#human feyre + tamlin + lucien is where the series peaked

[copypastus]

@lucienweekofficial Day 7 - Free Day

Closing off Lucien week with the best throuple that could (and should) have been.

Had a lot of fun with this event!

[illyriantremors]

Beneath the Stars Epilogue

Chapter: I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII XIII XIV XV XVI XVII XVIII XIX XX XXI

AO3 Linkage

Summary: Feyre's finally done with her art project and now just had to sit by while the AP board grades her exam. Thankfully, she has a few friends by her side each with a big interest in how her portraits turned out - and for good reason.

Epilogue

“Feyre!” A soft touch braced on my shoulders as an ethereal voice floated quietly through the exam room towards me. “These are marvelous! I had no idea this was what you were working on so secretly all this time.”

“Thank you Mrs. Weaver. I had a hard time figuring it out, but I’m really happy with how they turned out.”

“As am I, Feyre. As am I.”

She hugged me after one last appreciative glance at the ten tableaus hanging on the wall in front me before moving on to one of my classmates. The AP Board had already come around to my set. I wasn’t allowed to talk to them or explain the art and how I’d arrived at this particular interpretation of their prompt, but the few hushed whispers I was able to make out sounded really positive. I was confident they’d pass me, but I had my fingers crossed I’d at least get a 4.

“I gotta hand it to you, Feyre,” Amren said turning her back on the examiners who were now studying her submission. Amren was fearless in the face of pressure. “This is pretty stellar.”

“Better than art galleries and chocolate churros in Spain stellar?”

Her eyes smirked in a side glance at me. “Close enough.”

I decided to keep my job at the art gallery even though dad - or technically mom - didn’t need my help with the extra bills anymore. It gave me a sense of purpose and escape each week.

When I started back after winter break, I found the camera I’d last used still sitting at my work station and flipped through it until I’d found the pictures of Rhys I’d taken the night of Starfall. I touched little else but my paints and brushes from that moment on for several weeks thereafter.

I realized the night that I painted Rhys that I was painting a part of myself into him. I had added colors and details that had felt so inherently Rhys to me onto his skin, but the wings and colors themselves were inventions of my own design - the way I saw Rhys. The way he made me feel.

I had the close up photo of him - the one with the wings just visible behind his face - printed out in a larger size and worked for two weeks straight until I had successfully reproduced it on a large canvas with acrylics, a realistic rendering of just his face and traces of the wings behind him.

But because the prompt was self-portraiture, I added in little features that were unique to me. A freckle here, a smattering of blue in the eyes there.

And in the end it was Rhys but it also wasn’t quite Rhys. It was both of us. Because he helped make me me.

They all did. I asked each of my new friends to come in and sit for me so I could paint them and take photos. And though Az seemed a little self-conscious to sit until Mor walked in and watched him with a reassuring smile while she sipped her Starbucks, every single one of them agreed to do it without hesitation.

I had Mor draw her hair up into an elegant chignon that almost looked like a halo and flecked her skin with a bright metallic gold. She tilted her chin up with her eyes resting closed when I snapped the picture, a perfect vision of peace and happiness in a world of misery and hopelessness.

When her birthday came the day after graduation, I planned on giving her both a copy of her photo, but also the one I snapped of Az staring at her when I took his shot - staring like nothing else in the world mattered but the earth angel in front of him.

Azriel himself was trickier to get right. Easily the most mysterious of the bunch, I wrapped his face in shadows, making sure to keep the planes of his face sharp to draw out enough contrast. His head angled to the floor and when I asked him to look up, his brow was furrowed.

“Mor?”

“Hmm,” she said looking up from her phone. Azriel caught her stare and the second his eyes softened, I snapped the camera.

Cassian was the most amusing session by far. Rhys insisted on staying with me while I painted him after he made a suggestive comment in response to being asked to take his shirt off. He was all fire - bold, vivid colors worthy of a party in Barcelona. When I ran the paint through his hair, it spiked up into little peaks that could have been tendrils of flame. I carried into the backdrop behind him and made sure to make the hazel of his eyes standout like embers in a campfire when I recreated the portrait.

Amren was last and she refused to alter anything about her clothing to help me get the paint just right.

“You do realize I might get paint on you, yeah?”

“You will do no such thing, Feyre, or I will drink your blood for breakfast.”

“Okay, Am. Whatever you say, as long as you take me with you to Rome this summer.”

“I’ll bring you one of those stupid souvenir snow globes you’re so fond of, don’t worry.”

“Thank you, babe.”

“Just get on with it, Feyre. Really.”

In the end, I settled on a clean, neutral palette for Am so she could be anyone and anything, the mysterious void and the consuming beast all at once.

My family had done the series with me too. I needed ten pieces and they were the other half of me. Dad was the only one I had to paint from scratch since he was in rehab and part of me was maybe relieved not to have him come sit for a portrait. Once the pressure of his hospital stay was lifted and he didn’t come home, my worry over his life was replaced with the anger and frustration I’d felt when I first found him and thought he might leave me for good, something I wasn’t used to feeling towards him. But I saw him every week for the hour visitors were allowed to come to his center and we were working on things between us. I took pictures of him while I was there and he always asked how the project was going when I came in.

He and mom were still separated, but legally they were staying married until things were sorted out. He was coming home soon, but a lot of progress was still to be made. I was proud of him for how far he’d come.

My own therapy sessions were going well. I met with my therapist once a week - Dr. Carver. Her office suggested a proclivity for the morbid, particularly the human body and the skeletal structure, but she explained that bone composition and structure were part of her research when she studied to be a bone surgeon prior to choosing psychiatry as her final career choice.

She was nice and seemed to genuinely care about my progress, what my goals were, and how to help me get there. Within the first couple of sessions, she was challenging me to confront all of the wounds that were still open in my life and do what was within my power to heal them on my end.

Part of that included my decision not to go to college. I made application deadlines by the skin of my teeth and was even accepted to a handful of schools, but when I got the acceptance emails in early April, it didn’t feel right. Not with the progress I was making in therapy.

Dr. Carver encouraged me to consider my decision for a long time to make sure it was the right one for me and in the end, I thought it was. School would always be there when I was ready and both of my sisters had offered to help me with the transition, but right now I needed to work on myself. School still felt too overwhelming. The gallery had agreed to hire me on full time over summer, so I figured I could see where real world work experience could get me until I felt better about school.

Lucien had been the toughest to face. I cornered him early one morning before school when the fog made his hair stand out like a beacon of light at sea. I think he was a little surprised to see me approach, but once I started calling him Lukey again, he eased up.

He swung by to see his portrait before class when he should have been halfway across campus, the sneaky fox. Probably avoiding a run-in with Rhys and our little inner circle of friends, although now that Lucien wasn’t seeing as much of Tamlin anymore, a lot of the tension between us all had started to drain.

“So,” I said pointedly when Lucien did nothing but stare at his portrait with a sharp expression and crossed arms. “What do you think?”

He tossed his head at me and the long length of his red hair rippled on the air behind him. “You made me… rather handsome, Feyre.”

I snorted. “Is that a problem, Lukey?”

He frowned and shook his head, giving his tableau one last admiring look before the bell rang. “Nah. Better than all that burnished gold and starlit eyes you hoarded for yourself.” He gave my hair a quick flick of his fingers and winked at me. “Thanks.”

I smirked, of the dark pesky variety only Lucien could pull, as I watched him walk out and waited for the AP board to begin examining us. The hour dragged on horribly as I waited for them to get to my set. Amren sauntered up to me as soon as they finished grading me.

“Has Rhys seen it yet?”

“Nah-ah,” I said. “I made him promise not to look until after the exam was over. He’s coming by when class is over. Do you think he’ll like it?”

Amren smirked. “I think they all will.”

“All?”

She nodded behind me and in the window creeping over the door was a small set of chocolate brown eyes staring greedily into the room. Two more sets of hazel ones rested above Mor and I was willing to bet that behind them grumbling angrily something about “she’s my girlfriend,” would be a pair of violet ones.

I glared at them incredulously, praying the exam board wouldn’t notice and get huffy, but at least they’d already taken my marks down. Amren, on the other hand, was still on the chopping block.

I shooed them off, but the second the bell rang, they flooded the room and ran to inspect their respective portraits. I cringed wondering how they would take the changes I’d made to each one where I’d included little pieces of myself.

“Holy shit I’m on FIRE!” Cassian shouted. I froze, chanced a look at the examiners, one of whom was the last to leave the room and seemed a little put off by the exclamation. Cassian clapped his hands and mercifully said more quietly, “This is fucking rad as hell, Feyre.”

“Thanks, Cass.”

I looked at Azriel, my hopes high. The boy of shadows looked once at his portrait, then at me, and smiled shyly with a nod. “I see myself,” he said simply. “Thank you.”

And coming from Az, that meant the world to hear.

“You’re welcome.”

“I get to keep mine right?!” Mor squeaked and picked hers right up off the wall careless of the fact that it was technically art. “Of course I’m keeping this.”

“Morrigan,” Rhys said in that same old exhausted voice he pulled out for his cousin.

“Stuff it!” she snapped. “It’s going above the fireplace and that’s final.”

I slammed down the laugh in my chest and clamped a hand over my mouth to keep quiet. Rhys snaked over to me, pinching my sides. “What is so funny, Feyre darling?”

“You are,” I said and reached up to peck him on the lips. “So, what do you think?”

Rhys looked at his portrait, at the smoke and billowing wings shrouded in clouds of purple and blue and gold, and smiled slowly. He brought his attention back to me and I knew he and I were both thinking the same thing - about that night, how much it meant to both of us. How much we healed and loved and lived together.

“I think I’m stunning,” Rhys finally said.

“Of course you do.”

“Really, Feyre. It’s incredible and certainly nothing I would have ever expected to see of myself. Thank you for painting it.”

“Of course.”

“There’s just one thing I’d change, though, if you don’t mind me saying.”

“Oh?”

He swept my hair off my shoulders and took my face in his hands, taking a deep, dramatic breath as he did so. “Next time, I think nude would be best.”

I snorted and burst into a fit of giggles. “Maybe next time you should paint me. What do you think about that, huh?”

Rhys beamed at me, leaning in close enough for a kiss, but not before he’d whispered into my skin, “It would be my pleasure, darling. I’ll circle and point at all my favorite bits.” His finger trailed suggestively down my stomach tracing a line not entirely unlike an arrow and I laughed.

Behind us, my own tenth portrait sparkled in layers of starlight and night.

Life was beautiful once more.

The End

Bonus chapters to follow :)

xx