enough force to break them, especially when I collided with the cauldron. Severe bruising and maybe even some large gashes? Those chains were tight enough there had to be at least major bruising.” I winced as I adjusted how I was seated.

He nodded with a smile. “Correct to an extent, good job wildling.” His wings flared as he adjusted himself, and I wanted to move forward and help him adjust slow enough he wouldn't hurt himself.

He smiled when I extended my hand to stop him. “Hey im okay, i'm more worried about you right now, I’ve been shot down from the sky with fae bane arrows and survived it. I'll be fine. You however are the one I’m worried about, those chains were tugged back tight enough it had shattered your ribcage and popped at least one of your lungs. Thankfully the fae healing kicked in for you fast enough to keep you alive.”

I nodded in stunned silence. “Just sore and it hurts to move i. Sone directions, I'm breathing fine now.”

“Good! Madja, shes our lead healer here, was worried your healing wouldnt work fast enough since you were freshly made.” Azriel told me in a worried tone, but I could feel it in my chest, feel just how worried he was in my heart; could feel his emotions as well as my own.

I tilted my head in confusion and reached for where I felt him in my chest, my brows furrowed and he straightened.

“Are you okay?” He looked anxious like he was about to call for one of the nurses to help me.

“Im fine just confused? You told me all that information in a worried tone but I felt it here,” I motioned to my chest, “Like it was my own emotion.”

Small gasps echoed across the room and the small nurses fled. Azriel rose from his bed slowly and came to sit at the edge of mine.

“You feel it too then.” He spoke softly to me like he was calming a storm. “I wasnt going to mention it to you right away, both Nesta and Elain didn’t have the best reactions to suddenly having mates.”

“Mates?” I tilted my head quizzically at him. “I’ve heard the word, though I’m not a hundred percent sure what that means or what is expected of me.”

He placed his hand on mine. “Like Feyre and Rhys right?” I nodded. “The Mother, you remember her right? I mentioned she was another one of our ‘gods’ as well.” I nodded again, listening intently.

“Well,” he hummed trying to consider how to word something.”She blesses some fae with mates, or whats called ‘the mating bond’ its a soulbond between two people normally between two fae. Though admittedly both Rhys and I felt it with you and Feyre while you were still humans.”

I moved to squeeze his hand softly with my own. “So, our souls are intertwined with the others?”

He nodded. “That's one way to put it,while you didnt feel it snap till you were turned most likely, i felt it that day I walked into the kitchen to find you washing the blood off your arms and hands. You were just, how do I put it into words, Ethereally beautiful? Darkly enchanting? I don’t know how to word it but you get the picture. I felt the bond snap in my chest and I almost lost myself to the emotions when you looked up at me the way you did, like a flirtatious taunt.”

A blush crept up his face and I felt it creep up my own. I felt his adoration seep into my own chest again and I looked up at him in pure adoration back. “How do you do that?”

“Do what?” He smiled.

“Make me feel what you’re feeling?” I furrowed my brows for a second as I tried to send my emotions to him, to show him how I’ve felt about him for a while now without realizing it.

He moved his hand to his own chest, and tears welled in his eyes. “I didn’t even have to explain it to you, see? You’ve already picked it up. All the love you're pushing through to me. Good Job wildling.”

I smiled but then frowned. “I get the physical connection of it now but what is expected of me?”

He smiled and caressed my face gently, thumb running over my cheek bone. “As of right now? Nothing. But if you decide you want to accept it or reject it, then we will have more to discuss.”

I nodded and went to open my mouth but he interrupted me first. “I don’t want you to make a decision right now. Think on it for awhile, process all the changes to your life first okay wildling?”

He smiled sadly and I nodded. I could feel his sadness through the bond though I could tell he wasn't trying to make me feel it, I just could, probably easier than most I assumed since every other sense of mine was heightened. A soft knock rasped against the door and my attention shot to it, Azriel called for whoever it was to come in. Rhys had pushed his head in followed by his entire body.

He nodded at the two of us. “I see you’re both doing well, I owe the both of you an explanation and update on everything.”

So we sat, we sat and listened as Rhys gave us the rundown. How and why Feyre was in the spring court, how she was our inside girl, how eventually she would return. Explained to us Cassian was still out, having experienced a higher dose of fae bane than Azriel, but while he was healing slowly he was still healing and would be okay. Then he finally turned his attention solely on me and gave me a rundown on Nesta and Elain’s health. I must have pushed my grief down the bond to Azriel before the tears had even reached my eyes, because he was already comforting me when the dam burst. Rhys stood silent in front of us, before he congratulated us on our bond and offered me any assistance I would need in adjusting or helping my sisters adjust to the massive change in our lives. Eventually he left ,after some small talk with Azriel, to check on Cassian.

Then it was just me and Azriel again, for the next few weeks it stayed just me and Azriel in our small medical room with check ins from Rhys and Madja. We eventually got the clear and along with that cane the announcement Cassian was awake, we beelined it to his room; he was still on bed rest and would be for the next handful of days as they double checked everything had healed properly and assessed the damage. I was shown to my room right next door to Azriel’s, inside a neatly wrapped box in a blue bow sat on the foot of my bed.

“I asked Rhys to pick it up for me.” He smiled and sent a wave of adoration into my chest.

Opening the box I found a set of folded clothing black pants and a flowy comfy dark blue shirt. I sent a wave of appreciation his way and fingered the silky fabric. “Thank you Az, this is… probably the nicest set of clothing I’ve ever had.”

“Your welcome wildling.” He leaned down to press his forehead to my shoulder. His actions caught me by surprise and nearly had me crying, it was such a pure act of surrender and love; my breath caught in my throat and I had to swallow back sobs as I moved one hand to caress what I could reach for the male.

I had made up my mind then and there what my answer to the bond would be, if anyone could guide me and my ways through the sudden changes it was him. I stepped forward and he furrowed his brows but I turned and planted a kiss on his lips. He let out a mixture of a cry and a whimper when I pulled away, his eyes wide and watery; I turned back towards the clothes, not thinking about the implications as I stripped from my current ones and bandages but was stopped before I could step into the new ones laid out in front of me.

Azriel’s breath caught in his throat as he ran a light touch across a lingering bruise on my skin, goosebumps shot up my skin in a wave of chills that caused me to flinch and wince. Azriel growled softly at the thought of me in pain, or at least that's the impression I got from his side of the bond.

He wrapped himself around me, his hands finding purchase on my chest, causing me to swat at him with a light hearted hiss.

He grumbled back at me, rubbing his hand where I had smacked him in mock defeat. “You shouldn’t be so casual about stripping then. Especially being as hurt as you are, the urge to just protect you and curl up around you is a bit overwhelming right now.”

I rolled my eyes and turned back to my clothes, finally stepping into the new ones. “This is nothing compared to what it used to be like in the barracks.”

“What do you mean?” It was slightly growled out, the tiniest wave of jealousy seeping from his soul to mine.

Without thinking about what he meant or the new emotions in my chest I responded to him. “There were maybe 10-15 of us in the barracks total, I was the only female. Not necessarily common amongst sellswords, yet I kept up with all of them. You all become close like family; I'm sure you get how that feels, I mean you, Cass, and Rhys are like that. But after a point you all just change infront of each other and no one really looks or cares anymore, it just becomes natural, part of the routine in the morning.”

I shrugged it off as I shrugged my shirt over my shoulders, still slightly sore when I stretched my arms above my head. Azriel growled but tried to stop himself, an attempt to remember I hadn’t accepted the bond yet so he had no reason to be feeling jealous and territorial. “Ah, I see, I get what you’re saying though I admit I am a bit envious that 10 or 15 males have seen you shirtless before I did.”

I tried, I really did, to prevent the chuckle that fell from my lips. Azriel growled playfully in response. It was comfortable whatever we had, between all their meetings at the house and the now formed bond between us, I felt safe around him. Behind him neatly hung my cloak and furs, sparkling and pristine as the days I had cured them; yet somehow bigger, I understood with a simple what had happened: they had changed with me.

He caught where my eyes had fallen and smiled at me brightly. “Oh! Rhys said he would bring them to your room, I noticed they were different too. You went into the cauldron small yet ferocious enough you unsettled them, they couldn’t figure out how you were outsmarting them or how you had already killed so many of their comrades. But when you came out, they understood how and why. The cauldron however it forged your body anew, decided that for however ferocious and ambitious you were, you would need a bigger vessel to do it in.”

I hadn’t realized it yet but I only stood a few inches shorter than Azriel did now, eye level with his chin and throat; when before I was much shorter, level to his chest at most. It was then that I caught my reflection in the mirror, my features had indeed sharpened or elongated in spots and I gave off a predatory air about myself without even trying; Azriel stood behind me as I took the sight in. While I knew he was no high lord, the way in which he carried himself said otherwise, in the mirror, I realized we looked like the Lord of shadow and the beast that lurked just within it. A display I noted, however beautiful it was just between us, would have horrified onlookers if it was meant to intimidate. A thought I found quite pleasing.

He rested his head on my shoulder and I let out a low purr in response to the imagery in the mirror. “So. Let's say if I were to accept this bond.” He perked up. “What would be expected or asked of me? What would the process of accepting it be?”

His eyes met mine in the mirror, the smallest change in his scent had alerted me to what affect my questions had on him. A small enough change that if my senses hadn’t heightened more than even Azriel or Rhys’s that I wouldn’t have caught it.

“If you were to accept it,” he crooned, “then my answer would stay the same, I expect nothing of you except to accept my love for you and for you to return it back to me. I have waited centuries to find my mate, and you are so new to the world of the fae I want you to be able to explore it but I also want to be a guiding hand for you to do so. As you know I’m Rhys’s spymaster. I may be gone on missions for up to a week at a time, if you wish I can train you even more and you can eventually join me on them.” His shadows swirled at my feet, I had learned to accept them as an extension of himself from the first time we met, where he went they followed. “Is that acceptable?”

I nodded, a warmth in my chest. “And how would consummating the bond work?” A low purr rumbled from my own chest that ended in his own.

“It's a real simple process, a simple ritual, only differing slightly from the human tradition of marriage. Same significance just without rings.” He placed a kiss on my neck before continuing. “One of us cooks for the other, and presents it to the other to eat. Normally it’s something simple, seeing as the hormones and instincts start to affect us from the first bite we normally can’t scarf a whole meal down. Feyre made Rhys soup. Once the food has been consumed, like I said instincts and hormones take us over, reverting us to nothing more than feral creatures intent on fucking our mates till we collapse. That phase normally takes about a week, then it's a phase of adjusting to life together, heightened emotions, territorial instincts, and being inseparable till the bond calms. That phase however differs between mates.” His eyes bore into me in the mirror, the gold flecks in his hazel eyes sparkled in a feral amusement at my reactions as he spoke.

“So all I’d have to do is cook you something?”I tilted my head giving him more access to my neck as he slowly dragged his lips across the open space, in slow tension filled kisses.

“It depends,” He smirked at me, his canine digging ever so slightly into my skin. “On if you had the intention of accepting the bond or not. You have to make and serve me the food with the intention of accepting the bond.”

I shuddered under him. “I take it Rhys has given you some time off from work, to recover and until Feyre updates us on the situation?”

“Possibly.” He nipped at my neck trying to elicit the same shudder as earlier. “Why do you ask?”

I wanted to groan at him. “Maybe I was considering consummating it. But since you won’t give me a straight answer we will have to wait and see.”

I offered him a smirk back only for it to die on my face quickly, between the heat in his eyes and the growl that rose from his chest.

“Wildling.” He warned, “Do not toy with me, if you have the intent to accept the bond, tell me here and now. If you intend to cook for me I will march you straight to the kitchen and barge into Rhys’s office right now to tell him I’ll be taking the week off entirely.”

I swallowed a shaky breath at the pure power and intimidation he oozed when growling like that, his nose twitched and I assumed he picked up the shift in my scent. “So tell me wildling, do you intend to accept it?”

I swallowed and nodded. “Yes, I do.” It was shaky and broken up as I tried to regain my composure.

“Good” That same growl again, had my knees weakening. “Then I’ll show you to the kitchen.”

And so he did, he led me through the winding halls of the house till we were in the large kitchen and he dismissed himself quickly with a kiss lingering on my forehead. I shuffled through the cabinets noting ingredients as I went, trying to figure out something I could make. Meat, I knew how to cook different meats, had hunted and cooked several different kinds of it, whatever I made him I decided I wanted to have meat in it. Beef I thought or some chicken, I jumped out of my boots when a bundle wrapped in brown butcher paper appeared on the counter in front of me; the house was sentient Azriel had told me but I didn’t think it meant like this.

I unwrapped the bundle, white meat and from the looks of it chicken. Easy to cook, easy to pair with any ingredients I found lying around; my attention was drawn towards a fruit bowl, a lemon topping the pile of fruits. How amusing I thought, for the fae to have fruits from the human lands; only when I had pulled a knife from the wooden block and had split the lemon in half did I realize it wasn’t just a lemon, the taste and smell of it were both much sweeter and stronger yet still held a sour note. I found the spice cabinet and went through it, pulling everything I wanted out; a lemon pepper chicken I decided, simple yet enough to keep his energy up.

I had a tendency to keep my guard up unless I was in a place I ultimately felt safe and with Azriel just down the hall I felt safe enough to lose myself in cooking, it was something I had learned I had enjoyed when I was working in the barracks; I’d hunt down whatever tomorrow’s dinner would be then help the chefs prepare it for storage, then take the hides to be cured and turned into blankets for the barracks or depending on the quality of the pelt. Then when I returned to the kitchen the chef would have the night's dinner out and ready to begin preparing. The chef there was an older gentleman with blonde hair that had turned mostly white by the time I met him; he walked me through everything he did, explaining why and answering any questions he had. However, due to my love for the craft I found it easy to lose focus of the world around me and let my guard down; which was fine, until it wasn’t.

I had been so distracted pan searing the chicken that even with my heightened hearing I had not heard Azriel’s approaching footsteps, he leaned against the archway the led into the kitchen from the dining room silently as I hummed and began plating the chicken; I had been cutting the lemon into a smaller sections to drizzle it over the chicken, knife in hand I turned around to drizzle it on the plate when I heard the smallest of noises from the male. I jumped and spun towards the noise, the knife in my hand thunked into the wall an inch from where Azriel had just been leaning his head as I threw it.

His eyes widened as he jumped away from the wall. “Mother, save me, efficiently deadly even when off guard.”

I clasped at my chest as I panted loudly trying to catch my breath after being startled. “Fuck me! Azriel! Warn a lady!”

He mumbled “I'm trying.” Before actually apologizing for scaring me.

He slid his way onto a barstool and I pushed the plate towards him, he looked between the plate and me before he cut a small piece of the chicken off. He stared at the small piece of chicken and then looked back up to me, with a small nod from me he swallowed the small piece and I could see all the emotions cross his face as he began to scarf down the rest of the small piece. His wings flared ever so slightly as he bit into the last piece on his plate and I rounded the small island, pressing myself between his massive wings, a gesture to sooth him as I felt the cooling air he normally gave off grow in temperature and sweat began to form on his brow line. Then he had finally swallowed the last piece and chugged the small glass of water I had set out to accompany his meal, I had ran my hands over his shoulders and wrapped them loosely around his neck; His hand reached up and grabbed mine before he was pulling me off him and spinning around, capturing me in a tight hug as he pressed his lips to mine. With a growl he was pulling me down the maze of halls and then we had finally reached the set of familiar large grand doors with swirls and lines that reminded me of his shadows carved into them, the small royal blue rug he used as a welcome mat slid under our feet as he pulled me into another kiss while pressing me against the door.

He had managed to pull away enough to fumble with the door knob and finally open the door, his room greeted me with the gorgeous ash colored wooden decor accented in that same blue that matched his siphons. I took a few steps inside, he followed right behind, his shadows closing the door behind us with a click; he wrapped himself around me and his lips found purchase on my neck. I could feel everything coursing through him down the bond, my own emotions, hormones, and instincts beginning to scream louder and louder over any clear thoughts I was having. His scarred hands ,that I had found as a beautiful testament to all he had been through, ran under the soft material of the blue shirt and left goosebumps in its path.

He slipped the shirt off over my head and spun me to face him as he dropped to his knees, pressing several open mouthed kisses to the spattering of scars that adorned my skin. The last coherent thought I had before I lost myself to the haze of the bond was that one day I would kiss over every scar that littered his own skin like he had done with mine, I’d do it as an act of devotion when he thought he wasn’t deserving of anything good in his life.

He pushed me towards his bed, bedecked in blue silk sheets, till I finally fell back on it and he was right there at the foot of it slipping my boots off. He threw them somewhere across the room and then turned back to me with lust blown eyes, I ran my hand across his jaw line and leaned down to press a kiss against his lips; he replied with a soft moan and as he pulled away he began slipping the pants down my legs, ripping the only covering left on my body like the feral beast he currently was. His fingertips dug into the skin of my thighs as he held them apart, licking his lips with a smirk as he lapped from me like a stray hound. I can’t remember how long we were there but he repeatedly brought me crashing down over the edge on his tongue and fingers, the haze cleared ever so slightly as he threw me further up his bed and settled himself between my hips; my legs wrapped around his hips as he nipped at my neck and throat, a moan fell from my lips as he came to rest the head of his cock against my opening.

My mouth fell open as he sheathed himself inside me, capturing my lips in his as the moan I screamed echoed off the walls of his room. My legs tightened around his hips holding him close to me as I adjusted to his size, I wasn’t a lady by any means, I had fooled around with the males in the barracks occasionally when tensions were running high after some stressful patrol or hunt but they were all nothing in comparison to the sheer mix of Azriel’s girth and length. While with my newfound growth spurt the stretch didn’t particularly hurt it was still an adjustment, my mind wandered to those nights my mind had drifted to imagining him between my legs instead of my own hand. Azriel’s name was like a prayer falling from my lips as he slammed himself into me, our moans and pants mixing together as we called out each other's names. We were there, slotted together for what felt like ages until his hips stuttered and his wings flared, finally coming undone inside of me after he had brought me repeatedly to the edge and past it.

As he finally released inside of me, I felt the bond in our chest sing as it solidified and could then feel every ounce of pleasure he had received, if the growl that escaped his throat was any indication of him being able to feel my own, the pride he sent my way was. He finally pulled himself away from me and moved to stand, placing a kiss to my lips that I returned eagerly as he stepped into the attached bathroom. Exhaustion slowly started to come over me as I awaited the male, he returned to me and I couldn't help myself but to pull him back on top of me with another heated kiss.

He let out a mix of a growl and a laugh. “Look if we keep going down this track the bath I just drew for us will be cold by the time we are actually able to return to it.”

I sighed and relented, letting him carry me to the bathroom where with his help we both sunk into the warm clear water. He held me against his chest and began to run his fingers through my hair as he hummed a soft melody, I started to drift off with my head on his shoulder and he happily let me. He woke me when the water started to get cold, stepping out before me he wrapped a towel around his waist then helping me out and wrapping my own towel around me. My legs were still semi-shaky so he happily elected to carry me back to the bed, dropping both towels at the foot of the bed; he pulled back the sheets letting me crawl under them he followed behind me, pulling me to his chest we managed to get a few hours of sleep before he was slotting himself back between my legs and my hands found purchase at the spot where the membrane of his wings met his skin. The moan that left his mouth as he shuddered above me would never leave my thoughts, neither would the sensitivity of his wings.

It took us about two weeks before we were able to leave the confines of his room, finally going back to training was a relief especially after we had moved my belongings into his room earlier that morning. However Azriel was still overly territorial of me so Cassian found himself pouting as he sparred with Rhys. We had kept that routine until Azriel’s territorial behavior had lessened as long as I was within eyesight, Rhys was finally able to teach me how to control my mental shield and prevent daemati attacks. I had become a natural quickly between training with Rhys and sparring with Azriel as he furthered my teachings on fighting, we were in the middle of sparring when Rhys announced the boys would need to fetch Feyre and the friend that was accompanying her out of Spring Court. I had kissed Azriel goodbye and wished him well as he and Cassian took to the sky, I had decided to take the opportunity to fully explore the house; I had either been too entertained in Azriel, injured, or busy to fully explore it earlier.

I pushed a semi-large door open to be greeted with isles of bookshelves, a hearth that wasn’t lit, a long table with many chairs, and a few small loveseats in front of the hearth with a small coffee table and rug. Inside sat Nesta, who scowled at me, a handful of books whose genre matched what she and Elain enjoyed reading; I had no doubt she was reading them to Elain, Rhys had kept me updated on my sister's conditions.

“Sister…” A half-hearted acknowledgement as she turned back to the isles picking another book out.

“Nes! You look good! You could eat a bit more but-”I happily circled her taking her in before she cut me off.

“You look like you’ve adjusted to this life well.” It was a bitter acknowledgement that I did indeed look and act better than both her and Elain did right now.

“Well, Yes I have, Azriel has been a great help with everything-” She started towards the exit and I followed behind her.

“Well, you were always the wild one, I suppose it's fitting for the beast to feel at home amongst them.” I stopped in my tracks and she pushed her way out of the library.

“Nes..” I reached out for her but the door shut without her even looking back.

I tried to block my emotions from flooding Azriel while he was on the mission, simply sighing and turning back to the shelves around me; I plucked a random book from a shelf and made my way back to Azriel and I’s room, our room. The comforting shadows carved into his door were a happy sight as I oh so elegantly threw myself onto the black loveseat he had moved from my room into here, grabbing a fur blanket I made myself at home on the small couch with my book and some tea graciously provided to me by the house. Maybe once Feyre was back it would knock some sense into Nesta and Elain, I could hope at least.

I felt a calling from the bond an hour later, Azriel had made it back with Cassian, Feyre, and that red-headed male that had stepped towards Elain. I bounded up the stairs, racing through the halls and then finally slid into the living room. Feyre was wrapped in Rhys’s arms and I threw myself into Azriel’s welcoming him back with a kiss, Feyre whipped her head around to look at us; Rhys hadn’t told her we had accepted the bond yet, so when she found out she happily congratulated us. I pulled her into a crushing hug, which she tapped out of just as Rhys had called a meeting that had the entire inner circle making their way into the sitting room with us.

Mor happily smiled and waved at me, she had watched me spar with Az and train with Rhys and when the boys just needed to absolutely deck each other she would lead me up one balcony to where her and Amren set up a small little tanning spot. Amren, while Azriel had described her as this terrifying creature based on the energy she gave off, had only ever seemed as an equal to me. I had never felt that overwhelming power like the boys had described to me, she gave me a small smile and sat on the other side of me. While tucked into Azriel’s side with Amren’s foot touching my own in a comfortable silence, Nesta and Elain finally entered the room. It was a long night but eventually after a heated argument between my sisters everyone was dismissed, my sisters being allowed to keep to their own devices.

Azriel was sparring with Cassian and I had found myself holed up in Amren’s apartment with her doing puzzles when we had gotten an emergency call from Rhys. Amren and I both sped out of her apartment and we were off towards the mountain house, Azriel and Cassian picking us up and bringing us up the stairs to save us some time. We had been informed of the break in to the library, Amren and I were both on edge this understanding between us, when one was on edge then the other was too. Rhysand had asked her to comb through the rest of Velaris that night to see if any other uninvited guests were hidden amongst us, Amren invited me with her and I happily agreed. Azriel covered me with my furs and cloak and kissed my forehead as I set off to join Amren in this makeshift hunt.

It seemed like a back to back eventful week, I had crawled back into bed beside Azriel extremely late at night or extremely early in the morning depending on how you looked at it and it felt like I had just fallen asleep when Azriel awoke me in an emergency. Azriel had hurriedly told me Adriata was under attack and I slipped into the leathers Azriel had made for me adding my furs and cloak back onto my shoulder, next thing I know I’m in the bloodied streets of Adriata beside Mor and Feyre, Azriel and Cassian somewhere in the skies with whatever other forces Rhys had scrounge together on such short notice. I had been pulled into a hallway by someone whose armor I recognized as the enemy held me in a chokehold and I couldn’t get a grip on them due to how they had my arms restrained, an idea graced me as their arm rubbed against my face in my struggle. I growled before opening my mouth and latching my sharpened teeth into their arm, they screamed and relaxed their grip; it was enough of a give I was able to tear my mouth away from their arm and turn on them before tearing their head from their shoulders, a trick Amren had taught me. I rejoined their side and they both gave me a look that questioned if I was okay without the words leaving their mouth.

Then we were back home, and I was more than thankful to rinse the blood from my face. Nesta seemed to be coming around slowly as she worked with Amren, Elian was still pale and distant but was slowly coming around with Nuala and Cerridwen. Everything had seemed like it was going okay when Rhys and my sister finally announced the meeting with the rest of the high lords. I stayed beside Azriel the entire time we were there, it had seemed like negotiations were going fairly okay, yes there was people acting suspicious of others but with a war on the horizon who wouldn’t be suspicious of others, until Eris had opened his mouth about what had happened to Mor; she had confided in me what had happened one day when I had seen the scars while we were tanning, Eris’s words had enraged me and Azriel as well. If I hadn’t been enraged I was sure Azriel could have kept his composure if it wasn’t for my added emotions screaming down the bond.

Azriel reached across the table and had decked Eris, I stood from my own chair when Eris had landed a hit against Azriel’s cheek; a growl had ust echoed from my chest when the fight was called off. That had been the start of the downwards spiral of the first day of the meeting, Tamlin showing up and portraying my sister the way he did was enough for Azriel to defend her and when Azriel was dismissed out of hand it took everything I had in me to not rip Tamlin’s throat out; thankfully I was still able to threaten to do it. With tensions so high the first day of the meeting was called, the rest of the circle retired to our quarters with Helion in tow.

The second day started out alright, we all thought all tensions or issues had been aired, by the mother were we wrong. Interrupting us in the middle of a thought Nesta had screamed while the hairs on the back of my neck raised and we heard a loud crackle and roar, the color had drained from everyone’s faces as we realized what that had meant, the wall had fallen.

It had been months of war, fight after fight had everyone exhausted, and we all knew the last leg of the fight was nearing. Elain had been kidnapped by the cauldron, Nesta felt like she was guilty for opening the bridge that had let that happen; Azriel had calmed me while I destroyed the inside of the tent we all stood in at the news she had been taken, had let me get the anger that I failed to protect both of my younger sisters now. Then Feyre was concocting a plan and going into the enemy camp as Ianthe, Feyre was rescuing Elain while also rescuing an additional person with the help of Tamlin and Jurian. It was only after this we had found out Juriuan was a spy and was actually on our side, but they wouldn’t make it out with the naga-hounds on their tails and Azriel had to help rescue them. I had been panicked enough at the thought of my sisters in danger but from across the hills I watched as a naga-hound had sunk its fangs into Azriel’s wings, the scream that left me was gut wrenching as I felt the pure pain my mate was in.

Finally everyone was back in the camp, Azriel in the med-tent being cared for by Madja the thought of losing his ability to fly due to permanent damage to his wings looming over both of our heads. I knew how much flying meant to him, but the final day of the fight was upon us and I wasn’t going to let my sisters be on that field without me. I had come face to face with the weaver while I was out on the field, she had stopped and acknowledged me with a small smirk before she continued on her bloody rampage. Bryaxis and the Carver were there as well, I had crossed paths with them once or twice, and we had covered each other's back, why they had done it? I haven't a clue, but I assumed they recognized the rage beginning to boil under my skin, that had finally started to rear its head as I ripped those that opposed me apart. Whatever it was that lurked under my skin snapped as I heard Nesta scream, my vision blurred and I felt that terrible snap of my bones as I blindly ran towards my sisters.

It was as my vision cleared that I truly recognized what my gift from the cauldron was, what I had agreed to in the depths of the cauldron when faced with the beast that lurked there. I loomed over the fae scattered about the grounds around me, some shrieked in horror others stood stunned, I felt something thrashing against my mouth and gritted my teeth, biting down i felt the familiar crunch of bones yet it was all so different as a scream erupted and the taste of blood filled my mouth. I had become the same beast I faced inside the cauldron, I felt the energy that thrummed through me as I raced towards where I felt my sisters. As I reached the top of the hill I saw our father there, when had he joined the battle? How long had I been enraged?

Cassian was there too, Nesta covering his body wit her own, and the King had a sickening smirk on his face. My father stood between Nesta and the King, a pit formed in my stomach as read filled me, one paw in front of the other I tried to force my body forward. Before I can blink the King has my father’s head in his grasp, a sickening snap has me charging forward as our father slumps to the floor. A blur of movement, as my vision begins to blur again, then I’m towering over the King. I hear Elain scream as they snap closed around the King and his headless body slumps to the ground beside our fathers, his blood tasted bitter and I feel the crunch of his skull collapsing in on itself within my mouth. I let it fall from my mouth and watch as it awkwardly rolls a few inches from where it had hit the ground. Elain has a bag of medical supplies and moves to stand by Nesta and Elain, our eyes catch on eachother and there's an understanding there, they recognize me.

“Sister…’Elain barely mumbles it.

I stand in shock before I feel the bones in my body cracking again, exhaustion crashes into me and I’m back in my fae body. I can’t even take a step before I’m collapsing and hearing yet another heartbroken scream from across the field, my vision blurs like that time back in the throne room after the cauldron.

I hear murmuring when I finally come back too, based on the smell and colors I’m able to figure out I’m in the med tent. Azriel is in the bed to my left, still healing from his wounds the hounds caused. He looks like he's been crying and I try to push myself up to comfort him, all the voices silence all at once; the rest of the circle stands around me and Azriel, Madja helps me sit up and it's only then I realize it's not only me and Azriel there, Cassian is in a cot across from Azriel and Amren in one across from me and Rhys is being looked over while he sits on a stool in the center of the four of us.

It's Azriel’s voice that finds its way to me first. “Hey Wildling, good to see you awake, take it easy. You overdid it out there, but you still did it, you took the king down. According to Cass, you ripped his head straight off his body. Good job Love.”

It's a bitter smile in his voice. “I remember that, what happened after? It's all a blur.”

Cassian's astonished laugh is my answer “You ripped his head off, ended the whole thing, then you changed back from whatever that huge creature version of you was and passed out.”

“It's what I saw when I went under in the cauldron. That beast is my gift, I guess.” I dryly answered back, still sore from the pain in my bones.

It was then after we had cleared up what had happened with me, with the king did Feyre, Rhys, and Amren tell us what all else happened. Rhys had died, Feyre had felt the bond break and begged the lords to give him his life back. Amren had sacrificed herself for us too, she technically had died, sacrificed the ancient part of herself and was now just a regular high fae. Our father was dead, and the war was over. Life could somewhat return to normal, and I was grateful.

Finally Solstice was rolling around and everyone could breath somewhat normally, Azriel and Cassian had both healed nicely. Azriel and I had grown even closer and stronger, we had thrown around the idea that sometime after the solstice we would do an actual ceremony that mated fae did when they decided to marry. I had been ecstatic, we had cried the night he suggested it and had made love for hours, staying in bed the next day till well after the sun was over the mountain.

I had managed to get some time to do solstice shopping today since Azriel was out on a mission from Rhys, he said he would be back before dinner tonight. It had felt like I had searched every shop, yet I still couldn't find something for Azriel. Everyone else I had gotten something, even Nesta though I knew it was unlikely she'd be there with her current habits; she had asked to be left alone so I left her alone.

For Mor I had found a pretty red night dress that was incredibly thin and strappy with a slit that easily would’ve reached her navel, for Amren a pair of sapphire earrings with a matching bracelet set, for Cassian a set of training wraps for his hands as he had taken to complaining about the new scars there bugging him, for Rhys a set of small purple cufflinks, Elain a book I had found talking about gardens and plant life throughout the courts, Feyre I had got a set of canvases made from incredibly nice materials and the stuff to make your own p[aint like she had when we were younger, Nesta a collectors set of books she had often read as a child i had to admit I asked Rhysand to get them from the human lands for me, but Azriel? I was clueless. When asked he said he wanted nothing, but by the mother I was going to get him something. It was only after I turned into another shop that I spied the smallest thing in a glass case out of the corner of my eyes.

Elain had asked if a tonic for his headaches from Madja would be a good gift, as the male did often battle headaches from his terrible sleep regime. There was one thing he complained about, especially more often now that the colder months were approaching; the scars on his hands would often become sore, sometimes they would become so painful he couldn’t spar or even write. In a small glass case I spied a silk pair of gloves, I knew there was an enchanter in Velaris and was quick to purchase the soft gloves. I wanted to get him soft gloves so they wouldn’t catch on the scars, a bell ringed above me as I pushed the door to the enchanter open. An older male greeted me, and I passed him the gloves explaining what kind of enchantment I wanted to put on them; he nodded knowingly and brought them into the back to get to work, he returned them to me half an hour later folded and wrapped in blue tissue paper. I thanked him cheerily and paid him generously for his work.

Back at home I sat criss-cross on the floor, wrapping the gifts in shimmery black paper and wrapping them with blue bows. Eventually calling Rhys to hide them away with the rest of the presents like Azriel had told me to do. I decided to take a nap on the couch and Azriel had returned right on cue, well before dinner was to start. We made our way to the townhouse for dinner that was beginning to be decorated for solstice, after everyone had ate and said their goodnights Azriel swept me into the air; a tradition we had started after family dinners was to go on a flight across Velaris, I’d be clutched tight against Azriel’s chest as we soared above the city and finally back to the house on top of the mountain. I had happily curled up on his side that night as the solstice crept closer.

When finally the day of solstice had come around, Azriel had brought me down to the town house, kissed me goodbye, and informed me he would be back before dinner. The other two illyrian males disappeared with him, and I helped my sisters with preparations. Mor and Feyre disappeared together for a few hours, it was well after noon when everyone had finally returned from their little snowball fight; Rhys and Cassian were pouting as they kicked the snow off their boots upon entering the town house. My mate proudly walked in behind them, head held high, very obviously the winner. I pressed a kiss to his lips and congratulated him and in response he deepened it, slipping his tongue into his my mouth for a second before Rhys and Cassian were faking gagging noises.

Eventually the time for presents rolled around and everyone had started exchanging gifts, then Nesta had showed up in a pretty rough condition. I hugged her and pulled her to sit beside me, pressing the boxes from Elain and I into her hands; tears had welled in her eyes when she saw what I had gotten her but she caught herself before they fell and simply thanked me with a hug. Everyone else exchanged presents, save for a few of us mates, Rhys and Feyre hadnt publicly exchanged gifts and neither had Az and I. We celebrated Feyre’s birthday and then Az and I went out to Elain’s gardens, which had been decorated with strings of faelights. I asked Az if I could give him my gift first, to which he easily agreed and I presented him with the gloves. He slipped them on over his hands and tears found themselves in his eyes as he thanked me and peppered me with kisses, eventually he composed himself and asked me to close my eyes to which I agreed.

I heard a crunch as he shifted around in his spot, “Alright, open them.”

Tears filled my eyes at the sight in front of me, Azriel was kneeled in front of me, a ring box presented out to me.

“I know we already discussed this and both agreed to it, but I hadn’t got you a ring to symbolize it yet.Happy Solstice my wildling.” He stood and slipped the ring onto my finger.

We had returned inside to find everyone else passed out or in their room,we slipped into ours just like everyone else.

A few months later Feyre was announcing her pregnancy, we had all celebrated together and that night had flipped a switch in Azriel, neither of us had really known the male had a thing for breeding until the thought of us being in Feyre and Rhys’ position had crossed his thoughts, that night was filled with breathy moans and the sound of skin pounding against skin. Yet the simple act was enough to satiate Azriel’s hunger, to satiate us both really.

Feyre had a difficult pregnancy but pulled through, Nesta sacrificed her powers to save Feyre’s life and before we knew it. Feyre was pregnant with her second and Azriel became hungrier and more feral when he fucked me, claiming his instincts were screaming at him to repeatedly fill me.

It had all been okay until Nesta and Casssian had their first born, a whole new side to Azriel unlocked. I had never seen Azriel as jealous as he was the day we all sat around the living room, the infant in Nesta’s arms and Cassian leaning over her shoulder to wiggle his finger at the small girl whose wings flapped happily. Nyx was six at the time and had eagerly climbed into my head to hug me, ever the affectionate child unlike his sister who wanted nothing to do with anyone since her birth. Azriel’s eyes caught on me holding and rocking the six year old and I felt the pride roll down the bond from him, I sent him a joyous wave back.

It was only when Cassian and Nesta passed me their daughter did I really feel how jealous Azriel had become of the little families his brothers had crafted. As the small girl placed her tiny hand around my own an dI began to tear up as she smiled happily at me with the biggest grin on her face, I looked over to Az and saw the emotion in his eyes, a mix of lust, jealousy, and pride. I offered the small babe to him and he took her in his massive hands, adorned with the silk gloves I had bought him all those years ago. She wrapped her hand around one of his fingers and he looked up at me with massive puppy dog eyes.

Azriel’s birthday approached quickly, and I knew above all else there was thing he wanted for his birthday. I had felt it enough through the bond, every time he would see his brothers with their small families a small wave of jealousy and want would be sent through to me. Cassian’s daughter had just started walking, took her first steps today because she had wanted her father and he was just out of her reach on the couch, Azriel had been witness as she threw herself in Cassian’s arms; he had come down to our room that night upset, had cried in my arms how he had wanted what they have. It wasn’t that we were doing anything to prevent a pregnancy but when both of my sisters had conceived they had taken potions to boost their fertility. Which led me to Azriel’s birthday gift and the current appointment I had with Madja.

With the potion secured the day of his birthday, thanks to Rhys’s wonderful distraction, I was able to wrap it in a small box and hide it within our room. After hiding it I had made it back to the kitchens just as Rhys and Azriel had returned, Azriel pressed a kiss to my lips and Nyx had run in and threw himself onto Az in a bear hug. It was an endearing sight that had me hoping that with the addition of the potion Madja had made me soon enough our own son would be doing that to his father.

Dinner had gone off without a hitch, Nyx and his 4 year old sister Aurora lit up the table with their argument over whether or not Helion’s pegasi hatched from eggs like birds or were live births like horses. Nyx was getting fed up with Aurora's egg theory since he had asked ‘Grandpa Helion’ himself last time they had gone there, Arora was 2 and he had been 6 so of course he knew what he was talking about. Rhysand was rubbing his temples in agony, apparently the children had been having this argument all day, and wouldn’t let any adult butt in and settle it.

Eventually all the kids tired themselves out and everyone started toting them to their rooms, Rhys had hugged AZriel wishing him a goodnight, Feyre taking the chance to whisper to me a goodluck with a wink her mate not far behind her with a smirk and a nod in my direction as they headed off for their wing of the manor. Cassian and Neesta had left almost right after cake due to their daughter completely crashing and passing out at the table in her high chair.

Azriel smiled and let out a soft sigh. “Thank you for planning this love, it was a nice night.” he placed a kiss to my temple with a small content hum.

“It only gets better from here Az.” I smirked and he wiggled his brows in response.

“Oh yeah?” a smirk flitted onto his features.

“Yep. Still have to give you your present.” I nodded smugly and started pulling him towards our chambers.

He followed , curiosity evident as he tried to repeatedly guess what I had gotten him, guess after guess fell from his lips. Before Madja would give me the potion she had to check and make sure that if I managed to conceive it wouldn’t be a risk to my health since I didn’t have the magical benefit from Nesta’s powers that my sisters did, but thank the cauldron literally, because when it gave me my gift the growth spurt affected all of my bones including my hips so I was safe to carry his child. We made it into our room, my furs hung up on a coat rack beside the wing-suited coat I had got him last solstice and beside them a end table we used as a catch-all. I had hidden it here in the drawer because we always just threw stuff on top of it and went on collapsing into bed at night after rough missions.

He furrowed his brow as I pulled the box out and handed it to him, I gestured for him to open the small box and he stilled when he saw the small vial.

His eyes darted between me and the vial, tears began to well in his eyes. “Is this…”

He had to bite back a sob so I finished the thought for him. “The fertility boost both my sisters used when they conceived? Yeah it is, I finally got approved by Madja for it.”

He dropped to his knees holding the vial and sobbing. “Thank you, my wildling, thank you.”

I took a few steps towards him prompting him to stand up and pulled him into a deep hug, until he composed himself and stopped crying.

He handed me and the vial with a pleading look on his face. “Can we use it tonight?”

I took it from him and popped the cork out of the small bottle, shooting the terrible tasting liquid into my mouth. I wiped my mouth as I smirked back at him. “That's the plan shadowsinger.”

His shadows curled happily around my feet as I pulled him into a deep kiss, slowly coaxing him farther and farther into our room as I managed to strip his clothes from him. Then when we had finally gotten close enough to the bed, I pulled him down on top of me while I nipped at his jawline. I could feel the effects of the potion slowly start taking effect, I had been told it would increase the amount of lubricant my body produced as well as a dull throbbing ache within my ovaries and uterus.

Azriel realized fairly quickly he was the only naked one and ripped my clothes from my body, his head dropped to my core and he buried his tongue inside of, bringing me to orgasm a handful of times. Eventually satisfied with the taste of me on his tongue, he buried himself to the hilt inside of me and I could feel the tip of him kiss my cervix. I screamed his name until my throat was hoarse that night, only soothed when he had spilled a handful of times into me and finally pulled out only to replace my dripping cunt with my mouth instead.

We slept in the entirety of the next day, either wrapped up in each other as the potion boosted fertility for 48 hours, or sleeping and recovering some energy; though there had been many times we had fallen asleep together with him still buried deep inside of me so as not to waste anything. I had made a promise with Madja that I'd start checking in with her weekly after the potion was consumed and the effects had come and gone, so if I was to get pregnant from this night, we would catch it as early as possible to start me on the correct vitamins and set up a care plan immediately.

As I laid there in Azriel’s arms I could only hope that thanks to the potions help his seed would take root and I would be able to grant him this one small thing he so desperately deserved. His snores lulled me into my own sleep and in my heart were that bond sung and glowed brightly I had a feeling the intended result would in fact take root.

#acotar x reader #acotar #a court of thorns and roses #acotar fanfiction #azriel acotar #azriel x reader #azriel shadowsinger x reader #azriel shadowsinger

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sleepy-fiction · 1 month ago

Text

Got a crush- got a crush- Crush you all beneath me. ⚗️

Jinx x F!Reader SMUT

3k WORDS

tgs: intense violence, erotic asphyxiation, water sports, bdsm, knife play, powerplay, masochist reader, oral, cunnilingus, sexual repression, religious terms/oppressive religious language, reader is shit and pathetic its lovely

syn: Jinx spares you before your death, the adrenaline, the ecstasy, its euphoric. You re-emerge bright-eyed like the first oracle of a God. Only this time, you want to eat God's cunny, and she'll let you.

an: hii err questioning myself with this one wow. this takes place in act 2 of arcane s2, jinx is rumored to be older bc of a possible time skip between act 1 & 2, but jinx is early 20s in this fic. I wanted to write something freakalicious and get back in touch with my weird side. mildly proofread

Smeech's gang had been your home since you were little. You were born into it, your parents' loyal followers, devout, and strict as they came. The rules were engraved into your brain, defined like the Old Testament. You were linear, closed-minded, and point. Your parents died in the battled post silco. Your neighbors, the other kids. The gang's numbers were dwindling, if not by death, then by them abandoning the cree for others. And the years went by. Your silent, dormant hatred for Jinx muddled up.

It continued until her little revolution, where she gained her little blue headed cult following. You'd be lying if you say a part of you wasn't swooned. But your revenge called for more.

What they called "Safety". No, it was nothing but plain blameless sin.

And you were put on this earth to eradicate it.

So it only came natural after Smeech's disassembly, for the gang to disemble themselves as well. Like a ghost town, you found yourself being the only righteous one holding up the banner. And if A^2 + B^2 = C^2, you were going after the women responsible for it.

No.

THE woman responsible for it all.

Jinx.

Blue eyed, blue braided, soon to be blue bellied, Jinx.

Jinx was a flithy mongrel, poisoning Zaun from the inside out. Her almost physiological poison bubbled out of its bloodied cauldron and frothed onto the deep floors of Zaun. Like a thick and heavy smoke blinding the ground, sucking the souls out of sinners, and blinding even the most powerful. Tempting, and as small as an ewe lamb, yet brewing and seizing like an unruly urchin. Baring pretty pale hips, milky white skin smothered in tattoos. And those eyes. Those round doe eyes.

They kept you awake at night.

Tempting.

They made you shudder.

With the bloodlust you had been building for weeks, weeks until the day your holy vengeance struck from the skies. With the last remaining loyal souls with nothing to live for, other than the fragments of Smeech's impressive legacy.

Yet why.

How.

How did things end this way.

Your body seized the moment your very own blades, the one you fantasized about taking the life of Jinx, was twisted deep into your belly. Your eyes flashed white, your gasp deep and profound, your balance suddenly no longer mattering to you anymore. The surprise attack was going well, well, until Jinx drew her devilish strength from hell and slaughtered your gang like animals. And you, being brave enough to stop her, freed her of all her guns. You fought like chickens, scratching and scraping at each other, throwing rocks, tossing dust, kicking crotches, pulling hair (you mainly), all until you had her.

She was pined beneath, whimpering and blabbering useless mantra. You revved your blade. But you stopped. You had to tell her why she deserved this. Your speech you had prepared before vanquishing this world of evil. Your glorious speech of Smeech and your gang. And unbeknownst to you, that was more than enough time for her to flash bright magenta eyes. And whimper a sound so attainable, your breath locked, and suddenly, for no reason at all, you had an urge to piss.

That one second of weakness.

No.

She turned your speech against you, she built up her bewitching tactics, disarming you and filling you with mercy, all for her to drive your beloved knife, your knife that your parents made you, deep, deep into your belly.

Then those doe eyes sharpened and she laughed.

She pushes you off her like you were nothing, your body hitting the wet dirty floor. It was raining, and glory's pellets dribbled woefully onto your cheek. Your breath was broken up into sharp, unattainable gasps as you meekly tried to crawl away. Your vision shook white in a painful mix of adrenaline, pain, and panick. Panick thick enough to make you spit and froth out the corners of your mouth.

Your body was ringing, brazen silver alarm bells loud and sparky in your ears. The flashing of tree roots and veins in your vision, and how sharp your sense of smell suddenly became. You could smell the muddy streets clearer than day, and even the smell of cotton candy and battery acid death pouring out from her body. A smell that, even now, still made your lower parts clench.

"Ha-! Ahaha-ha," she laughs. Her voice echoes. In your shaken vision, you see her rise before you, blurry bright cyan blue blinding. Pitifully, you crawl backward, desperate to flee death. Once Jinx has you, she never spares any mercy. You knew that going in, but never, never did you believe it'd become a reality.

You were going to become another number on an ever growing list of people who thought they could kill Jinx and failed.

Once that settled in your brain, pitifully thick tears sprang out from your eyes. You cried loudly, a wail strong enough to shake the most powerful souls. A wail so primal, so childish, a wail that stemmed from early development yet also the evolution of humans itself- the last cry of a dying homosapien at the hands of a bloodlust driven Neanderthal.

A cry that was stopped by the quaking footsteps of Jinx. The booming, sloppy, wet footsteps filled with the vibrations of her getting closer. She fell on top you with a cadence, a gust of quick wind as she straddled you. You gasped and reached forward blindly, raindrops falling in your eyes and mixing with the tears as you clawed at her jaw and neck.

She didn't care. She grabbed your left wrist in a vice, hard enough for you to cry out like an injured lamb. And with her other hand, she gripped your face and trusted hers into your view.

She spoke, "You feel that?"

You gasped, your breathing erratic.

"You're going to die," she laughed at you. "You're going to die, and you almost had me! Not even my sister got that close!" Her voice is like a wicked hyena. Gravely and strained from the battle, creaking to show her physical pain.

But it was enough. It enough for your body to grow limp in her hands like a frightened goat.

Your eyes bare into her face, your head uplifted by her tight hands. As you stare at her skin, as pale as powder, eyes as tired and jaded as a wilted flower, and smile as deranged as a wheel on its last hinge.

She smiles, growing ever close, closed enough for your noses to touch, and for her breath, the mingle with yours, "You know. At this stage. You're suddenly aware of everything around you. Your vision goes to shit. But you can still hear the little birds go 'cheep-cheep-cheep', and the rain-- 'pitter-patter-pitter-patter'. And you can't quite feel the pain, but it's the fear of knowing it's coming that gets you." She grabs the knife, twisting it slightly.

You jolt, crying out in agony. "Your heart rate spikes, you begin to hyperventilate. And there's this ringing in your ears... And... My favorite part, the buzzing behind the eyes," she says as she reaches and stretches your eyelids back. Your pupils shrink, and just as she says, your body systematically begins to follow. Snot pools down your nose, a tell tale sign of your inability to get oxygen. "It's totally useless how we have a nose and mouth. But yet they get so scared and they start working against eachother! Just like families... Just like gangs... like rats," she hisses, and you can feel the etchings of her lips near your cheek as she loopily giggles towards your ear.

"You know, if you breathe through your nose, your hyperventilating will stop," she smiles. Eagerly and foolishly, you obey, shutting your mouth instantly and sucking in gifts of air. But just as instant as you gain it, you lose it within seconds. Jinx pinches your nose shut, her thumb and index vicious like the jerking bite of a shark.

You panick, you eyeballs ringing. And as you try to open your mouth again, she drops your head, ot crashes to the ground, and she slams her free hand to clamp your mouth shut.

"Nhahaha," She laughs. Oh, she laughs. It's manical in nature, enough for you to wet yourself in pure fear. Your hands shoot up to claw at her hands, albeit weakly, and it feels nothing more than a massage to her. By now, you're aware of the warm wet clinging your shirt has to your belly, your pants to your crotch, and the flavorful blend of urine and iron in the wet muddy air.

Your vision spots.

She releases you, but it was already much too late.

"You know what," she says. Her voice trails in and out in your ears. Her blurry figure rises, "I think I'll spare you... That is, if you don't bleed to death out here."

Your head sags, catching the final glimpses of her limping away before it all fades to--

You jolt awake with a hard start. You shoot up, blinded by white lights that eventually shimmer down to a familsr room, your hideout. Your heart bursting a hundred miles an hour out of your chest. It was the feeling of shimmer running down your veins like a cold shower.

Instantly, you recognize your old partner, Kilo, rushing up to you from their seat in the back. Their hands grab yours, but you're even quicker to smack them away. "What t'hell! I was supposed ta-ugh die," you blabber out, spit flying in your jittery rage. Your hands grip your head of hair, your heart racing painfully.

"I heard about your dumb plan, and I came to save you, (y/n)! You had been laying there for God knows how long--" They say but you cut them off with a deadly glare, "Why are you mad? I saved you! Listen, God, you just need to calm down," they pleaded, burning their doe shaped brown eyes into your skull. Eyes you used to find allu ng, before they abandoned Smeech.

Smeech.

Dammit.

Did it really even matter anymore.

Dammit you can't fucking think straight.

How much shimmer did they use on you?

They reached again for you, and you smacked them harder, as hard as your jittery body could manage. They were as thick as a barn, burly and bearded, so your shove did nothing to them. But still, you powered up, barely making out of your bed before you knocked into your bedside table and cracking into your lamp.

As soon as you stood, your heart rate spiked, causing a brilliant gasp to leave your body. The kind of gasp they've only ever heard you release in bed. The kind of gasp that was filled in nostalgic ecstasy, the pain was so reminiscent of when Jinx--

Fuck.

No. Please God no.

"Are you okay," they asked. And with one look from them, you knew that they knew.

They knew.

And they were judging you with those pitiful eyes.

"Jinx did a number on you," they tried to whisper, but you seethed like a jackal.

"Jinx did nothing to me! I am normal! I am fine! I haven't changed," you screeched. Your face was warming, your heartbeat was painful, but memories of your last encounter flooded your brain.

You were going to die in the marvelously sinful hands of Jinx. But she spared you. It made every part of you tingle. You didn't notice when your partner sprang up to catch you, and you as hell didn't notice you falling forward. No, but what you did notice was the worry in their eyes. The worry in their deep masculine voice. And the devil horns springing out of their head.

They knew.

They knew and they were going to tell everyone.

"Get the fuck out of here, bastard!"

You yelled it with all your heart and soul.

And within seconds, you notice their heart crumble. Bleary brown eyes only complimented the flicker of guilt that panged you.

You just.

Needed them gone for good.

You collapsed moments after they left you, moments after the door quietly shut.

You were never going to see them again. They weren't just a partner they were your best friend.

And Jinx.

Jinx was brewing in your heart.

And you knew it then.

You were becoming something you never knew before.

⚗️

You'd imagine Jinx's surpise when the little runt she spared weeks ago came crawling deep onto Silco's old zone (now turned her streets), fully armed. What she thought was a foolish revenge battle turned into something else.

Sevika dropped you dead onto your knees before the desk in Silco's office. Your hands were bound behind your back, and Sevika had already stripped you of all the weapons you had. She walked up to the desk, where the back of Silco's chair faced you, and dropped all the weapons onto it. The daggers and guns flattered and shined in the light.

A dry, crackling laughter sparked into the air. A laughter you knew was hers. It made you tingle again. It made the bruises Sevika left you in all the more worth it.

You were shivering from withdrawals. Jinx withdrawals, adrenaline withdrawals, shimmer withdrawals. You needed her to make you experience that death spark again.

Please Jinx.

"Are you dumb or something," she asks. The chair finally spins to face you, her feet clashing against the table. Her face ridden with withheld rage. She blinks in disbelief with an agape mouth. She jolts forward, grabbing ome of your daggers and launches it towards your face. It narrowly dodges your eye and slices a thin scratch into your cheek.

You hiss and laugh.

It irrates her instantly. Her eye twitched. For the first time in forever, Jinx experienced the stress felt Silco once before. The stress of dealing with idiotic subordinates.

And for once. She didn't find it fucking funny.

"I spared you! But you come back with an even dumber plan. What? Did you think you could just waltz in here and slice me up," she asks. You laugh. She clenches her jaw. With an aggravated start, she jumps out of the chair, stomping on the desk as she slides off it in one quick athletic gesture. In seconds, she's on her feet crouching before you, squeezing chunks of your cheeks between her fingers. "What are you thinking," she spits.

Her grip is vice. It makes your eyes water. But you tingle and shiver all over.

"Mmh. Look at those pupils. You're on shimmer. Or- well, off it. What? Did the jitters make you think you could take me? Reclaim your honor," she says.

"M'hehe..mh," you giggle.

She bares her teeth. She drops your face and stands at break neck speed. Your head crashes to the floor, and you hear the familiar sound of a click.

"Everything about this is stupid and makes no sense. Your plan before was beautifully executed and thought out. So why... Why are you," she winces before she can finish her sentence and pinces her temples. You can hear Sevika cackle in the background. You peek up, staring up the barrel of a pistol. "Geez toots... I might get withdrawls next if you don't- I'dunno, say something," she says.

"Mmh... Jinx... Jus' just kill me... Jinx," you gasp out. Your nose aches, a perfect compliment to the ringing from your ribs from taking a robotic punch earlier. "Kill me... And it'll all be... like it was supposed to... Another number on the "anti" tally," you murmur. Not even you know what you're getting at. Why you're here.

Her heel touches your head. She's purposefully digging it into you. "Aah- haa," you shake.

Sevika gasps sharply, "Oh?" Her eyebrows quirk knowingly. Jinx turns to her, but Sevika merely smirks. "I'll leave you to it," Sevika hums, her shoulders slumping as she steps out. Jinxs eyes flicker with wilderment. Sevika lowered her guard. Totally.

They both knew you weren't a threat. But here, that small gesture confirmed a lot to Jinx. You were harmless, you didn't want to die, but you wanted to be around her. No. You wanted her to hurt you. She tests the waters. Jinx's muddy shoe pets down your head, its light not to hurt you. You buck and shiver again, blabbering out heedless.

No.

You didn't want her to hurt you.

When the realization dawned on her, a breathy cackle split the air. "Ooh! Oh god this is too good! What's that little runt," she squats right down next to you, flipping you onto your belly, "you want me to play with ya? Oh, daddy'll play with you toots."

"Wait- that's not what I what I w-want you to kill me! My honor! I lost it in battle, and i-it can only be claimed in--"

"Nn'haha! You really believe that? Oh god you're a riot! Say it. You want Jinxsy to touch you... And err... Ya'know! Take you to p-town. Play with your cunny?"

You felt an electric jolt sink to your clit. One strong enough to shut you up. Your eyes flicker to her crotch, where her legs were spread as she crouched.

"Ooh," she caught it immediately, "you want my cookie instead, eh?"

You gasped in horror.

"Or box? Is that what the kids call it nowadays? Box... Box... I always wonders why, but," she says as she pushes Silco's desk out the way and sits down in the chair, spreading her legs wide, "apparently! It's called a box cause you can stuff it! Myahaha! Ain't that something?"

You stare blissfully at her spread legs, painfully aware of your slick oozing.

She pats her thigh. "Well? What's the verdict? I'm not pulling my pants down till ya tell me ya' want it. Say it cute-like! Oh Jinx-jinx-jinx-jinx! I want your cookie wookie! Pleaase'z," she drags it out, saying it sing-songly to fuel your embarrassment.

You blabber in disbelief, "Buh," and gulp, "B-But why. Why are you letting me?" You sound like a shy child.

"Why dya' think I spared you? You're pretty hot. And... I liked being handsy with you. It felt good... Gooder than usual... Hah! Prolly cause your whorish, sensual aura stunk up the place. All that temp'TIT'ous-humbo-jumbo! N'ahaha... God you-"

"Please, Jinx," you whimper.

She returns, "Hey. I already told you. We're not unt--"

You squeak, "Let me... Eat it..."

"Huh? Is that how you ask -"

"Let me eat your cookie," you say. She gives you a bland look. "Uh," you gulp, "Please Jinxsy... Let me eat your- c-cookie. Wuh... Wookie."

She laughs, "Tehe, you got it dollface!"

this wasn't ever about smeech, was it?

⚗️

"Ooh... ff-fuck dollface," she mewls breathlessly. Your hands are still tied tight behind your back, balancing wobbly on your knees as you bury your face deep beneath Jinx's bare, pale, milky legs. Your nose is buried deep into her cunt, your tongue and lips viciously lapping at her clit. Twitching between sucking and tapping it. She was swollen already, a clear sign of her sexual negligence.

No, part of you is convinced she is a virgin. Jinx bucks into your mouth, gripping chunks of your hair. Her leg twitching, barely missing kicking your shoulder as it flies off the seat it was propped up on. She let's it slump over your shoulder. And you almost cried at how far her hole was now from your greedy lips.

You growl, "Jinx put your other leg on me... C-cant suck all of you like this."

"Uhh... Hmm," You're sure she was only half listening, but still, she lazily hunches down and stops her other leg on your shoulder. She adjusts herself and leans slouches downward more, sitting on her upper ass and pushing her cunt straight onto your face in the process.

You snuck in deep sniffs, the smell balanced, tart, and salty. You slurp up her folds into your lips, pulling and letting them slip out between your lips. She hisses and mewls delightfully, an airy cackle leaving her lips. She taps your head with two fingers and bobs her head rhythmically, a delighted hum squeaking from her lips. You giggle humored, licking a stripe up her, slowing down to enjoy the moment.

She's staring deep into your eyes, grinding against your flat tongue, slowly matching your rhythm. Your rhythm was closely following the one she hummed and drummed on you.

It was odd, how calm it all suddenly became. How you couldn't seem to look away. You wanted to please her so bad.

A ferocious shiver sparked down you again. You locked in, cupping her clit in your lips, suckling and tapping against it. You buried yourself into her, erratic and fanatic, slurping all of her like it was your last dinner. She squeaks and bucks into your mouth at the sharp change, bowling out her moans. "Aah- ff... Oohh, dollface-ugh," she whines. Her arms fall out, one landing on her forehead, her index and thumb propped up on it, rolling her head back into the chairs cushions.

Her bucking became erratic, her moans spiking, her grip on herself becoming undone. As she reaches with her free hand again to grab chunks of your hair at the root. Her cunt is pink and pale, littered with pretty hair. But your bullying turned it a vulgar shade of red. A red you'd wear on your lips any day.

"Aah! Ah! Aaa-mmgh," she barks out. Her thighs clench vice around your neck, her leg spasming before finally, "Oouh," she janks your head away from her pussy, gasping and waning in the chair.

Her eyes rolled back, while senseless blabbering drooled out her lips. "Mmht... D-Dollface," she sighs blissfully.

"It's (y/n)," you murmur and lean back in to peck at her swollen, ruined pussy.

"(Y-Y/n)?" She gulps, her eyes never returning from their blissful heaven beneath her eyelids. "Mmh yeah... (y/n)," she mumbles, half listening. She sighs after a few seconds, finally looking down at you and- smiling? It was a soft one, geninue and pure.

She asks, "What else can you do?"

"Mmh... I want... to feel good too," you murmur still pecking her pussy and inner thighs.

"Hmmmrr.... Alright. Let's get you fingered up."

"N-No... At the same time as you... Let's grind on our thighs... er like how they do in those... Brothels."

"Ooh what? You mean scissoring? Ha, is this your first time with a woman," she barks a laugh.

"Is this your first time ever, Jinx?"

"Hey," she commands, her face twitches. She shoved your face back into her lips. "Don't get smart with me. You're still my doll," she hums.

"M'forgive me," you mumble out, with pussy between your lips. That was all the answer you need. You slowly begin to suckle her again, hearing her breathy moans pour in.

"Mmh yeah... Let's go to my room..."

⚗️

😁

#arcane #jinx arcane #jinx #jinx x reader #jinx x y/n #jinx x you #league of legends #jinx league of legends #jinx lol #smut #arcane fanfic #arcane fic #jinx fanfic

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prythianpages · 7 months ago

Text

Just A Girl | Eris x Rhysand's Sister

series masterlist | summary: Your father throws a ball in your honor. When Beron belittles you, you decide to show him what you're capable of, catching the attention of his firstborn.

word count: 2K

a/n: Hi guys! It's been a hot minute since I've written anything and I feel rusty lol (kinda like when you stop riding your bike and have to relearn type of feel.) Anyway, this is entirely based off no doubt's just a girl bc I felt like it gave off Rhys's sister vibes and then I thought why not incorporate this into an au I had planned for an Eris x Rhys's sister one shot??

“When I’m High Lord, I’ll go–”

“I’m sure you’ll go far,” you interrupt, a half smile playing on your lips as you look up at the first born of Spring. With his luscious blond hair, striking green eyes, and well-defined jawline, he's undeniably a sight to behold. Unfortunately, his personality doesn't match his looks—dull yet somehow arrogant and miserably misogynistic.

You don’t have it in you to spare him a moment longer, especially not when his overbearing pride is becoming overwhelming for your senses. You push past the desire to call upon your abilities and manipulate his emotions into something more humbling. He is not worth exposing your powers.

With a pat on his shoulder–too harsh for his liking– you add, “and I really hope you stay there. It was nice speaking with you, Heathen.”

“It’s Heath.”

You give an uninterested hum before making your way to the refreshments table, desperate for something to soothe the tension between your brows. A silent prayer is sent to the Cauldron that no other male approaches you with a lame attempt at conversation. If they are interested in you, they should at least be able to hold a good one. One that doesn’t incorporate any microaggressions toward you.

Fortunately for you, it is your brother who approaches you next. He takes your–what was it? fourth or sixth, you can’t remember– champagne flute from your grasp with an effortless ease. A glare settles upon your features as you watch him chug it before fixing your gaze straight ahead, to the dais where your father and mother sit.

Your father occupies the grand throne, while your mother sits beside him in a smaller, less ornate chair. The Lady of the Night Court��magnificent and burdened with countless responsibilities—receives none of the praise that is lavished upon your father. Despite her contributions to your court, she is not held in the same regard… simply because she is a female.

It leaves you to wonder what your destiny is.

Rhysand looks at you with sympathy, and you realize that in your moment of vulnerability, you've let your mental shields slip. “Please, save your breath,” you mutter.

Sensing Cassian and Azriel approaching, you flash them a small, relieved smile. “And please, stay by my side,” you say, your eyes scanning the room where multiple pairs of eyes are fixed on you. You feel so exposed and though it’s no surprise, it still leaves you unsettled. When your gaze meets that of one of Autumn's sons, you quickly look away and strengthen the shield around you.

“I could use my scary brother privileges right now.”

“Who are we scaring, princess?” Cassian asks, flexing his muscles as he pretends to adjust the cuffs of his dress shirt, rolled up to his elbows.

Azriel lets out a snort, but his keen eyes are already scanning the room, easily locating the Autumn male. The red-haired male immediately cowers under his cold, hard stare.

“No one.” Rhysand replies, shooting them both a warning look. He then turns to you and you don’t need his daemati abilities to know what he’s about to say. “y/n–”

“Don’t you think I know exactly where I stand?” You interrupt him with an exhausted sigh.

Tonight was a celebration–a ball to honor you and all you’ve done for the Night Court during the war. When the war started, you were twenty-three and deemed too young to participate. Though, at that age, Rhysand had already completed the bloodrite and was esteemed a formidable warrior. You were fortunate that your father allowed you to train and even more so that he allowed you to join the Night Court council.

You quickly mastered the politics of war and the intricacies of the Prythian courts. Midway through the war, your father entrusted you to visit the war camps and delegate on his behalf. There was no doubt that it was a privilege you were granted due to your powers. Still, you embraced it eagerly and tonight was the night you would officially be recognized as an emissary.

But of course, many–especially the sons of the High Lords–confused tonight as your debutante ball. You were in your third decade, after all. While your brother was recognized as a fierce warrior and heir, you were regarded as a highly sought out bachelorette.

Lucky you.

“I am meant to be pretty and docile,” you continue, gesturing to yourself.

The dress you wore was far from your usual preference. The bodice, adorned with intricate beadwork and sequins, featured a sweetheart neckline that teased a glimpse of your breast—but not too much. The skirt of the gown was voluminous, made of layers of soft tulle that shimmered with every step as the light caught the scattered sequins. It was a beautiful black ball gown, crafted by your mother's talented hands. Yet, you much preferred dresses that clung to you like a second skin, revealing more of your figure.

To put it frankly, you felt quite suffocated in this gown. And you rather not even get started on your makeup. You were transformed into a perfect painting of a sweet and innocent princess. Not the daring and powerful female you knew yourself to be.

“Desirable but not too attainable.”

“However, that does not mean I need to be consistently tortured by dull conversations and hungry stares from controlling males,” you finish, crossing your arms against your chest with a scowl. “No one has even asked me about my role in this court.”

“Oh, yeah. How is it being an emissary to the Night Court?” Cassian asks, earning a smack to the back of his head from Azriel.

“Just splendid,” you reply with a sarcastic smile.

“You played a significant role in establishing peace between Spring and the rest of the courts after the war. I’m sure your efforts will not go unnoticed,” Rhysand assures you.

“Perhaps I played my role too well. Heathen has seemed to have taken an interest in me.”

It’s as if he heard his name being called, for the blonde male’s gaze meets yours across the ballroom. He winks at you with that stupid, cocky smirk of his. A grimace crosses your face. You had been hoping your conversation from earlier would deter him. It seems it has only spurred him on.

“He’s... pretty,” Rhysand starts, but then trails off, struggling to find a compliment for Heath. “Pretty full of himself,” he finally manages, shooting you an almost apologetic glance.

Both of you erupt into laughter.

“It could be worse,” Azriel comments after a moment, a futile attempt at making you feel better. “It could be the heir to Autumn. As the by-product of growing up under Beron’s cruelty, I hear he’s pretty ruthless. Might even turn out to be crueler than him. At least Heath isn’t as bright…”

“Ouch,” Cassian says with a playful wince, almost feeling bad for the Spring heir.

Your eyes find the male in question. Eris Vanserra. His vibrant red hair makes him and his siblings easy to spot in a crowded room. Surprisingly, Eris hasn't made any attempt to approach you tonight. Unlike his brothers. Instead, he stands by his mother's side. She appears uncomfortable and weary, her arm linked with his as she rubs her swollen, pregnant belly.

As you focus on him, you feel a mix of anger and concern. “Somehow, I doubt that,” you voice your thoughts out loud, following the trail of emotions. Your eyes land on the recipient of his anger. Beron. The High Lord of Autumn stands amongst the other High Lords, engaged in conversation with your father.

Sensing your gaze on him, your father looks up from where you stand. He holds a hand up, summoning you and your brother.

“Time to shine,” Rhysand says, holding his hand out to you.

“Ah, my son,” your father greets with a smile as you and Rhysand come to a stop before him and the other High Lords. He then turns to you, violet eyes alight with pride that has your chest swelling with warmth. At least your father recognizes your worth and you don't dare to wonder if he'd see you the same if you weren't blessed with your power.

“My daughter, the guest of honor," he introduces, reaching for your hand to pull you to his side. You offer a polite smile and curtsy to the High Lords. “Y/n has done a lot for this court and all of Prythian. Tonight is a means to show my immense gratitude and present her with the official title of lead emissary of the Night Court.”

It is the High Lord of the Winter Court who speaks first, offering a slight bow of his head. “I look forward to continuing working with you, Lady y/n.”

“A wise and thoughtful member of the Night Court.” High Lord Thesan says with an amiable smile, the High Lords of Day, Summer and Spring sharing his sentiments.

However, the same cannot be said for the High Lord of Autumn. His lips curl in distaste, the thought of having to interact with a female tasting sour on his tongue. He had tolerated you before but only due to the war.

“You expect me to welcome her to my court to discuss important matter?" Beron huffs. "She’s just a girl.”

You don’t speak. You don’t even make a sound. But the look in your eyes…the look in your eyes was downright murderous.

Memories begin to flood your mind of you being berated and undermined. The box in which you had locked away your emotions can no longer contain them. A wave of anger and frustration begins to surge forth...

Rhysand knew exactly what was about to happen, his hand silently reaching out for yours. To hold you back.

But it was too late. Your mind was like a wall of steel. Impenetrable.

All you saw was red, your wings bursting forth from your glamor, unfurling behind you. They tore through the seams of your dress, provoking gasps. Swiftly, your magic mends the fabric, accommodating your true form.

Tendrils of darkness emanate from your outstretched hands, weaving through the air like sinister ribbons. Your gaze, unwavering and intense, remains fixated on Beron. With each movement of your fingers, the room plunges deeper into shadow. The once-illuminated space is now consumed by a thick veil of darkness. Even Azriel’s shadows, accustomed to the darkness themselves, cling onto him like a second skin.

As the last glimmer of light fades into oblivion, the ballroom becomes a chamber of obsidian night. With a mere thought, you tap into the emotions swirling within the hearts of those present. Careful to be subtle upon the intrusion as you do not want to expose the true extent of your abilities.

You summon only the most negative emotions like a maestro orchestrating a symphony. Screams erupt, drawing your lips upwards. You can feel resistance against your power and whether it is from your father or brother or even one of the other High Lords, you can’t tell.

Gathering all your pent up frustrations, you use it to fuel your strength, wanting to hold onto this moment of mayhem just a bit longer. It is only when you feel Beron’s heart racing, feel the trace of fear threatening to dim the fire in his veins that you let go.

In the blink of an eye, your tendrils of darkness disperse, succumbing to the resistance. The faelights around the ballroom shimmer to life once more and the moon’s light seeps back into the room. It casts an ethereal glow over you, revealing the calm and cool expression on your face. Yet, your eyes remain seething with the fury of a dark, raging storm.

Beron's scowl deepens at your display. He parts his mouth in disbelief, looking towards your father, who says nothing. Beron then looks back at you.

For once in his miserable life, he is at a loss for words. Pride swells in your chest and you push against the talons raking across your mind, wanting to bask in your small victory.

“I’m just a girl,” you finally say and then give a nonchalant shrug of your shoulders before turning to leave.

Reveling in the animosity radiating off of him, your smirk deepens as you recognize a faint trace of humiliation somewhere among the fire of his wrath.

The assembled crowd parts before you, their gazes a mixture of disdain, shock, and fear. You keep your head held high and eyes focused straight ahead. Dread begins to settle in, the onset of a headache from overexertion threatening to break your composure.

Still, you carry on, feigning nonchalance. The only sounds echoing through the room are the hushed whispers and the sharp click of your heels against the marble floors.

Yet, amidst the sea of wary onlookers, one figure stands apart.

Eris.

The heir to the Autumn court is leaning casually against the wall near the exit doors, his mother nowhere to be seen. The corner of his lips are upturned into a smirk, amber eyes alight with amusement and curiosity and perhaps, even something more.

Your steps threaten to falter as your eyes meets his. He looks back at you, holding your gaze with a searing intensity, it sends a shiver down your spine. He looks at you in a way no one ever has...as if he can see you for you who you really are.

Because you aren’t just a girl.

You’re the daughter of the Night Court. A shining star. A force to be reckoned with and one he finds himself irresistibly drawn to.

series masterlist

a/n: I honestly don't know how to feel about this one. I guess it's kind of a prequel to my upcoming one shot. Also, you can't tell me Eris wouldn't find anyone besting his dad like reader did in this hot lol

general tag list: @scooobies, @kennedy-brooke, @sillysillygoose444, @lilah-asteria

#acotar imagine #acotar fanfiction #acotar fanfic #acotar x you #eris x reader #eris x y/n #eris fanfiction #eris vanserra x reader #eris vanserra x you #eris vanserra x y/n #eris vanserra x rhysand's sister #acotar x reader #acotar x y/n #eris vanserra fanfic #eris! his star au #eris vanserra #eris acotar

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serpentandlily · 1 year ago

Text

Arcane - Azriel x Reader

Azriel x DeathGod!Reader

Summary: Azriel never thought he’d find his mate, was convinced the Mother hadn’t even given him one because he was unworthy. That is, until he stumbles upon his mate while looking for the most unusual ally.

Based on this request.

Warnings: very brief illusion to past SA

⋆˙⟡☾𖤓☽ ⟡˙⋆

“We’ve exhausted all our options,” Rhys declared, dropping his head into his hands. “I’m afraid another war is on the horizon. Koschei cannot be dealt with alone.”

“I don’t understand. The weaver and the bone carver were able to be killed,” Cassian interjected. “Why is it impossible for us to find a way to kill Koschei?”

“It took the might of the cauldron to defeat them,” Rhys explained.

“Well, then let’s ask Miriam and Drakon if we can use the cauldron,” Cassian replied, giving the obvious answer.

“It would be no use,” Feyre sighed. “I destroyed the book. We’d have no idea how to cast the spell the King of Hybern used that day. And we risk Koschei, himself, getting his hands on the cauldron.”

“There’s got to be another way,” Mor chimed in. “Something, someone, that could be as powerful as the sorcerer himself. He wasn’t the only God that found their way to Prythian.”

“Most of them are locked up in the Prison,” Rhys said. “And the Prison would not allow us to free any of them even if we wanted to.”

“Az, how has your search for Bryaxis been going?” Feyre asked.

“Not good,” Azriel answered honestly. “It’s like that thing disappeared from Prythian entirely.”

The room was silent for a moment until Amren sat up straight. “Wait, there is someone we could go to for help. As a last resort.”

Rhys lifted his head, staring at her with a heavy resolve. “No, absolutely not. It is too dangerous.”

“You said it yourself, we’re out of options!”

“What are you two talking about?” Feyre asked, looking between them.

Rhys let out a long breath. “Bryaxis…had a sibling. If you could even call her that. Someone who also came from wherever he slipped through from.”

“And why haven’t you mentioned this before?” Mor asked with a glare, crossing her arms.

“Because,” Rhys started. “Like I said, it’s too dangerous to get into contact with her. She’s…well, to be honest, no one really knows much about her. She keeps herself in a dark cave somewhere in the middle. Likes the darkness as much as Bryaxis does.”

“If no one knows much about her, then how do you know she’s dangerous?” Feyre asked. “Everyone was scared of Bryaxis until I went down there and was helped by it.”

“I’ve been told stories of her from my father,” Rhys explained. “How in the past, long before any of us were born, she could cause the fall of entire armies. Could level any court into rubble and dust.”

“And if that’s true, then doesn’t it speak to her character that she hasn’t done any of that? Maybe she is good of heart,” Mor suggested.

“We’re out of options, Rhys,” Amren said. “She might be our last hope.”

“Fine,” Rhys sighed. “I guess we better get ready for a trip to the middle.”

⋆˙⟡☾𖤓☽ ⟡˙⋆

“Alright, maybe this was a bad idea.”

Azriel glanced at Cassian to see him frowning as they stood in front of the dark cave. It was just him, Cass and Rhys who had come here to try and find this creature to ask for help. But it seemed Cassian was already losing his nerve.

“I tried to tell you,” Rhys muttered under his breath. “Azriel, can you scout ahead with your shadows?”

As soon as those words left Rhysand’s mouth, Azriel’s shadows darted ahead, trailing into the cave in a flurry. Azriel’s eyes widened as he was left standing completely bare, exposed. Not a single shadow had stayed with him, which was unusual. He tried to brush it off, tried to hide how uncomfortable he felt without them.

They waited expectantly but his shadows never returned. Azriel’s brows furrowed in confusion.

“I can’t call them back,” he said to his two brothers watching him. “They aren’t listening to me.”

“That’s…unusual,” Rhysand said, stroking his jaw.

Nothing more was said as the darkness in the cave seemed to grow and grow, almost extending out towards them despite the sun overhead.

“Who are you?”

The feminine voice was sensual yet sweet, playful almost. Nothing like he had been expecting. It struck something inside of Azriel, making his chest ache. Rhysand stood up straight, switching from brother to the High Lord in a mere second.

“I am Rhysand, High Lord of the Night Court,” Rhys answered, plucking a piece of lint from his coat. “If my sources are right, I believe you are y/n, sister of Bryaxis.”

“That I am,” the voice answered. “Why are you here? No one ever dares come here.”

Those words might’ve seemed like a threat, but her tone was light, curious.

“We’ve come to beg a boon,” Rhysand answered honestly. “There is another Death God who threatens war. We have been unable to stop his efforts.”

“Nobody has ever asked for my help before,” the voice said back in that same curious tone. “And what of Bryaxis. Will they help as well?”

“Bryaxis…Bryaxis was freed by my High Lady. We have been unable to find them.”

A step in the darkness. Another. Light footsteps came closer and closer to the edge of the cave. Azriel’s heart rate picked up, his hand falling to truth-teller. Cassian’s face was white and he looked ready to flee.

“You are afraid.”

It was not a question. Just a statement. But Rhysand answered it like it was.

“Bryaxis is made of nightmares,” he explained. “Something so terrifying to us. Perhaps you do not see it the same way but I imagine you are much the same and that is why we are…nervous.”

A laugh. A light, lilting laugh. Something sparked in Azriel’s chest.

“Me and Bryaxis are not made of the same thing, but opposite. A balance for our world,” the voice said. “Bryaxis is made of nightmares but I am made of dreams.

“Then why do you hide in the shadows?” The question came out of Azriel’s mouth before he even realized he was speaking. He could see his own shadows now, twirling in the darkness as if they were home.

“When we were captured, Bryaxis caused them fear so they were locked below the earth.” Her voice was sadder now, more serious and Azriel found himself hating that. “But I-I caused them…something different than fear. So they kept me locked in their bed chambers for decades, centuries, until I was able to escape. But then I learned those that did not desire me, feared me instead for the same reason. I was either caged or hunted. That is why I hide here.”

A shiver ran down Azriel’s spine. His face hardened at what she was implying. The fae who had captured the two Gods had locked one beneath the library and had used the other for…He felt sick to his stomach.

“If you are to help us,” Rhysand spoke, “I can promise you that we have no intention of keeping you locked up at all.”

“I do not trust the fae. Bind your words to magic and perhaps I will help you in return.”

“What is it that you want from us?”

It was silent for a moment, as if she were pondering.

“A place to stay. A place to live. Somewhere safe from being hunted or kept as a prisoner. A chance to live in this world, outside of this cave. To get to experience all that you do. That is what I wish for.”

Azriel knew that wish. Knew it all too well. For it was one he had for years while being locked in his father’s dungeon. So maybe that is why he found himself stepping closer to the cave, found himself unafraid of the darkness that had captured his own shadows.

Maybe that was why those words slipped out of his mouth before he could think of the repercussions, before he could be held back by one of his brothers.

“I will promise you that, y/n. I will promise you the opportunity to experience life outside of this cage, outside of the darkness.”

He could feel the heavy stares from his brothers on his back but he didn’t turn around, didn’t look anywhere but that darkness, even though he felt so exposed without his shadows.

Another footstep.

And another.

Until a figure began to emerge from the darkness, finally stepping into the light.

Azriel’s breathed hitched, his eyes widening in surprise. He wasn’t sure what he had been expecting, but it hadn’t been this.

Because before him now stood the most beautiful female he had ever seen. The type of beauty only a Goddess could possess. The type of beauty that had his head spinning, had his heart palpitating in his chest.

She smiled and he felt the whole world pause in that moment. It was a sight that would bring any male to his knees. A sight that could start wars.

She held out a small, delicate hand.

“Then I will help you, shadowsinger,” she said.

He mindlessly took her hand in his, shaking it as the sting of magic burned on both of their skin forming a bargain tattoo on the inner wrist. He looked down at it to see what the magic had created out of their promise to each other.

Swirls of shadows with a small lunar moth emerging at the end. A creature that sought light, finally leaving the darkness.

When he met her eyes again, those beautiful expressive eyes, he stumbled back a step. Stumbled as a golden thread unwound itself in his chest and pierced straight through the universe to the female standing before him.

⋆˙⟡☾𖤓☽ ⟡˙⋆

The battle lasted thirty-seven days. Koschei was defeated, the females he had spelled were freed. Beron had been exposed for helping him and was killed by Eris finally, bringing a new leader to Autumn.

And things were finally at peace.

“What are these again?”

Your index finger poked at the spongy thing on your plate. It smelled sweet, good. And it was warm to the touch. You glanced up to see the shadowsinger watching you, amused.

“Those are pancakes,” Azriel answered with a chuckle.

“Pancakes,” you repeated, slowly, testing the word on your tongue. “I thought cakes were desserts. Not breakfast.”

“They are a bit different from cake. Made in a pan instead of baked in the oven, hence the name,” Azriel explained.

You hummed in response, taking a bite out of one of the pancakes. “Hm, just as sweet as cake.”

“I might’ve added a bit more sugar than normal to them,” Azriel said, rubbing the back of his neck. “To satisfy that raging sweet tooth of yours.”

Your cheeks heated, that ticklish feeling in your stomach came again. A feeling you had never felt before this month and still had yet to make sense of. It made something in your chest ache when you looked at Azriel.

“You made these?”

Azriel nodded. “Someone slept through breakfast with the others.”

Your cheeks turned even redder.

“You should’ve woken me up,” you muttered before stuffing more bits of pancake into your mouth.

“You deserve to rest, y/n.” Azriel was still watching you with that little glint in his eyes. “After everything, you deserve to rest.”

Since coming to Velaris to help with Koschei, Azriel had been the one to show you around, to help you learn the customs of the fae. He had so much patience for you and your endless amounts of questions.

The others had helped you as well, had welcomed you into their home with open arms, but there was just something special about Azriel. You felt some sort of pull towards him. As if the darkness inside of you called to his.

He was beautiful, more than any God or male you’d ever seen before. And beneath his icy exterior, he was sweet and kind. Thoughtful. Witty.

You enjoyed being with the others but you preferred times like this, when it was just the two of you. He was less shy, more at ease, when it was just you. And something about that made you happy.

Seeing him smile, even when it was just the faintest expression, brought you joy like you’ve never felt before.

And Gods, he brought out so many emotions you had not felt in a very long time, some you hadn’t even known you could feel. You had begun to crave his presence. Desire it. You wondered if he felt the same.

“Did you still want to come with me to the city today?”

Azriel’s voice pulled you from your thoughts. That’s right, Azriel had cryptically told you he needed to pick something up from Velaris today. When you had asked him what he was getting, he had refused to answer.

“Yes, I would like to.”

“We’ll leave as soon as you’re ready.”

An hour later, you found yourself in Azriel’s arms, flying down to the city. Your heart was pounding in your chest at how closely he held you, like he was afraid you’d suddenly fall from his arms. You kept your own arms around his neck, playing with the ends of his hair.

You still remembered the few hours after the last battle. The showdown with Koschei had left you depleted, covered in wounds, but otherwise okay. Still, Azriel had burst into your tent with panicked eyes and only seemed to be calmed when you had let him tend to you like a mother hen.

You didn’t know what to make of his behavior. But you did know that being in his arms made you feel safe.

“Can we get more of those honey mooncakes on the way back?” you asked, trying to distract yourself from the ticklish feeling in your stomach again.

Azriel laughed, his chest rumbling against your body as he tightened his grip on you. “That sweet tooth of yours really is insatiable.”

“I didn’t get to finish mine from last time,” you said in defense for yourself. “Cassian got to them before me!”

“Well, next time tell Cassian to go get his own,” Azriel said. His breath ghosted against the tip of your ear, causing a trail of goosebumps on your skin. “I buy them for you, not him.”

Once again, you found yourself with red cheeks and a swelling heart. Ever since he had discovered your sweet tooth, Azriel had a habit of leaving sweet treats out for you. At first, he found it hilarious that a Death Goddess craved pastries of all things. But now he found it just downright adorable.

When the two of you returned to the House of Wind, you found Feyre and Mor waiting for you. You barely got out a small goodbye to Azriel before they were pulling you away, telling you it was time to start getting ready for the night.

Tonight was Starfall. Something you hadn’t seen in centuries. The girls helped you get ready as day turned to dusk and finally night.

“Come on, we’re going to be late,” Mor giggled, leading all of you out of the room and up to the main balcony. You could already hear the crowd and the music.

You felt nervous as you reached the top, your eyes instantly darting around to find that one person you were always looking for these days.

Azriel stood with Rhysand and Cassian, dressed in all black, finely tailored pants and a matching coat. He looked handsome, yet still beautifully lethal. The darkness and light bounced off the elegant planes of his face, causing his hazel eyes to glow golden.

When he caught sight of you, those eyes widened and you felt them roam your entire body. You’d always hated being looked at in such a way, but not with Azriel. Never with him.

In fact, you found yourself getting heated under his stare.

Rhysand and Cassian moved to their respective mates, leaving you to greet Azriel alone. He took your hand in his, pressing a gentle kiss to your knuckles.

“You are stunning,” he whispered. “Absolutely stunning. Happy Starfall.”

You blushed. “Thank you.”

Azriel gave you a rare smile that had your heart pounding. You peered at the crowd, watching the faeries enjoying their evening. Azriel stood with you, his fingers brushing against yours in a comforting gesture. He knew you weren’t the biggest fan of crowds, not when your presence was met with so many stares of both fear and desire.

“What are they doing?” You looked at the crowd of faeries that seemed to all be paired off, moving to the music from the band.

Azriel’s lips twitched, like they always did when you asked him a question like this. “They’re dancing.”

“Dancing,” you repeated. The word sounded familiar, like something you had known in a past life. You had spent so many years in that cave, you had turned into a mere shadow of who you used to be.

“Would you like to dance?”

Azriel had turned to look down at you, running a hand through his hair. His shadows curled around his wings.

“I don’t think I know how,” you whispered.

He held out his hand to you. “That’s alright. You can follow me lead.”

You bit your lip but decided to take his hand. He had promised you a chance of experiencing the world as it should be. He hadn’t led you astray yet.

He pulled you to the dance floor and you mimicked the other pairs, keeping one hand in his and placing the other on his shoulder. He wrapped his arm around your waist, yanking you closer to him.

The music started up again and Azriel began to lead you through the dance. It was easier than you thought it would be or perhaps he was just a good lead. Still, it wasn’t long before you were smiling and being twirled around in his arms.

You danced like that for a while, basking in the feeling. The soft music, the laughter, the gentle faelights above you. You had never felt so alive. And it was all thanks to the male who held you in his arms.

A slower song came on, some pairs leaving the dance floor. You looked around in question until you realized the pairs who had remained held a more intimate position. You copied them, placing your arms around Azriel’s neck.

Both of his arms wrapped around you now, resting on your lower back.

“Is this okay?” He leaned down to whisper in your ear.

You nodded, letting him drag you even closer until your bodies were pressed together. The dress you were wearing was thin and you could feel all of him through it. His hard chest, his sculpted muscles.

Azriel swallowed audibly, swaying you gently to the music. You laid your head on his chest, letting him rest his chin on top of your head. Every inch of you that touched him was on fire.

You closed your eyes for a moment, just letting yourself feel this, embrace it. You’d never felt like this before. So warm and light. It felt like it was just you and him that existed.

That is until you opened your eyes. You suddenly felt overwhelmed as you noticed lingering stares. A lot of them. You felt uncomfortable under the weight of them.

“What’s wrong?”

Azriel had some sort of sixth sense when it came to you. He always seemed to know what you were feeling before you said anything.

“Everyone’s looking at me,” you muttered under your breath, staring up at him.

He raised his head, looking around with narrowed eyes. That caused most of them to look away, not wanting to risk the shadowsinger’s wrath.

“Come on,” Azriel whispered. “I know somewhere we can go that’s more private.”

He enveloped you in his shadows until you were stepping out of the darkness and into a rounded alcove somewhere else on the balcony. Vines dangled down from the roof, trailing down the pillars holding it up.

You stepped forward, placing your hands against the stone railing. You could see the crowd below, the one you had just been in. Still hear the music and still see the night sky. You turned to face Azriel.

“Thank you,” you said. “I-I just hate it when they stare. Like I’m some weird creature.”

Azriel stalked forward until he was right in front of you, so close you had to tilt your head up to look him in the eyes.

“They don’t stare at you because they think you’re weird,” Azriel replied. “They stare at you because you are beautiful.”

His hand rose and brushed a strand of hair behind your ear. Your heart skipped a beat. Your mouth parted to say something but a roar of cheers cut you off. You whirled around to see thousands and thousands of stars beginning to soar through the sky.

Your mouth dropped open. It was more beautiful than you remembered. The stars kept falling and falling, like cascading fireworks. So bright and breathtaking. You couldn’t stop the small laugh that escaped your mouth, standing on your tippy toes to lean over the balcony as if you’d be able to reach the stars.

An arm circled your waist and Azriel’s front was pressed against your back as he held onto you.

“Careful,” he whispered in your ear, scared you were going to tip right over the edge and fall down the steep mountain.

“So beautiful,” you murmured, staring up at the stars. “Oh, it’s so much better than I remembered it from all those years ago.”

“It never stops amazing me,” Azriel said. “No matter how many times I watch it.”

You both watched in silence for a little longer, letting the music and laughter and cheers fill the space. Eventually, you turned in his arms, now pressed against the railing.

“Thank you,” you said again, “for bringing me here.”

“Anything for you,” Azriel whispered, raising a hand to rest on your cheek. His eyes were filled with a reverence that stole your breath away.

A brush of magic zipped by in the air and you gasped, raising up your wrist. The tattoo was gone. The bargain had been fulfilled. You had defeated Koschei and Azriel had given you the opportunity to live a life more than you had dreamed. That chance at life was in your hands now.

“The tattoo is gone,” you said, grasping his arm and pulling back his sleeve.

Your eyes widened to see his tattoo still there. The lunar moth emerging from the swirls of shadow.

“Wha—”

“I got it tattooed,” Azriel cut in. “Permanently.”

You glanced up at him in question. “Why?”

“Because I always want a reminder of what I promised you,” he said, his thumb stroking your cheek. “What I still promise you, y/n. A life worth living. I want to continue showing you the world, to be there when you experience new things.”

You were speechless. Completely, utterly speechless.

No one had ever shown such devotion to you, such care and love. Your heart swelled up, your chest ached.

“Azriel,” you stuttered out. “I-I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything,” he replied. “I was trapped in the darkness once too. I know what that’s like and I never want you to fall back into it. I don’t need anything from you, just the chance to be there with you while you learn, while you feel.”

Something was building inside of you, building and building until it was ready to break out. You rubbed at your chest, at the unusual feeling.

“I feel this…I feel this thing inside,” You said, gesturing to your chest. “Do you know what this is? Do you know why I feel this way?”

Azriel grabbed your hand and placed it on his chest, in the exact same spot yours ached.

“It is the mating bond,” Azriel answered, softly. “I feel it too. Right here. I have since the day I met you.”

His shadows swirled around like they had been waiting for this. You felt your own darkness rise in response until the two had joined together, watching together from the dark crevices.

“A mating bond,” you repeated.

Something snapped the moment you said it out loud. As if a question you had been asking your whole life had finally been answered. A gold thread was woven between the two of you, a beacon of light in the darkness. A place for that moth to call home.

You gasped looking back up at Azriel. Now that you recognized the bond, it grew more taut. You stumbled closer to him, fisting his coat in your hands.

“A mate,” you whispered. “You're my mate. I..I didn’t even know Gods could have mates.”

“Say it again.” Azriel’s voice was as dark as the shadows. A shiver ran down your spine.

“Huh?”

“Say it. Say that I’m your mate again.”

“You’re my mate,” you whispered, looking up at him through your lashes. “My mate.”

A quiet whine came from the back of Azriel’s throat that sent heat between your legs. Your eyes widened. A muscle in his jaw clenched. The air around you was charged and you felt like you had been set on fire.

“And you are mine,” Azriel growled. “My mate.”

His possessive tone only made that heat grow. Your lips parted, a small breath leaving your lungs. His eyes glanced down to your lips, hungrily. You gave him the smallest dip of the head, the permission he was waiting for.

Azriel surged forward and crashed his lips against yours. You stumbled, your backside hitting the stone railing behind you. You met his vigor with your own.

His lips were soft and warm. And his kiss felt like heaven and hell all mixed in one.

He groaned as you deepened the kiss, tilting your head back to give him more access. You yanked him closer, wanting to feel him everywhere. You never craved someone as much as you craved him.

His tongue swiped your bottom lip and you opened for him, letting him claim your mouth. His scent was intoxicating, he tasted like pure sin. You could drown yourself in him.

Your hands trailed up from his chest to circle around his neck. His own hands were holding you by the waist, pulling your hips into his. They traveled down your thighs until he was lifting you up, seating you on the stone railing, never pulled away from your kiss.

You parted your legs, letting Azriel step even closer as he finally pulled away, trailing kisses down your jaw to your neck. You whimpered at the feeling of his canines grazing the sensitive skin.

His nose traced the column of your throat before he rested his forehead against yours. You were both panting, both completely lost within each other.

“Wait,” Azriel breathed out, squeezing his eyes shut for a second. “I got you something. I don’t want to forget to give it to you.”

Because he would. He would forget his own name as long as the sweet scent of your arousal filled the air. Would forget the whole world existed if you kept staring at him like you were.

He pulled a small black box from his pocket, handing it over to you.

You opened it, gasping at the beautiful ring displayed inside. It was made of gold with a mesmerizing amethyst gem in the shape of a teardrop, accentuated by crescent moons on both sides and tiny stars.

“Azriel,” you breathed out. “This is beautiful.”

A small smile ghosted his lips.

“May I?”

You held out your hand and he pulled the ring out of the box before sliding it onto your ring finger. It was the perfect fit. You admired it, twisting it under the faelights to see the gem glow.

“It’s perfect,” you sighed.

“I had it made just for you,” Azriel said. “It’s what I had to pick up in the city today.”

“I-I really don’t know what to say, Azriel.”

Azriel rested his forehead against yours. “Just say it again. Tell me you feel this too. I’ve been searching for you for over five hundred years now and I just need to hear you say it. Again and again. Until I can wrap my head around it. Until I realize I’m not dreaming.”

You smiled, lifting up to press a small kiss against his lips. Your heart fluttered in your chest at his words, at the realization of why exactly the bargain had been fulfilled. You had asked for someplace to be safe, for a home, a chance to live. Azriel was giving you all of that and more.

“You are my mate. And I am yours,” you murmured against his lips. You pulled back to look him in the eyes. “All I’ve ever wanted was to find somewhere to call home. Being with you, being in your arms—that feels like home to me, Azriel. The one I’ve been looking for my whole life.”

Azriel’s eyes searched yours, as if he was trying to find the lie in your words. But there was none. Of course there was none. You were falling in love with him.

“Does this mean you want it?”

“It means I want you. I want all of you, everything.”

Azriel smiled and the sight nearly blew you away. You giggled as he held you close to him, buried his face in the crook of your neck. He kissed your throat once, twice.

“Then I think we’re due for a long vacation,” he murmured against your skin.

You knew what he was referring to. The frenzy that would come with this. Just that thought alone caused a tantalizing ache between your thighs.

“I think so too,” you whispered back as Azriel pressed kisses up your neck and jaw.

He held your face in his hands, his thumbs brushing against your skin as he stared into your eyes. His gaze was filled with so much promise, so much love. And then he kissed you again and everything felt right in the world. You were home.

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