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shadowsingerdraco · 4 months ago

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sjmU modern university fic

PART TWO

(part one linked at the bottom)

summary: cassian deals with his hangover and the lingering affects of nesta… more on azriel and lidia’s history

pairings: rhys/feyre, azriel/elain, azriel/lydia, cassian/nesta (these are all insinuated or hinted at but nothing explicit happens… thats for later hehe)

warnings: this fic contains sjm multiverse characters so there may be spoilers regarding characters. this is a modern au so i wont stay close to cannon most likely. but i just wanted to put that in here. also, drinking and smoking mentioned, partial nudity mentioned

notes: i want this to be a multi part series. i hope to include many smjU characters so stay tuned!

words: 2.5k

—

Cassian felt like a right asshole as he nursed his hangover. Azriel sat across from him, sipping his own cup of coffee while Cassian’s remained untouched. He was afraid if he ate or drank anything, he’d puke it up.

“I need to apologize,” Cassian rasped, and rubbed his fingers into his temples.

Azriel raised a brow at him. “And how do you plan on doing that? You’ll likely never see them again.”

Cassian let out a groan. A wordless agreement to Azriel’s claim.

The day passed by in a haze. Beer bottles and sticky red solo cups that none of them had bothered to pick up were scattered around the apartment. Azriel usually took care of it, but he had locked himself up in his room all day with Lydia. She had stayed over last night—though that wasnt unusual. After Cassian and Az’s chat this morning, Azriel had silently made another mug of coffee with two sugars and some milk and brought it into his room. They haven’t come back out.

It was aproaching three o’clock and Cassian was begining to get hungry. He went over to Az’s door and thumped his fist against it a few times before saying, “I’m going to get lunch, do you guys want anything?”

There was some rustling before the door creaked open to reveal Lydia, who was wearing Azriel’s hoodie and her hair tossed into a bun. The fabric fell to her knees, but Cassian had a hunch she wasn’t wearing any pants. He was going to tease her about it but she spoke before he could.

“Where are you going for lunch?”

“The deli,” Cass replied.

Lydia pursed her lips with a small nod. “Alright, get me and Az regulars. One with no pickles, the other with no onion.”

Cassian gave her a mock salute and she shut the door. On his way to his truck he dialed Rhys, asking him to come to lunch with him. He responded with a quick sure.

When the boys were sitting down at their table, Rhys was looking down at his phone with a schoolboy grin on his face.

“What the fuck are you so giddy about?” Cassian said with a mouthful of bread and salami.

Rhysand looked up, the smile still on his lips. “This girl, man. She’s funny.”

Cassian almost choked on his sandwich at the statement. The sisters. Nesta. Her name clanged through his head, ringing and ringing and ringing.

“You got her number?” Cassian asked, unable to school his wide eyes.

Rhys scoffed. “Of course I did. Best shag I’ve ever had in a bathroom.”

Damn. Nesta might have been a bitch about it, but she was right about her sister and Rhys.

Cassian let out a low whistle at Rhys’s confession. He was going to start giving his brother hell about it, but Rhysand was already looking back down at his phone, tapping away and chuckling to himself. Rhys never kept contact with his one night stands. Damn, these girls were turning their worlds upside down it seemed.

A few more moments passed, and Cassian coughed out, “So, uh, do you think you could see if Feyre and her sisters wanted to meet up tonight?”

Rhysand looked up from his phone, brow raised. “I don’t see why not.”

Cassian just nodded his head in acknowledgement and dove back into his lunch, not wanting to face Rhys’s knowing gaze. Bastard.

Back at the apartment, Cass sent Azriel a text letting him know that their sandwiches were on the counter and went into his bedroom. He definitely didn’t spend the remainder of the afternoon playing video games to ignore the five hour countdown until he saw Nesta again. Definitely not.

Meanwhile Lidia and Az sat on Azriel’s bed with their lunches spread across their laps, Lidia’s computer propped between them, Home Hounds playing on the screen.

“That house is so ugly,” Lidia said through a mouthful of turkey, lettuce, and pickles. “They should pick the first house instead.”

“No way,” Azriel responded, mouth just as full. “The husband likes this one better. He definitely will win her over to this one. She seems like a pushover.”

Lidia hummed in agreement. The show continued to play and they continued to make idle commentary. This was how the two usually spent their nights: Lidia and him lounging around, eating and watching casual T.V. They would occasionally smoke a blunt of murthroot, but that wasn’t usual and typically reserved for parties. Azriel only liked to do it when he was feeling particularly anxious, and Lidia did it so he wasn’t doing it alone.

The pair had been best friends since they were kids, growing up next door to one another. Azriel used to sneak into her room, climbing up the large oak tree that sat between their windows. The first time it happened, Azriel’s step brothers were banging on his bedroom door trying to get in. Those boys terrorized him any chance they got. They would put tacks in his shoes, steal his lunch at school so he wouldn’t have anything to eat, and beat him up whenever Azriel did so much as breathe wrong. Not that his parents cared all that much. His dear mother worked nights at the hospital so she never really saw him, whereas his step-father thought his demon children could do no wrong. Everything was Azriel’s fault and would turn a blind eye to his bruises.

Azriel felt panic sliding up his spine at the constant banging on his door, his step-brothers shouting threats at him. Then, there was sudden quiet. A stillness. Azriel calmed, thinking the boys must have given up or gotten bored. His hopes were shot down quickly as his door handle began to rattle. Not a harsh, insistent jostling, but a gentle wobble. Azriel felt his blood run cold. They were picking the lock. His one place of solace was about to be destroyed, ripped away on its hinges.

Azriel darted his eyes around, trying to think think think. He had nowhere to go, nowhere to run except—except the window.

They were still working on the doorknob as he hurried to the window on the farside of his room, undoing the latch with shaking hands and slid up the glass pane. The gods must be real and giving him a wink as he looked at the large oak tree that seemed to be reaching out to him with it’s sturdy branches. Azriel sent a quick thank you to the Mother and climbed out of his room and into the chilled night.

Once he was sure of his footing, he turned back and slid the window closed, not wanting to leave any evidence behind. He didn’t know what his step-brothers would think about his empty room, but he just hoped they didn’t follow his footsteps. Azriel continued to make his way across the expansive oak, hiding himself in its leaves. He kept going, looking back periodically to make sure he was alone.

He took his eyes off his path and towards where he assumed his window was one time too many as his foot met air. Azriel had nearly fallen to his death, or at least to a broken arm, but he was able to catch himself. With his heart thumping in his chest, he looked up to find not only the end of the branches, but another window. And a girl. She stared at him with wide eyes, her hair dripping wet from what Azriel assumed was her shower.

Azriel gave her an awkward smile and a wave. She let out what seemed to be a laugh. They both stared at each other for what felt like hours to Azriel, but then she snapped her head to her door, smile now gone. Azriel’s stomach dropped. She was going to get in trouble for this, he thought. But then she looked back at him, face set in what could have been determination, walked over to her window and slid it open.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi.”

“I’m Lidia. Do you live next door?”

Azriel debated lying but then that would be weird for him to be in this tree. So he said, “Yeah. I’m Azriel.”

Lidia smiled at him. She was missing her front left big-tooth. Azriel had just lost one on the bottom himself.

“That’s a cool name,” she said. “What does it mean?”

Azriel hated the blush that he felt bloom on his cheeks. “Uh, thanks. And I don’t know. Does it have to mean anything?”

Lidia nodded, as if she knew the answer to all his questions. “It has to. It’s a word, after all. And all words have meaning.” Her eyes got big then and she snapped her fingers together. “Oh! I have a book for this!” She quickly turned around and disappeared into a corner that Azriel wasn’t privy to.

She came back into view with a large orange book in her hands. Azriel furrowed his brows in question. When Lidia noticed, she explained, “It’s a baby name book. My mom kept it from when she was naming me.”

She began flitting through the first couple of pages before asking, “How do you spell it?”

Azriel told her and she continued to frown at the book, pink blossoming on her own cheeks this time.

“What’s wrong?” Azriel asked. She had been quiet for a minute now.

She looked up, lips pulled tight and eyes hard. “I can’t read the stupid thing.”

“Oh,” was Azriel’s response.

“My teacher says I’m not reading on the expected level for a second grader,” Lidia confessed quietly.

“Well if it makes you feel any better, I’m really bad at math,” Azriel said. A burst of wind rippled through the tree then, making him shudder. Lidia gave him a funny look then and asked why he was in the tree in the first place. He almost blurted the truth, but second guessed it. He didn’t know this girl, why should he trust her? People haven’t proved themselves to be kind to him.

“I like to climb trees,” he said with a shrug.

“At night? In the cold?”

“I like the night time,” Az said. This wasn’t a lie. He did like the night time. It was the only part of the day where he had come to peace. Well, usually.

They continued to chat for some time before Azriel heard a distant voice call Lidia’s name. She looked to the door again before turning to him, frowning.

“That’s my mom. She’s calling for me to turn out my lights and go to bed.”

Azriel felt like a stone dropped in his stomach. Don’t go, he found himself thinking. Don’t make me go back.

But she smiled at him and said, “Do you want to play after school tomorrow?”

He opened his mouth to say yes, but then he remembered, “I can’t. I have chores and I won’t be done in time to play before dinner.”

Now it was Lidia’s turn to seem disappointed. But she seemed to be full of solutions because she said, “Well what if you came back to my window? I have some chalk and we could play tic-tac-toe on my window seal!”

She seemed really excited about this, so Azriel agreed. And he did show up the next night. And the next. And the one after that for the rest of their adolescent lives before they packed up their things to move away for college.

Somewhere in there, they shared kisses for spin-the-bottle or smoking games, but they never passed this threshold. They were of the same breath by the time they reached teenage years and there was nothing embarrassing or too much for the other. As for them falling asleep in the same bed with Lidia in nothing but her underwear and his t-shirt was something they had done for the first time on their senior trip to Avallen..

Lidia’s piece of shit boyfriend (per Azriel’s assessment as soon as he met the guy) cheated on her with best friend. Lidia had no interest in sharing a room with her that night and went straight to Azriel, who went straight to her ex and gave him a busted lip. Lidia wasn’t sad at first, but instead dove into deep anger and had no patience as she snapped at Azriel by telling him that she would not be sleeping in her jeans and would not be wearing a bra and that he would just have to get over it if it was weird. He had simply chuckled and raised his hands in mock-innocence and laid on the floor, resolving to only his boxers and a t-shirt himself. It wasn’t until he heard her soft sobs in the middle of the night and couldn’t stand the sound of it and crawled in with her, holding her tight to his chest.

They never really went back to modesty after that.

So here they were, eating a Cassian bought lunch in bed without a care in the world but one another. That is until Azriel’s phone buzzed with a text inviting him to a small pub with the boys and the three sisters from the party last night.

“You wanna go?” He asked her, his dark hair falling above his golden eyes.

Lidia shrugged with a nod of acceptance. He told her that they would need to leave in the next hour. So they watched another Home Hounds episode before they got up and Lidia dug around in her drawer of clothes that Azriel kept for her. She threw on a light blue v-neck tee and jeans, her hair in a pony-tail. Azriel settled for one of his many black shirts and black jeans and they walked out into the living room to see Cassian picking up the aftermath of last night. Lidia thought she must be dreaming.

“Cass, are you okay?” she asked, half teasing.

He paused in his movement of putting a red solo cup in the open trash bag he was carrying. “Yeah, why?” His voice was labored, as if he had paused his run instead of a clean-up.

“Because you never clean. And here you are doing just that. Not to mention you’re doing it right before a night out.”

Azriel leaned as if to whisper in her ear, but said it loud enough for Cassian to hear, “He’s antsy because he is nervous about seeing Nesta again tonight.”

Lidia made a silent, overdramatic oh.

“Fuck off, Az.” Cassian snapped, but just chucked the cup into the trash before picking up another one.

The pair just laughed at him as Rhys walked out of his own room, looking impeccable in his black denim jacket and styled hair. “Let's go,” he said, throwing his keys up in the air and catching them.

Cassian just dropped the trash bag onto the floor and followed Rhys out the door.

Lidia and Azriel just shook their heads and headed out the door.

—

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