Be You.

I'd begun insisting that I cook meals, at least sometimes. It felt wrong to take so much without giving anything back, and food was the one thing I could manage with some confidence.

Or so I told myself. In truth, I wasn't great at it, never had been.

Azriel never seemed to mind.

No matter what I was trying to make, he was there beside me, sleeves rolled up, knife in hand. He insisted he could chop vegetables just fine, that he didn't mind helping.

One evening, I stood at the counter watching him hack his way through an onion. My lips twitched despite myself. 

"You're cutting that wrong," I murmured, leaning closer. "The onion needs to be smaller. More... even."

My voice trailed off as he glanced at me, the faintest smile curving his mouth. Shadows flickered at his shoulders like they were listening in. 

Heat rushed to my face. "Sorry—sorry, you don't want me explaining it to you."

"It's okay." His voice was low, smooth, certain. He tipped his chin toward me, hazel eyes glinting. "Don't be afraid to tell me when I'm doing something wrong."

The words caught me off guard, disarming in their honesty. My tongue fumbled before my pride could catch it. "I don't think that's possible. You're... basically perfect—"

The words tumbled out before I could stop them. My heart stuttered in my chest. Silence fell, thick and mortifying. 

I clutched at my stomach, heat crawling up my neck. "I just mean..."

Azriel's knife didn't falter. His composure was maddening, the faintest flicker of amusement tugging at his mouth as though he knew exactly what I meant but would never make me say it aloud. "Don't worry about it."

Then Cauldron curse him he winked. Effortless, smooth, the kind of gesture that made my chest feel warm in a way I hadn't expected in so long.

And just like that, he steered the conversation somewhere else, dipping into safe territory while chopping the onion smaller, exactly the way I'd asked.

I leaned my weight against the counter, trying to calm the flutter in my chest, stroking the curve of my stomach as if that might ground me.

It didn't.

It only made me more aware of how close he stood, of how his shadows whispered across the counter like they wanted to close the space between us.

The days lengthened, stretching with a strange sort of ease. Life in the townhouse had settled into a rhythm, one I didn't dare call home but which, piece by piece, began to feel like something dangerously close to it.

Still Azriel was often there. 

Not in the way Cassian was, loud and teasing, dragging me into conversation whether I wanted it or not. 

Not like Rhys, who always carried the quiet weight of his court behind every soft smile. 

No, Azriel was there differently. Always steady. Always close enough to notice the little things, without ever pressing too hard.

He started accompanying me on short walks in the courtyard when my body felt too restless to sit still, yet too heavy to stray far.

It became a ritual of sorts. He would fall into step beside me, wings tucked neatly in, shadows brushing at the flowers and stonework as though curious about the world I passed through.

One afternoon, I pressed a hand to the small of my back and groaned under my breath. "Cauldron, I swear this child already hates me."

Azriel's mouth twitched just barely but it was enough. His hazel eyes glinted as he said, "I've interrogated prisoners with less dramatic complaints."

I stopped mid-step, staring at him. "Was that... a joke?"

His lips curved, almost imperceptibly. "You'll have to decide."

I gaped at him for a second before laughter burst out of me, sharp and unexpected. It startled me how good it felt, that sound, how rare it had become. 

I pressed a hand to my mouth as if I could stop it spilling out, but Azriel only gave a faint shake of his head, shadows curling lazily around his shoulders like they, too, were amused.

"You're insufferable," I said between breaths.

"And yet you keep asking me to walk with you," he replied smoothly.

"I don't ask. You just... show up."

"Convenient, then."

I rolled my eyes, but the smile lingered on my lips longer than it should have. Longer than I let myself admit.

As the days went on, those small exchanges piled up like pebbles dropped into a still pool, sending ripples through the heaviness that clung to me. 

His dry comments, his steady presence, the way his gaze always seemed to catch on me when he thought I wasn't looking.

It wasn't romance. Not really. I couldn't let it be. Not with the weight I carried, the child in my belly, the mess of my broken past. 

But with him, in those fleeting moments, I could almost forget the shame, the fear, the ache.

With him, I could breathe again. And for now, that was enough. 

Until it wasn't.

The sun spilt gold across a cafe today, warmth on my skin and the faint scent of roasted coffee in the air. 

I held an iced tea in one hand, the condensation wetting my fingers, and a delicate croissant-cookie hybrid in the other, savouring a rare moment of calm. 

Azriel sat across from me, shadows flickering softly at his shoulders, a faint smirk tugging at the corners of his mouth as he watched me carefully nibble.

I opened my mouth to comment on something he'd said, but a sudden, familiar face in the window stopped me cold.

Time seemed to still.

Garrick. The male who had once been the centre of my life, now a ghost of betrayal, stood frozen on the sidewalk, eyes wide and pale, as if seeing me again had drained all colour from him. 

Then, as if compelled by some magnetic force, he strode toward me, each step full of desperate intent.

I swallowed, my chest tightening, but he beat me to words.

"I've been looking everywhere for you," he panted, finally stopping in front of the table. His gaze flicked to my stomach, and I felt my stomach knot as if he'd struck it with a blade.

"Garrick... no." My voice was shaky, more brittle than I intended, and I straightened abruptly, gripping my iced tea as if it could anchor me.

Azriel's eyes immediately cut to him, sharp and unreadable, yet protective. His hand moved, almost imperceptibly, closer to mine, shadows coiling ever so slightly at his sides.

"I... I changed my mind," Garrick blurted, voice desperate, raw. "I want to be part of this. I—"

Rage snapped through me like wildfire, hot and untamable. Hormones or not, heartbreak or not, I had reached my limit.

"Now? After months?" I didn't give him a chance to interject. "You don't get to play father when it's convenient for you. You abandoned me. You abandoned us!"

"Just... listen—" Garrick tried again, stepping closer, hand reaching for mine.

"No!" I recoiled instinctively, my fingers curling around my cup as if it could shield me.

Azriel moved with quiet, lethal precision. He slid between us, his presence suddenly immense, shadows flickering like knives at his shoulders. 

His voice was low, steady, but edged with ice.

"Don't touch her," he said, each word deliberate, measured, dangerous. "Not after you threw her out like a coward."

Garrick blinked at him, faltering. The bravado that had carried him this far melted beneath Azriel's calm fury.

"This... this is between me and her," Garrick tried, voice softening, almost pleading. "We don't have to involve—others. It's my baby too."

I flinched, my anger and resentment warring with the truth of his words. Yes, it was his child. 

But that didn't erase the fear, rejection, and uncertainty I'd endured. My hands trembled slightly as I rested them on my stomach, protective and wary.

"You abandoned me," I said, voice quieter now, but no less firm. "You threw me out. You don't get to come back and dictate anything. Not now, not ever—unless you're ready to accept that this isn't about you."

Garrick's jaw tightened, eyes glimmering with something like shame, and for a brief moment, I caught the weight of his regret. 

But I didn't trust him. Not fully.

Azriel's hand hovered near my back, a silent anchor, his presence a quiet promise of protection. He didn't speak, didn't push, but the subtle pressure of his shadowed aura reminded me I wasn't alone.

After a long, taut moment, I exhaled slowly, letting a fraction of reason creep in. 

Garrick's child deserved a father, even if it was complicated, even if it was messy. I wouldn't hand him blind trust, but... I could give him a chance to try, carefully, measured.

"Until it wasn't," I murmured under my breath, more to myself than anyone else, letting him know the line he'd never cross.

Azriel's hazel gaze met mine briefly, unspoken understanding passing between us. 

He would stand guard, and I... I would do my best to navigate the storm.

Azriel's POV -

Even after the confrontation at the cafe, I couldn't shake him. Garrick. 

He didn't vanish. He kept showing up appearing under the guise of concern for the baby, checking in, asking questions, insisting he wanted to be responsible.

But I knew. I could see the glances that lingered too long, the smiles that weren't meant for the child, they were meant for her.

It wasn't about the baby. Never just about the baby. 

And every interaction, every subtle attempt to insert himself, carried more than responsibility, it carried expectation, longing, entitlement.

Jealousy. 

I hated that word, hated admitting it. But that was the closest thing to what I felt every time Garrick was near her. 

My chest tightened, shadows coiling at my sides, a restless edge in my thoughts that refused to settle.

It wasn't just jealousy. It was protective, possessive in a way I'd never experienced before. 

Seeing Garrick's hand brush her arm, or the way his eyes lingered on her stomach, made my blood burn with a mix of fury and helplessness. 

And yet, every time she shifted subtly, keeping her words clipped, polite but distant, the wave of relief that hit me was almost disarming.

It was absurd. My instincts screamed at me to remain detached, to guard my own heart and keep distance. And yet... I couldn't.

The first time I realised it wasn't just care, it was something more, I'd been helping her cook. The knife slipped slightly in her hand, and before she even realised, I'd steadied it. 

My fingers brushed hers, and she'd looked up at me, startled, and murmured softly,

"I... I like it when you're around."

Her words, so small, so fleeting, hit me harder than they should have. 

I'd only muttered, "I'm right here," and returned to chopping, trying to appear nonchalant, though my pulse had spiked.

Later, when she bent to pick something up, a loose strand of hair falling across her face, I couldn't stop myself. My hand lifted before I had a thought, brushing the hair behind her ear. 

She leaned into the motion, a small, almost imperceptible sigh leaving her lips, and my chest constricted.

"Azriel..." she murmured, but it wasn't a warning. It was acknowledgement. A shared, fleeting intimacy that made the air between us heavier.

At night, I'd find myself checking on her. Not because she asked, not because anyone ordered it but because I couldn't not. 

A soft knock, the tilt of her head, the way her eyelids fluttered open, and I'd murmur quietly,

"You've been awake long?"

She'd shake her head, a tired smile tugging at her lips. "Just... thinking."

I'd linger, refusing to intrude, but unwilling to leave. Shadows stretched softly in the corners of the room, wrapping us in quiet warmth. I found myself brushing invisible dust from the windows, adjusting her blanket, placing a cup of tea within reach, all without her asking.

Every small act, protective, subtle felt like a confession I wasn't ready to voice.

And then one evening, as we walked the courtyard, the setting sun gilding the stones, she huffed, rubbing at her aching back again.

"I swear my spine is going to snap if I bend over one more time," she complained, half joking.

I couldn't resist. A dry, rare smirk tugged at my lips. "Then stop bending. Problem solved."

She laughed, the sound like wind chimes in the dusk. "Oh, brilliant, yes, thank you, Azriel. How ever did I manage before you?"

"I don't know. Luck, I suppose," I replied, voice low, letting the teasing linger. Her laughter made something twist in my chest, a warmth and ache I didn't understand but could not ignore.

And still... Garrick existed. 

Still, I found my jaw tightening every time his name was spoken in her presence. Every laugh Garrick drew from her, every glance he risked, made the shadows around me flicker with something sharper, fiercer.

I told myself it was just care, just protection. But deep down, I knew it was more. Far more. 

And I didn't know if I could keep pretending it wasn't.

A/n - A hint of a romance blooming :)

Baby daddy has finally decided to make an appearance and he's begging for forgiveness (as he should), she gives him the benefit of the doubt but only for the baby. That's it. No more, no less!!

Azriel is predictably losing his mind in his POV because... really? Why does this guy have to show up and throw a wrench into everything while he's just trying to quietly love be there for her x

Thank you so much for reading <33

My boots slipped on the slick cobblestones, worn soles no match for the storm. My balance, already clumsy from the weight I carried betrayed me. My knee gave, pain shooting up my leg as I crashed to the ground. 

The impact rattled through me, sharp enough to steal my breath, sharp enough that terror instantly clawed up my throat. My hand flew to my belly, desperate, trembling.

The world didn't pause for me.

A raucous shout tore through the patter of rain, followed by laughter, rough, jagged. I looked up, blinking water from my lashes, to find a group of males stumbling from the doorway of a bar. 

The scent of cheap ale clung to them even across the distance. One swayed closer, his grin crooked, his eyes mean in the dim lamplight.

"Well, what've we got here?" he slurred, the words slopping together. Another jeered behind him, and though the rain blurred their voices, I caught enough.

"Stupid bitch." 

"In the way."

My pulse thundered, loud and frantic, as if my body itself was trying to shield the child I carried. 

I shrank back against the cold stone wall, fingers digging into the cobblestones for purchase as I tried to push myself upright. My throat was tight, my heart lodged somewhere between my stomach and my lungs.

Alone. So devastatingly alone. 

The storm seemed to swallow me whole as their shadows loomed closer.

Then—different shadows. A shift in the air, so sharp it silenced even the storm.

"Enough." The word wasn't shouted. It didn't need to be. Quiet, controlled but honed like steel, the kind of voice that could slit through bone.

The drunk male who had been looming over me faltered mid-step. He blinked once, twice, his booze-clouded bravado evaporating. 

With a mutter and a stumble, he turned away, swallowed by the rain. His friends followed, their laughter subdued into uneasy silence as they vanished back into the bar's glow.

My chest heaved as I pressed harder against the wall, one arm tight around my stomach. My eyes darted toward the street, toward the source of that voice.

And froze.

A tall male stood only a few feet away, wings tucked in close against the storm. Shadows curled around him like living things, coiling and shifting in patterns I couldn't understand. 

The moonlight caught on a sharp, beautiful face, on hazel eyes that seemed to pierce straight through the dark, through me.

The Night Court's spymaster. Azriel.

For a heartbeat, I forgot how to breathe.

He crouched in front of me, lowering himself with a grace that made no sense for a male so broad, so armed. He extended a steady, scarred hand. "You're hurt."

"I'm fine," I rasped, though the words trembled more than I wanted them to. 

I pushed myself up, but pain flared white-hot in my ankle, and my knees wobbled. Before I could crumple again, his hands warm and strong were there, steadying me as if he'd been expecting me to fall.

His touch was careful. Too careful, like he knew that one wrong move might send me running.

"Let me help you," Azriel said, voice low but certain. "Where is your home?"

Home. The word was a blade.

My throat closed up, and for a moment I could only stare at the rain-slick cobblestones. His hands were still bracing me, keeping me upright. 

His shadows stirred restlessly, whispering things I couldn't hear, couldn't understand. But when his eyes, so unreadable, so impossibly steady met mine, I knew. He already saw the truth.

The pity that flickered there nearly undid me.

"I can take you somewhere safe for tonight," he coaxed gently, though there was no give in his tone. "You shouldn't be out here. Not like this. Not wet and hurt... not in your condition."

Instinctively, my hands wrapped tighter around my stomach, as if to shield myself from his words, from the way they landed so easily on the secret I thought I could still hide.

"I don't need your charity," I said, the words breaking against the rain. Pride surged, brittle and sharp, the only weapon I had left. "I... I have somewhere to go."

I didn't. We both knew I didn't.

Azriel didn't flinch, didn't waver. His eyes locked on mine with an intensity that made my skin prickle. 

"You don't," he said quietly, simply. "Not right now. Come with me."

It wasn't a command. It wasn't even quite a plea. It was something else, something that slipped beneath my guard and made my pulse stutter.

Something in his voice, in the steady weight of it, cut through my resistance.

I should have refused. I should have shoved him away. I had every reason to. But instead, against my better judgment, I let him shift closer, let him slide an arm beneath mine. 

His grip was firm, but never rough,an anchor more than a cage. He was mindful of the way I clutched at my belly, mindful of the small, terrified creature I had become.

And I didn't protest when he half-carried me through the storm, toward whatever safety he had promised.

I was too drained to ask questions, too numb to protest, each step sending sharp twinges through my ankle. 

All I could do was cling to the warmth of his arm and the steadiness he offered, though every instinct screamed that I shouldn't be leaning on anyone. Not anymore.

We stopped before a townhouse, tall, elegant, its stone facade softened by ivy and rain-darkened wood. Golden light spilt from the windows, casting a gentle glow that seemed impossibly warm compared to the storm outside. 

I froze, blinking up at it, throat tight. "This... this is safe?" My voice was barely more than a rasp.

Azriel glanced at me, his face unreadable in the glow of the moon. "Yes. You'll be safe here."

He shifted his wings slightly, opening the door with a hand still braced against me. The warmth that greeted us was immediate, wrapping around me like a soft blanket. 

The faint scent of cedar and spice clung to the air. 

My boots squelched against polished wooden floors, and I hesitated just inside, dripping water onto a rug that looked far too fine for someone like me to ruin.

"Whose house is this?" I asked finally, my voice small but wary, eyes darting over the cosy sitting room, the plush furniture, the flickering fire in the hearth. Everything about it was too rich, too... cared for. "It's beautiful."

"Rhysand's," Azriel said simply.

I stopped dead. "Rhysand's?" My voice cracked. I stared at him, incredulous. "The High Lord? You brought me to the High Lord's house?"

His hazel eyes cut back to mine, calm, steady, unbothered by my panic. "Yes."

I gaped, words tumbling out too fast. "I can't—he'll know, he'll be furious—"

"He won't," Azriel interrupted, quiet but firm. "He wouldn't want you in the street. Not like that. You're safe here."

Safe. The word again. It echoed in my chest, rattling against every broken shard inside me. 

I still didn't fully believe it, but something in the way he said it, absolute, immovable, made my shoulders sag despite myself.

Azriel led me down a short hallway, past shelves stacked with books and paintings that seemed far too personal for a High Lord's home. 

He pushed open a door to a bedroom, softly lit, the bed neatly made with thick quilts. The fire in the corner crackled, already filling the space with a golden warmth that smelled faintly of pine.

"You'll sleep here," Azriel said, his voice low. He stepped back, as though giving me room to breathe. "I'll bring you some dry clothes."

Before I could protest, before I could tell him I didn't belong here, didn't deserve this kindness, he slipped away. His shadows lingered for half a heartbeat in the corner of the room before melting after him.

I stood frozen, dripping rainwater onto the rug. My hand clenched around the edge of my coat, my other braced over the swell of my stomach. 

For the first time tonight, the silence pressed in, not the suffocating silence of being abandoned, but something gentler. Quieter.

The door creaked open again, and Azriel returned, carrying folded clothes. 

A loose shirt and soft trousers. He set them on the chair near the fire without a word, but when he straightened, his gaze met mine.

"Thank you," I whispered, my voice catching on the weight of it.

Something flickered in his hazel eyes, something unreadable, something that made my chest ache. He only nodded once. Then he turned and left, closing the door quietly behind him.

And suddenly I was alone.

For a long moment, I just stood there, shaking, staring at the fire as warmth seeped into my frozen skin. 

The tears came before I could stop them, silent, shuddering, falling hot and fast down my cheeks. I pressed a hand to my mouth, as though I could swallow the sound, but my shoulders trembled with the force of it.

When the sobs finally eased, leaving me hollow, I changed into the clothes he'd brought. 

They were soft and smelled faintly of smoke and leather, and for a moment I buried my face in them, as if they might anchor me. Then I slid beneath the thick sheets, curling on my side, one hand still cradling my stomach.

The fire crackled steadily and the storm fading to a muted whisper against the windows.

Azriel's POV -

I shouldn't care. I didn't even know her.

That was the thought that circled in my mind as I stood outside the door to the room I'd given her. A stranger. Pregnant, alone, drenched in rain. She should not matter to me.

But the image of her collapsed on the cobblestones, one arm wrapped desperately around the swell of her stomach was carved into me like a scar.

When I'd seen her stumble, soaked through, trying to hold herself together while those drunk males closed in, something had shifted. Something sharp had seized my chest, unfamiliar and unwelcome. 

I'd felt anger, yes, fury enough to make my shadows coil, dark and ready. 

But beneath that, deeper, was something else. Something I couldn't name.

My shadows had whispered her fear to me, wrapping around her trembling form even before I reached her. Fear laced with pride, stubborn and brittle. 

She had tried to shove me away, to insist she didn't need help even as she swayed on her feet, ankle twisted, soaked to the bone.

But her hand... her hand kept drifting to her stomach. A small, protective gesture that told me more than words ever could. 

It wasn't weakness I saw. It wasn't shame. It was strength, fragile and desperate, and it cut me open in a way I wasn't prepared for.

It wasn't pity I felt, I hated that word. No. This was something else. Something that unsettled me more than I wanted to admit.

Now, standing outside her door, that feeling only grew.

The townhouse was quiet, save for the low crackle of the fire downstairs. Then I heard it.

Soft, muffled cries. The kind someone tried to swallow down, to bury beneath quilts and silence. The kind of sound that slipped past all defences, threaded through stone and steel and found its way straight into the chest.

It hurt. Gods, it physically hurt to hear her cry.

I curled my scarred hands into fists at my sides, resisting the urge to push the door open and offer—what? Comfort? I had none to give. My entire life had been built on silence, on secrets, on carrying pain alone. 

What right did I have to tell her not to do the same?

And yet... something about her shattered edges, about the way she'd tried so hard to stand tall even as the storm broke her down, struck a chord deep within me. 

A chord I had buried years ago, back when I learned that no one was coming to save me either.

My shadows brushed against the doorframe, restless. 

They didn't whisper of threat, they whispered of sorrow. Of exhaustion. Of a female who had been pushed past every limit and still, somehow, was clinging to herself and the child she carried.

I didn't know the full situation. My shadows could only tell me so much. But I knew enough, whatever it was, it had hurt her. And that hurt lingered like a bruise in my own chest.

I exhaled slowly, forcing myself to turn away from the door, to let her grieve in peace. But as I descended the stairs, shadows still clinging tightly to me, one truth gnawed at me, undeniable and insistent.

I was supposed to leave her be. I was supposed to walk away. But I already knew I wouldn't.

Not tonight. Not tomorrow. Not until I was certain she and that child were safe.

A/n - First part and we start off with reader's POV, giving a glimpse into what's going on and where we are going with it :)

Predictably, she doesn't want a handout but for her baby's sake she give's in x

Azriel's POV is him just saying "well, I'm in too deep now... might as well see this through." Expect stoic spymaster energy, but with a soft spot creeping in faster than he probably wants to admit!!

Thanks so much for reading <33

He had just left a winery after purchasing Cassian and Mor’s long list of demands, face buried in the damn list, when he had stumbled into something. Or someone as it seemed. Grunting, he looked down and found a small girl staring up at him, scowling.

Now Azriel was not good with kids, had never known how to dealt with them. The closest had been his nephew, Nyx. And even with him, Azriel had been terrified at first, too scared that he would do something wrong, would somehow hurt the little boy. For some time, he had downright refused to hold Nyx, consumed by his fear and doubt. It wasn’t until that Rhysand had almost shoved the boy into his arms, slapping him across the head for his ‘stupidity’ as his brother put it, that he had started bonding with the boy more.

Now, however, he was pulled back reality as the girl before him snapped at him,

“Hey! You dropped my ice cream, mister.”

Azriel was taken aback. Usually kids, parents included, shied away from him. They were all too intimidated by him; by his title, his shadows... his scars. So Azriel stopped bothering about them altogether. So for this little girl to be so unabashedly reprimanding him for causing her to drop her ice cream, definitely took him by surprise.

“I’m sorry?” Azriel asked, still not grasping the situation at hand.

“You should really watch where you’re going. That was my favourite flavour and its gone because of you.”

Azriel looked around, trying to locate either of the child’s parents, not wanting to abandon her in the middle of the busy street. Just as he was about to ask her where they were, a woman exited one of the shops and frantically ran over to them. And Azriel’s heart stopped. Before him now was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. The golden light of the Summer sun made you glow as you rushed over. And Azriel was once again speechless, this time by your breath-taking beauty.

“Aria! How many times have I told you to stay close to me. You know you’re not allowed to wander off,” you reprimanded, not even noticing him standing there, watching you, enamoured.

“Mama, I was just waiting for you outside. Its so stuffy in there. And I was just having my ice cream when this man pushed me!”

The blatantly untrue accusation broke him out of his reverie. Azriel made an incredulous sound and shot back,

“I did not! You were in my way.”

The woman then, finally, turned to take him in. Her eyes wide, obviously realising who he was. She started to apologise when her daughter interrupted her again,

“Well you should keep your eyes open while walking, mister. You have to buy me a new ice cream now.”

“Aria!” you started, horror etched across her face, then turning to him she continued, “I’m so sorry. She’s not usually like this, I don’t know what has gotten into her...”

“Please, no need to apologise. I mean, she’s not wrong. I was a bit preoccupied. I should have noticed her,” Azriel agreed all of a sudden, overcome by a need to appease you, wanting to ease the frown marring her beautiful face. Woah. Where did that come from? You had a daughter, so you must have a husband. Therefore he shouldn’t be finding you anything... let alone beautiful.

‘She’s alone, master.’

His shadows, ever the busy bodies, whispered to him. Well that certainly wasn’t any excuse. If she was alone right now, that didn’t mean she didn’t have someone waiting for her somewhere. Although, looking down he notices the stark absence of a ring on her left hand. Strange...

“Exactly. You were in the wrong. So now you have to buy me a new ice cream,” Aria stated, matter of fairly. Azriel laughed at her dedication to her ice cream before asking,

“Well I have to run right now. I was running some errands for my family. Can I get a rain check?”

“Mama what’s a rain check? It’s not going to rain today, the weather so hot, I’m boiling,” Aria inquired, her brow furrowed as she tried to make sense of the word.

“A rain check is when you postpone something and ask for a later date,” you explained.

“Oh. Then when will you buy me ice cream then, mister?” Aria rambled on, unfazed completely.

Both of you laughed at her dedication to her ice cream. Turning to each other you both exchanged names. After some back and forth, the two of you decided to meet at an ice cream parlour that had just opened in town. Azriel had heard nothing but praises of the place from Nesta and the Valkyries who frequented the place often in their book buying sprees.

Several years later, Azriel would remember to thank Morrigan for sending him out that day. As Azriel flew back home, smiling to himself at the ice cream date he now somehow had with the two of you, he was oblivious to the fact that he had just met the love of his life.

...............................................................................

The ice cream date had been just the beginning of the beautiful journey the three of them would embark on together. The very first thing Azriel had learned about you was that you and Aria were all by yourselves. Aria’s dad, the fucking prick, had taken off just as you had gotten pregnant and had never looked back. The fact shouldn’t have made him as glad as it did. Yes, Azriel was enraged on your behalf and had half the mind of asking you his name just so he could hunt the bastard down. But he was happy because it meant you weren’t off limits. It meant he could maybe, just maybe, convince you to give him a chance.

Although as time passed, Azriel realised it wasn’t you who needed convincing; it was Aria. The eight year old girl was so much more smarter than he had given her credit for. She seemed protective of you in a way. Overtime she put Azriel through so many of, what he later realised, were tests to see if he would stay for the two of them, if he wasn’t just playing around. This continued for some time even after the two of you had officially started dating.

One day, he had been in the middle of going through reports for Rhys, when one his shadows who he always left with the two of you appeared by his side and frantically pulled him up. He had immediately winnowed to your house, knowing his shadow would only leave the two of you if it was an emergency. To say he had been scared would be an understatement. His heart had dropped as he arrived, mind instantly assuming the worst possible scenarios. Was Aria hurt? Were you? What if one of his enemies had gotten to the two of you? If anyone had hurt a single hair on your head, he would-

Storming into the kitchen, Azriel was met by a site of absolute chaos. He was relieved to find the two of you safe and sound. But his relief was short lived, and was replaced by confusion at the state of the usually meticulous kitchen.

Not a single inch of the counter top was empty. Dishes and flour and sugar (was that maple syrup?) were thrown around haphazardly.

You were wiping down the spilled flour when you noticed his presence. Looking up, you exclaimed,

“Oh, Az. When did you get here?”

“Just now. What... what happened here, love?” he inquired, slowly making his way over as he tried to navigate through the mess strewn on the floor.

“Well, I had thought since today was Saturday I could get some more sleep in. But this little miss decided to take it upon herself to make breakfast today,” you answered as you turned to Aria, levelling her with a glare. Azriel was glad he wasn’t on the receiving end. While you were usually the most kind hearted, amicable person he had ever met, he knew you could be firm when you wanted to. Whether that was with Aria whenever she wouldn’t cooperate or some stranger trying to mess with her.

Speaking of Aria, the shadow that had alerted him in the first place, was now playfully slinking around at her feet, like a goddamn pet dog. Ah, the power the two of you had. You, with your endless love and adoration, had reduced Azriel to a love sick puppy within a few months of being together. And little Aria had trained his shadows, the source of his power, the bringer of death and pain for many, to eager puppies. Ah, how love changes a person.

Aria turned to him with a cheeky grin and said,

“I just wanted to do something nice for Mama.”

“Is that so?”

“Mhmm. I don’t know how it got so messy. That’s why i called you here, Azzy. So you can help her clean up,” Aria answered. Another habit the little girl had was giving him the strangest of nicknames.

“Darling, I don’t think that’s why I left my shadows here. You scared me, you know. I thought something happened,” Azriel admonished. While he was always joking around with her, he felt it was important to teach her some responsibility from time to time.

“Aria!” you remarked as you overheard what your daughter had done.

“What? It’s just so much! And Azzy doesn’t mind. Do you, Azzy?”

“No, no I don’t,” Azriel said as he huffed a laugh. He would do anything for the two of you.

Azriel rolled up his sleeves and started gathering up all the dishes to move to the sink. You were dusting off the spilled flour while Aria observed from the corner. The two of you had forbidden her from entering the kitchen while they cleaned. The little devil would surely have created an even bigger mess.

With all the dishes piled up, Azriel was just about to start washing them when Aria slowly tip toed over to him. With her hands behind her back, an innocent smile on her face, she made it impossible for him to scold her anymore.

“Azzy. I have to tell you something,” Aria whispered. He gestured for her to continue but she shook her head,

“No, no. Come here. Its a secret.”

Azriel sighed and leaned down, knowing the little girl would not relent until she got her way. As Azriel leaned closer so she could say whatever she had to, he was met by her palm smacking across his right cheek. Erupting in giggles, Aria ran away before either of them could say anything.

Standing up, Azriel simply stared at you as your hand flew to your mouth to stop your own laughter. If only his brothers could see him now; standing in a kitchen, doing dishes in a house not his own, cheek covered in a hand print of flour. They would surely think he had been replaced by some clone.

Laughing, you walked over to him. You wiped off the flour covering his face, then wrapped your arms around his waist.

“I’m sorry darling. I hope she didn’t interrupt anything important,” you said as you leaned closer.

“Nonsense. Nothing’s more important to me than you. I’d do anything for my girls,” he replied firmly, hoping you understood how much the two of you meant to him.

“I love you Azriel.”

“I love you too,” Azriel replied, with his own smirk. Before you could have the chance to move away, he had grabbed some flour from a stray bowl and blown it all across your face.

Azriel erupted in laughter, at your expression, at your now completely white face.

“Oh you little shit,” you snapped as you reached over for some flour of your own.

The sight was truly comical; the two of you running around like maniacs, chucking flour at each other. The house filled with sounds of laughter and joy.

.....................................................

Several months later, Azriel was staying over at your place for the night. Having been gone to the Winter Court for some recon, Azriel had been away from his girls long enough that he had jumped at the offer.

You were already in bed, waiting for him. Knowing you had a long day at work, Azriel had offered to put away the dishes after dinner and put Aria to bed as well. You had refused at first, knowing he had just returned home and surely must be exhausted as well. But Azriel had heard none of it and had sent you off with your favourite novel and a warm cup of tea.

With everything else done, Azriel now lay in bed with Aria, reading her a story as she slowly dozed off. One thing about Aria was that whenever she was with Azriel, whether that was while he was reading her a bed time story, or sitting on his lap for dinner, or while she rambled about her school to him, she always took his hand. And that always took his breath away.

Just like right now, Aria had his right hand clutched in both of hers. Her soft hands rubbing shapes into his hand, smoothing over the rough scars. When the two of you had started getting closer, he had been hesitant in initiating any contact with Aria, had always kept his distance, since he thought his scars might scare her. You, however had interpreted it as not wanting anything to do with your daughter. And you had expressed this to him with tears in your eyes. Tears that had almost killed him, to think that he had been the cause of your distress. It was then that he had told you of his own insecurities, how he was afraid that his scars might bother the innocent little girl. You had immediately tried to ease his doubt, assuring him that they had never thought any different of him because of his scarred hands.

Looking down, he saw Aria had gone to sleep. He put away the book and slowly eased his hand from hers. He had pulled up the blanket around her, making sure she was properly tucked in. He was just about to get up and leave, when Aria roused. Internally cursing himself for waking her up, Azriel made to run his hands through her hair, knowing it always puts her straight to sleep.

Aria, however, sat up on the bed and threw her arms around his neck whispering,

“I love you, papa. Goodnight.”

And then just as quick got back in bed and went to sleep. Azriel was frozen in place. Tears rolled freely down his face. Aria had never called him that before. Always referring to him through her silly nicknames. And to think... she trusted him enough to consider him her father... it was more than anything Azriel could ever ask for in life.

Leaning down, he kissed the top of her head and slowly said,

“I love you too, my angel.”

Azriel tip toed his way to the door and closed it silently behind him, not wanting to wake the child again.

He moved away from the door quietly for a moment, before practically running down the hallway to tell you what had inspired.

Had someone else been here that day?  It didn’t smell like anyone Elain would come into contact with on a day to day basis.  He paused at the top of the landing thinking that maybe he should just go when he heard Elain retch and he instantly hurried down the hall to find her.  He found her in the bathing room attached to her bedroom, slumped over the toilet.  Her hair was damp from sweat and plastered to her face, and she appeared to have a death grip on the sides of the toilet.

Azriel didn’t even think as he knelt down beside her, pulling her hair back and stroking soothing circles on her back.  She retched again and then slumped back into him with a sigh.  She was trembling slightly and he carefully laid her in the bed before heading back into the bathing room to wet a towel.  When he returned she had curled on her side, the trembling somewhat subsiding.  He sat beside her and used the towel to wipe away the sweat and hopefully soothe her some.

“Elain, what’s going on?”  He asked after he had discarded the towel and gotten her brush to work through the tangles.

She had been quiet this entire time, letting him work and sorting through her thoughts about how she was even about to broach the subject.  It had been a few days since she had last seen Azriel, he and Rhysand had gone to Spring to check in on Tamlin and the state of the Spring Court.  That had been three days prior and also when the sickness had started.  At first, she thought that she may have eaten something bad, but when her symptoms persisted she knew it could only be one thing.

And that one thing scared her.

“I’m pregnant,” she whispered, her voice hoarse from disuse and throwing up constantly.

The brush stilled and Elain closed her eyes, waiting for him to silently get up and leave.  But that’s not what he did.  A moment later the brush continued running through her hair and Azriel hummed, “I hope it’s a girl.”

Elain rolled over, pushing herself up and staring deeply into his hazel eyes, “You’re not upset?”

He huffed a laugh, “I’m not upset, El.  We’ve discussed children before, how you’ve always wanted to be a mother, and how I wanted children too.  Sure the circumstances of this situation aren’t the best given the fact that I’m currently breaking my High Lord’s orders to stay away from you, but I’m happy nonetheless.”

She moved closer to him then, wrapped her arms around his middle, and snuggled close as he laid them both back against the pillows.  “I’m worried about how Rhys will take it.  I know my sisters will be overjoyed and Feyre will probably protect us from Rhys, but at the same time I’m afraid she’ll take his side.”

“El, you have nothing to be worried about, you’re not the one under orders.  I am,” he said as he ran his fingers through her hair.  “Rhys won’t do anything to you or the baby.”  The word felt weird to say… ‘baby’.  Elain was pregnant.  She was carrying his baby.  He was going to be a father.

He pictured Rhysand with Nyx, and how happy he looked whenever he held his son.  He pushed down the part of him that wondered if he would ever get to see his child grow up.  Disobeying Rhysand’s order could get him banned or worse from the Night Court.  Lucien could call for a Blood Duel.  He couldn’t voice these worries to Elain, he didn’t want to add any more stress to her than she already had.

“I still worry,” she said.

“Let’s not think of the what-ifs right now.  Have you thought of names?”  He wanted to get her mind away from the dark and focus on the good.  “I was thinking Rose if it’s a girl.”

“I like that,” she said.  “Or Lily, like the ones that I planted for that older Fae couple a few months ago.”

“The pink ones?”

“Yes!”  It pleased her that he remembered.  She had talked about what she was going to plant in that couple’s garden enough that he should have known what she was referring to.  “Those will be so beautiful when spring finally arrives.”

“What about if the baby is a boy?  Any names for him?”  Azriel glanced down at her, watching as she pursed her lips thinking of anything to name their potential child.

“Ash?  Grover?”  

“I like Ash,” he said.  “I know it may seem odd to name a child after something that could potentially hurt us, but it’s not a bad name.”  Just then her stomach rumbled and Azriel said, “Stay here, I’ll go make you some soup.  Keep thinking of names so we can discuss them when I get back.”

When he returned Elain was sitting up in bed, some of the color had returned to her face and she eagerly accepted the food he offered her.  Between spoonfuls of soup she chatted about names she had considered for both boys and girls.  Her earlier worries were momentarily forgotten as she forged ahead with her ideas.  Azriel put in his own thoughts for names and he couldn’t help when she drifted off to sleep the image of Elain pregnant and glowing with his child.  Spring was only a few short months away and he could see her now standing amongst her flowers, smiling widely, a hand on her growing stomach.

He knew he needed to do something and something fast if he had any hope of a future with Elain.

It was two weeks later when Elain invited her sisters over for tea, she wasn’t sure when she’d start showing, but she was already beginning to notice some differences in her body.  Azriel was there waiting for the other two Archeron sisters to arrive.  Two weeks since he had learned he was going to be a father.  It still didn’t seem real to him at times.  A few days ago when he had been flying around Velaris he pictured a little girl with Elain’s eyes flying beside him.  He felt his heart grow two sizes at that mental image.

The front door of the townhome opened revealing Feyre and Nesta with large smiles.  Those smiles however dropped when they saw Azriel sitting there, hand clutching Elain’s, and the slight green tint to Elain’s skin.  “Mother, please tell me no one’s going to die,” Feyre said.

“No!”  Elain quickly said.  “No, no one is going to die.”

Nesta wandered closer, her eyes narrowed, “Then why do you look as if you’re going to be sick?  And why is Az here?  I thought this was going to be a sisterly luncheon.”

Elain and Azriel shared a look with one another and then Elain decided to just come right out with why they had been brought there.  “I’m pregnant,” the words rushed out of her and some of the tension in her shoulders melted away.

Feyre plopped down onto the couch and stared at her sister, “I–”

“It’s Azriel’s,” she said next.  “I mean that’s probably obvious, given he’s here and holding my hand.  But with Lucien and I having a mating bond I didn’t want there to be any mix-up.”

Azriel kissed her temple and said, “El, you’re rambling a bit.”

“Right,” she clamped her mouth shut to give her sisters time to absorb the news.

Nesta spoke after five minutes of silence, “Why are you only telling us and not the rest of the family?”

“That would be because of me,” Azriel said.  “Rhysand ordered me to stay away from Elain over a year ago.  I stayed away but I hated being away from Elain, and I hated that I had hurt her because of what Rhysand wanted.”

“Obviously this pregnancy isn’t ideal,” Elain jumped in.  “Given that going against Rhysand’s orders on Azriel’s part is a big issue.  But we’re both happy about this, we want this.”

“I know the Valkyries and I will protect you,” Nesta said.  “I’m not going to let Rhysand do anything to you.”

“It won’t be me that he does something to, Nesta,” Elain said, her eyes drifting up to Azriel’s face.  “I’m not the one he ordered to stay away.”

“What are we going to do then?”  Nesta asked.  “I’m not letting Rhysand ruin your happiness all for some mating bond you clearly haven’t wanted.”

“I’m working on something now,” Azriel told them and even Elain looked at him with confusion written on her face.  “Trust me,” he murmured to her.

They did enjoy tea after that and Feyre was already asking if she could paint the nursery and Nesta was thinking of all the bedtime stories she could get the child.  Elain leaned into Azriel’s side as her sisters spoke and smiled, she was happy to know that they were on her side and would make sure that the child was happy and healthy.

Before Nesta left she turned to Azriel and Elain and asked, “May I tell Cassian?  I don’t feel right keeping this from him.  I’ll make sure he understands that Rhysand isn’t to know, but I can’t keep this from him.”

“Of course,” Elain said.  She didn’t want Nesta to have any secrets from her mate, it was bad enough Feyre was going to have to keep this from Rhysand.  But with Cassian in the know it would be yet another person on their side.

By month six Elain could no longer hide the fact that she was pregnant behind dresses.  She was beginning to show too much and they needed to come clean before people began to whisper and news reached Rhysand.  It was amazing that they had been able to keep it from him thus far, but their luck was running out.  Azriel came the afternoon she was supposed to head to the manor for family dinner and gave her a reassuring hug.

“No matter what happens, I love both of you,” he whispered.  “So much.”

She gripped his shirt tightly and willed herself not to cry, and as if their baby knew that their parents were upset they began to kick.  Elain let out a startled laugh and Azriel placed his hands on her stomach, smiling down at the bump.  “I think they're trying to tell us not to be sad,” she said.

Azriel knelt before Elain, placing a gentle kiss on her stomach, “Don’t worry darling, I can never be sad with you and your momma around.”

The baby seemed to settle at his words and Elain brushed some of his hair out of his eyes.  “I love you, Az.  We both do.”

He stood and kissed her forehead, “I’ll see you in a little while, love.  We’ll get through this together.”

He left without another word and made his way to the manor ahead of Elain.  She, however, puttered around the townhome giving herself some time to prepare, and then she headed out into the streets of Velaris.  Some people stopped to stare at her as she made her way toward her sister’s home.  Many of the people knew her and she could see their shocked expressions.  She smiled at them but kept moving, not stopping to answer anyone’s questions.  When she made it to Feyre and Rhysand’s home she took a deep breath and stepped inside.

The manor smelled good as the food from the kitchens wafted through the halls.  Her mouth watered and for once her stomach wasn’t turning despite the stress she was feeling.  Apparently, the baby’s hunger outweighed her nerves.  Elain followed the sound of her family’s voices and when she entered the living room a hush fell over them.  Mor grabbed onto Feyre’s arm, Rhysand’s smile faded, and Amren looked a tad shocked.

Only Feyre, Nesta, Cassian, and Azriel remained unbothered by her swollen belly.  “Hello,” her voice was weak and she wished that she could turn right back around and go to the safety of her home.  To a place where only she and Azriel existed and court politics did not matter.

“By the Mother,” Mor said.  “How the hell did you manage to keep this a secret for so long?”

Elain shifted from foot to foot and Nesta stood and helped her over to the chaise lounge so she could sit.  “Magic I guess,” she tried to joke, but she could feel Rhysand’s eyes on her and her heart began to race.

“I didn’t realize that you and Lucien had accepted the bond,” he said casually, a hint of something in his voice that she couldn’t decipher.

Elain and Feyre’s gazes met briefly and she felt Nesta squeeze her arm, Cassian subtly moving closer to Azriel.  “We didn’t,” she said.

Rhysand’s eyes narrowed and darkness seemed to start leaking from him, “I thought I ordered you to stay away from her.”

Azriel straightened, “You did.”

Rhysand turned fully to Azriel now, rage written all over his face, “Do you understand the political ramifications of this?”

“He does,” a new voice said and everyone turned to see Lucien lounging against the doorway.  His gaze cut to Elain before going to Rhysand.  “Which is why he came to me.”  Elain looked at Azriel who nodded his head to her.  “He told me about the order you gave him, but how he had broken it.  I was reminded of myself once upon a time when I would have even gone against my fath- Well I should say Beron's orders for the female I loved.”

Azriel moved toward Elain and placed a hand on her shoulder, “I planned for every contingency.”

“That he did,” Lucien murmured.  “You see when Azriel came to me, he accepted that I might call a Blood Duel, but he asked me to hear him out.  I pride myself on being above barbaric ideals that Beron clings to and to be honest after years of Elain and I skirting around one another I can’t say I care too much.  We made a deal, I don’t challenge this and he tell me a secret that my mother had been holding onto for centuries.”

It was Feyre that spoke, “You knew?”

“That Helion is Lucien’s true father?  Yes, I wouldn’t be a good spymaster if I didn’t,” Azriel replied.  “It was the one piece of leverage I had if things didn’t go as planned.”

“Since learning all this Helion and I have taken it upon ourselves to get to know one another.  He offered me a place in his Court and I accepted.  Though for my mother’s sake until Beron is gone we won’t be disclosing that information to the world.”

“I can’t believe that once Beron finds out that he’ll be okay with this,” Rhysand hissed.  “He’ll know that Elain’s child was not fathered by you.  He’ll know you didn’t accept the bond.  I can’t let this go unpunished, I gave a direct order.”

“Then Elain and Azriel can come live in Day with me.  My father would be more than happy to house them and you would save face with Autumn.”

“Rhys,” Mor’s voice was low.  “This is Az we’re talking about!”

Rhysand’s jaw clenched, “I have no choice, I can’t have one of my own Court members disobey a direct order and get away not punished, not for something like this.  Elain is free to stay, I didn’t place the constraints on her, but Azriel should have known better.”

“I’ll go collect my things,” Azriel said and Elain stood to go after him, but Lucien stopped her.

“Are you going with us?”  He asked.

Elain looked back at her family, she didn’t want to leave her sisters, but she knew she couldn’t stay, not without Azriel.  Nesta and Feyre knew it too because she felt Feyre caress against her mental shields.  “I am,” she said when she looked back to Lucien.  “I won’t leave Az.”

“Come, I’ll help you pack and we can sort out our mating bond as we do.  Azriel can meet us at the townhome and then we can head to Day.”  He offered her his arm and she accepted it, not looking back as he winnowed them away to the townhome.

Feyre holding onto Nyx, Nesta, Cassian, and Mor waited outside the room where Elain and Azriel were waiting.  A healer from Dawn had arrived to help with the winged delivery.  And after hours Elain and Azriel were holding a precious baby girl.  Elain held her against the bare skin of her chest to build a connection between her and her newborn daughter.  Azriel stared down at her in amazement.  

“She’s so beautiful,” he whispered, afraid of disturbing the beautiful moment.

Elain chuckled, “Do you want to hold her?”

He nodded and they traded off, he watched as she yawned and he knew he would keep her safe forever.  There was a knock and Lucien poked his head in, “May we come in?”  Elain motioned for her family to enter the room and Feyre and Nesta were there immediately cooing over the bundle in Azriel’s arms. 

Helion grinned at Azriel, “How does it feel?”

He looked up at the High Lord and smiled a smile that none of them but Elain had ever been privy to.  “I still can’t believe she’s real,” he said.

He passed her to Nesta who gently rocked the little girl in her arms.  Lucien looked at Elain, “Is there anything you need?”

In the months since she and Azriel had come to Day, she and Lucien had become good friends.  It had been awkward at first, but they found their footing eventually.  Lucien had admitted to her a month after her arrival that he and Vassa were together and had been for some time.  She gave him a tired smile, “I need a nap.”

He laughed, “Completely understandable.  Want me to shoo everyone away so that you can rest?”

“Please,” she said before she yawned.

“All right, everyone who isn’t the father out of the room.  The mother needs some rest,” Lucien said as he began ushering the others out of the room.  Complaints were known and Nesta promised to keep a watchful eye on their daughter while she got some sleep.

Azriel slid under the covers with her and pulled her against his side.  “Get some sleep, love.  We can sort out a name once you wake up.”

Azriel held her in his arms, content as could until Feyre came back in saying that Elain should try feeding her.  He gently nudged her awake and Elain blinked a few times, slowly coming out of her dreams and saw that Feyre was there with her squirming baby girl.  Elain held out her arms and happily accepted the newborn before Feyre took her leave to give them some privacy.  As Elain fed the baby Azriel began asking about names.

“So I know we originally talked about Rose and Lily, but have you thought of any others you like more?  Or are they the two contenders for baby girl?”  

“I love the name Lily,” she said.  “I feel like it fits her well, don’t you?”

“I do,” he agreed.  “Lily Archeron, it fits her perfectly.”  He slowly started getting up and said, “I’m going to go get us something to eat.  I’ll be back.”  Azriel left the room with Elain still holding Lily and murmuring softly to their daughter.  He didn’t want to leave them, but he knew Elain needed something to eat and he was getting hungry himself.

On his way to the kitchens, he heard Nesta’s voice raised and angry coming from one of the alcoves near where Elain’s room had been.  He drifted that way to see what could have made his sister-in-law so upset when he came face to face with Rhysand for the first time in months.  His brother looked thoroughly chastised, but his eyes met Azriel’s, and his shoulders slumped.  Everyone turned to see Azriel standing there, a blank look on his face.

Cassian walked over and whispered, “We can have him thrown out.  Helion offered.”

“You have until I get my wife’s food to say whatever it is you need to say before I take Helion up on his offer of throwing you out,” Azriel told Rhysand before motioning for him to follow.  Nesta looked like she wanted to protest, but Cassian told her that they needed to work through this.  Silence persisted as they walked down the hallway together and Azriel said, “Well?”

There was a sigh from Rhysand and then, “I’m sorry.”

Azriel clenched and unclenched his jaw, “What hurt the most was that my own brother thought I merely wanted her for sex.  That maybe, just maybe, I had moved on from Mor and found the person I truly wanted to be with.  That finally after centuries someone I had grown to care for and fall in love with was doing the same.”  He cast a glance at Rhysand who was looking down at his feet.  “I never used her headache powder.”  

That got Rhysand to look at him, “Why?  You suffer from them enough that she took notice and gave you a solution to help with them.”

“Because that is one of the best gifts I had ever received.  That someone took the time to have something made for me that wasn’t just the usual daggers or gag gifts.  For the first time in a long time, I felt seen.  Every time I had a headache I thought about using it, but part of me couldn’t.  I just needed the reminder that she saw me.”

Azriel pushed the door to the kitchen open and waved hello to the cooks who had grown quite accustomed to his and his wife’s presence when they visited the palace.  Rhysand watched as Azriel moved around the room comfortably, managing to dodge the cooks and use his shadows to grab things he needed and lit the burner and began working on some soup.  It reminded Rhysand of he and Feyre in the cabin in the mountains many years prior.

“I’m rescinding the banishment,” he said softly so that the cooks wouldn’t overhear them.  “I realize that I was in the wrong for how I handled the whole situation.  That I should have just talked to you and Elain both about this instead of ordering you as I did.  I was under so much stress, but that’s not an excuse for the hurt I caused, and the worry I must have put on the two of you when you figured out that Elain was pregnant.”

Azriel stirred the soup slowly for a moment and then, “I did stay away from her, but I missed her so gods damn much that I just couldn’t anymore.”  He sighed, “I don’t know if we’ll return right away.  Elain is happy here and I like working with Helion and Lucien.  I just need time.”

Rhysand had figured that this would be his response, “I understand.”  Then he hesitantly asked, “May I see her?”

“That I have to clear with Elain, she’s just as upset with you as I am,” Azriel said as he ladled the soup into two bowls.  “I’ll ask, but if she says no I won’t go against her wishes.”

“Understood.”

They made their way back to the room and Rhysand stood in the hall as Azriel went to see what Elain wished to do.  A moment later Azriel returned with Lily in his arms.  “You and the others can watch her while Elain and I eat.  Don’t drop my child,” Azriel playfully threatened, trying to break some of the tension and tell Rhysand it would take some time, but maybe someday they could be brothers again.

Rhysand took the small bundle in his arms and headed down the hall, cooing at her and telling her someday he would tell her all her daddy’s embarrassing stories.

Years later Elain and Azriel stood in the backyard of their home in Day and watched as a young Lily chased after a butterfly.  Azriel had his arms wrapped around Elain as she giggled at Lily and the way her daughter was trying to mimic the flapping motion of the butterflies wings with her arms.

“She has her own set of wings and yet she’d rather use her arms,” Elain said as Lily jumped in the air trying to catch flight.

Azriel hummed, “She’ll get there someday.”

Elain turned so she could look up at Azriel, “What if we had another one?”

Azriel stilled and stared down at her bewildered, “Are you–?”

“Figured it out this morning when I couldn’t keep breakfast down,” she said.  “We’re going to have another child.”

Azriel let out a shout of joy and Lifted Elain up, spinning her around.  They caught the attention of Lily who came running over and tugging on her mother’s skirts.  “Mommy!  Mommy!”

Elain lifted Lily into her arms and kissed her temple, “Hello sweet girl.  Did you have fun with the butterfly?”

“I don’t want them to turn it off,” Cerridwen hoarsely says, drowned by the ventilator keeping her sister’s body inflating and deflating, her voice faint beneath lapping and crashing waves of dizzying grief. Azriel rises a little, releasing a hand that clutches Nuala’s shoulder. Morbid, to hold a dead body, the leftovers of the person you loved so much. Stranger still to feel gushing rivers of love flooding your senses, urging you to do nothing but hold on. Hold on. This comfort in holding them is cathartic.

He quietly breathes out, afraid of hearing his own breath and missing Nuala’s artificial one. Still hers. He understands now why people sit in silence with their mortally ill loved ones, have no desire to break it. It’s a tank in which to submerge their senses in, listen and count and cherish every last breath and sound they’re making as if it can hold off the inevitable surrender to the siege. One more second. One more minute.

So he bows his head over her shoulder, arm slung over her rising and falling chest, and listens. One more. And another. Here is a fine place to be, now.

________________

Though the eve of the new year is often remembered to be one of the most celebrated nights worldwide with the cheer of wrapping up the past three-hundred and sixty-four days, this one will not only be remembered for being the coldest night of the year. Azriel’s not looking forward to escaping the warmth of Rhys and Feyre’s estate for the howling bitter biting mother-of-all-chills out there. To remain by the fire, explaining the world to dutifully listening pupils interested in every breath of his, while hiding from the world outside, if only but for an hour.

“So we’re celebrating the start of the New Year in a few hours but other countries have already done that, you see,” Azriel is explaining to his nephew the semantics of the clock and time zones while he’s buttoning up his pressed white shirt in the spare room. “See, Nana and Grandad in England are ahead of us so it’s the New Year for them now.”

“How did they beat us?” Felix frowns as he props his jaw in his palms, lying on his stomach as he watches Azriel work the buttons. “Why are we slow tortoises!?”

“It’s not about beating us, it’s not a race,” Azriel replies, glancing at the boy through the mirror. “They’re just closer to the sun when the earth rotates. They see it first.”

“Thun?” Winnie pipes up, sat on the foot of the made-up bed.

“Yeah, Bunny,” he turns, holds one fist up, angled over another low-lying one. “Sunlight falls on us, on earth, and cause we’re going in circles around it—you know, like Rebel trying to get something off her tail—it takes us one year to do it. So sunlight falls on one part of the earth before the other cause while we’re going in circles, we’re also spinning. So like…”

Winnie furrows her brow before Az gestures she come forward and makes Felix stand up.

“Bunny, you’re the sun,” he makes her stand still in the center of the room, and stations Felix a little ways away from her. “Feely, you’re the earth. Now, Feely’s going in circles around Bunny and that’s what?”

“A year?” Felix replies, unsure, as he slowly walks around his cousin.

“Exactly!” Azriel praises. “So, now it’s still 31st, and when this night is over and we start a new number it’s the first day of the New Year, and the new month and the new day. Got it?”

“But…But what about my birthday?”

“Ah, ok,” Azriel directs his attention to his cuffs. “So, you get the idea that one entire round around Bunny means a year?”

“Uhu.”

“On your birthday, it’s when we start counting down from, okay? We have a starting point. That part of the rug, right? The number of the day you were born on, your birthday, is your starting point. So when you finish all the days between, and it’s the fourteenth again, we know that you’ve finished a whole round, and congratulations you’re starting a new year of your life.”

“But it’s not tomorrow,” Felix muses, handing Azriel the remaining cufflink.

“Yep,” Azriel ducks his head over it,

“How can it?”

“Tomorrow’s the earth’s birthday. Wait, no. Tomorrow’s just the year’s birthday. January first means we’ve all finished a whole year.”

“But we have different birthdays.”

“Yes, but collectively as the human race, we just finished one round around the sun.”

Felix twists his mouth. “I’m confuse, Uncle Az.”

Azriel smiles, and ruffles his hair. “I know, Superman. It gets confusing a little at first, then you make sense of it.”

“Whose birthday is it today? Why are Mummy and Daddy having a party?”

“Uh,” Azriel thinks, sliding his tie off the hanger. “The Gregorian calendar.”

“What?”

“Someone called Greg.”

“Is he famfus?”

“Yeah he’s famous. Cause he’s the one who told us how to keep track this way.”

“Azeel.”

“Yes, Bunny?” he loops the smooth tie around his neck beneath the shirt collar and turns to the mirror.

“Thathorus?” she holds up a small fist clenched over a T-rex.

“Oh right, sorry, where was I?”

“You said asturd in space.”

“Right. Right,” Azriel mutters, remembering why he’d strayed off course in the first place, tugging the knot up his neck. “Yeah, an asteroid fell on the dinosaurs from the sky and they went extinct.”

Felix and Winnie stare blankly at him.

“What asturd?” Winnie blurts.

“It’s a…” Azriel trails off. “Like a big, big rock. Some of them are small rocks and others dwarf planets. One of them hit the earth and most species on it went extinct.”

“Tint?”

“Died,” Azriel faces the staring kids.

“All of them?” Felix demands.

“Er, yeah.”

“But there was one on TV!”

“CGI, Feely,” Azriel says sympathetically. “Just a drawing.”

His nephew blinks. “No it’s not,” he points out with utter conviction. “Daddy says they’re still around.”

Azriel blinks, reaching for his suit jacket. “I mean some species survived like birds and lizards. But I’m pretty sure all the big dinos died, Feely.”

His nephew promptly turns on his heel and marches out, calling out for his father at the top of his lungs. Winnie remains staring up at Azriel, clutching her dinosaur and looking at him in earnest while he slides on his jacket. She blinks and looks down at the figure in her hands, one of the dinosaurs she quickly became inseparable from since unwrapping it.

 “Azeel?” she hums.

“Hmm?”

“What that?” she walks towards him, holding up the base of the figure, her fingertips trailing along the carved line into it.

Azriel crouches, and cups his hands around hers. “Well that’s a message. A secret one from me to you.”

“Weally?”

“Do you know what it says?”

She shakes her head.

He gently grabs her index, and places it at the start, dragging it along as he speaks, teaching her the love encoded in it as if it is Braille and he can somehow teach her how to recognize it by any form it comes in. Sight, sound, touch. “It says: To Winnie from Az, with love.”

“Wif wuv?”

“With love,” he murmurs. “Means that every time you play with them, you’ll remember that I love you, Bunny.”

Winnie holds it up before her eyes, before clenching her hands over it and holding it to her chest. “I wuv you too.”

The heater’s warmth is colder in comparison to what her words ignite in him. He finds himself curling over her, hugging her tightly, not really knowing what to do with himself or his emotions. Only knows that if he holds this little girl long enough, maybe everything wrong in the world, in him, will be fine.

“You’ll be good tonight?” he murmurs, finding something holy in the way she is so small and fragile in his arms and yet his chest feels so tender, something so easy to hold and shelter, as if with any more effort he can engulf her whole.

“Mhm,” her muffled hum resonates in his tux.

“You can stay up just a little. But you have to go to bed when Alis tells you to, ok?”

“Otay.”

“Feyre and Rhys aren’t going to tuck you in tonight, or Mama. Okay?”

She curls into herself. A miniscule change in body tension that instils in him a sudden desire to stay inside, cooped up by the fire and wrapped in this embrace. His arms engulf her, but in a realer sense, it is she who has such a hold on him. No one else has managed to tempt him away from his objectives and ambitions. No one else has forced him to realign his priorities simply by existing. He has the sudden urge to do nothing but stay with her throughout the night, drive her nightmares away and put her to bed, surrounded by nothing not of a sense of reinforced safety and care.

But he breathes in.

“You?” she softly requests.

His breath stutters its flight on the way out. “I have to go. But I’ll be back in the morning.”

“One sleep?”

“Yes, Bunny. It’s just one sleep.”

She turns. “Wanna sleep now.”

“You don’t want to stay up with Felix a little? Watch Youtube and cartoons?”

Her determined eyes flicker between his, round and hazel and bright with an intelligence he’s never seen before in a child. She gives one nod. “Wanna sleep now.”

He smiles softly, sliding his fingers down the side of her face, brushing runaway strands behind her ear. It feels clumsy, the action, looks so as well; with gnarled fingers that are not the image of grace—quite the opposite—that do not work in fineness and sharp accuracy the way Elain can reach anything and everything (her daughter’s fine hairs, dead roots in garden beds, his own heart) but by God it is something caring and gentle. The spitting image of so.

“Tell you what—me and Mama’ll tuck you in before we leave and you can play with Felix in the meantime.”

“Don’t wanna be mean,” she says in a small voice.

“Oh no,” he chuckles, cupping her cheeks. “I meant to say you can have fun while we wait to go. Mama needs a few moments to get ready. Okay?”

She nods, stepping back and out of his arms, her eyes never leaving his, not blinking.

“Off you go,” he shoos, facing the mirror and the sullen face staring back at him. He wonders what it means, if it means anything, to stare in a mirror and find no recognition. Nothing. A blank canvas of black brows and cheekbones, and anything in between that would normally carry something of himself empty. He’s never sat with a person less than ten minutes without gauging their self entirely through their body, but it’s an empty, barren canvas he looks at. As if someone had crafted him together and forgot to flip the switch on.

Azriel exhales a long, deep sigh, shoulders deflating entirely, rubs scars into his eyes. This numbness is not alien, nor is it foreign to himself to feel dead, but still it is heavy.

His phone lights up with a ping, a single message that has him frowning and snatching his coat off the bed.

“Hey,” he catches Rhys in the bathroom shaving. “I’ll beat you to the venue. Something came up.”

His brother blinks once as he drags his razor blade along his neck.

“Hey, Winnie?” Azriel tracks her down in the playroom with Felix pouring over a child’s astronomy textbook. She looks up immediately, her expression strange until he realizes that he’d called her by name. “I have to go now. But I’ll see you in the morning, okay?”

She blinks before running towards him. The impact of her throwing her arms around his legs is little stronger than a puppy knocking into him, but somehow it jolts his heart out his ribcage. He crouches down, holds her face in his hands.

“Pomise?”

“Of course,” he gently promises, never one to break his promises.

“One seep.”

He smiles. “One sleep.”

She nods.

“Mama’s going to tuck you in, okay?” he presses a peck to her forehead and directs his attention to Felix coming to bid him goodnight.

“See you in the morning, Superman.”

“G’night, Uncle Az.”

“You too, kiddo.”

Azriel leaves in a hurry, his eyes fixated on his phone, navigating the large house through subconscious memory and had he paused, maybe, been instilled with the thought or the feeling to glance back when he was at the front door, then he’d have had the chance to witness Winnie at the staircase, holding onto the railing and looking through them, watching him go the way she watches everyone else walk out on her. Maybe if he’d seen her expression, or the way her shoulders are slumped and her face revealing a yearning so deep, he’d have decided to fuck the entire world to Hell, to drop his keys and his holster and teach her all about tyrannosauruses and pterodactyls, made her feel safe, loved and happy and cherished. If he’d looked back while swinging open the front door, maybe Azriel would have been forced to recognize what his realigned priorities were.

But he hadn’t, ventured head-on into the coldest night of the year and didn’t look back.

________________

It’s a beautiful night, in hindsight. Though his judgement is biased and impaired, a while later, Cassian remembers that it started out beautiful. Glittering venue, charming hosts, polite waiters, easy fun conversations and not many people going “Oh, EX-Marine, huh? I bet you miss the army, don’t you? Thank you for your service” and he’d gotten Nesta to laugh. If he is able to choose one moment to nominate as the silver lining, it is the flash of her teeth in a grin that is off-guard and soft and her easy laughter while he kept her company, waving off waiters before they can approach.

Cassian isn’t in the habit of lying to himself. Though he keenly misses the structure and sense of purpose that the army had given him, and had felt blinded when he came home with an honorable discharge, and most of his days the pointlessness jumps him, he wouldn’t choose to go back out to wherever he would be stationed next. He doesn’t feel as weightless as he had when he’d graduated school. Not as irresponsible.

So when Nesta curiously asks him if he had the chance and the leg, would he take it, Cassian honestly says no.

“Why?”

And there is where he comes up empty. Why? A plentitude of excuses but not one solid reason. He simply cannot think of a reason to go back out.

“I don’t know,” he replies honestly, hands tucked behind his back and shoulders backed up, leaning his weight on his prosthetic limb.

“It’s a thing you’re good at,” Nesta points out.

“What, killing people?” he raises an eyebrow.

“Looking out for people,” her tone softens. “You’re annoyingly good at it. Like you’re programmed that way.”

He blinks.

She looks away, at the crowd around them and the various different famous faces. Politicians and artists and old-money people. A mix of Rhysand’s social circles, Feyre’s, and his parents’ wide diverse networks. Almost anyone who was anything, and here Cassian is standing next to someone who barely lets herself be known.

“You still do it,” says Nesta, sipping from her glass of sparkling soda. “Your friends, your comrades, anyone who needs help and comes asking. Even those who don’t ask.”

He’s not used to this honest version of a woman who more often than not sets his nerves on fire.

“Well, it’s gentler than the army,” he too looks away. “And I like helping people become better versions of themselves. Physical or emotional.”

“What’s changed?” 

“What, why I wasn’t offering group therapy and opening a gym when I was eighteen?” he snorts.

Nesta concedes with a smile. “I’m just wondering why you didn’t do it sooner.”

“It’s not easy to get out,” Cassian says quietly. “I was lucky to get out earlier than others. Even if I had to lose a leg. I guess, growing up a bit and having my head set straight forced me to look at my world honestly. You know, I had my brothers and Rhys was already starting his family and there Feyre was, and fucking Az, and I couldn’t not stay. It’s not in my nature to leave or abandon. Family’s important to me, and I suppose they need me.”

Nesta’s smile is soft but genuine. “You’d make a great father, if you go for it.”

He cannot stop his own smile. “Ah, one day, hopefully. Cheers, witch.”

“Cheers, cripple,” she clinks her glass with his own. “Ah fuck. Feyre’s cornered by Fungal-Toes, I’ll talk to you later.”

He snorts, watches her walk off with an air of grace and confidence that is weaved into her very being that parts the crowd for her. Not many people walk like they can conquer the very air everyone breathe, but Nesta does it effortlessly. Appearing both confident and deadly, and still managing to look like a well-mannered lady.

His eyes rake the crowd, absent mindedly listening to the music, catching Kallias’ eye briefly and saluting him before the man gestures to the right with a flashing motion of his eyes and brows, returning his attention seamlessly to the old man he is in conversation with.

Frowning, Cassian follows his line of sight, scouting out any potential issue, before he notices Azriel and Rhys in the far corner, and—judging by the dead expression on Azriel’s face and Rhys’s impassive stony face—arguing.

“Shit,” he curses under his breath, making his discreet way towards them. They’re not in a habit to argue, Rhys and Azriel, but the past few months have brought about wired nerves and tensions stifling the very air around them.

“The fuck is going on?” Cassian lowly interrupts them, thumping a hand on each of their shoulders. “Nesta’s got Feyre distracted but I promise you if your wife catches you arguing in public she’ll skin us all.”

“You promised,” Azriel quietly says.

“You do remember the specifics of that fucking promise, don’t you?” Rhys hisses back. “Irrefutable evidence, holistic entrapment and no-one left un-fucking-touched. What the hell have you got? Nothing I can work with.”

“Yes you can,” insists Azriel. “You just don’t want to.”

“Oh, what, I don’t want to publically prosecute powerful people and fail because I’m looking out for my son and wife? You are spot on, man.”

“Can we not leave this for another day?” Cassian forces out through clenched teeth. “Not when literally everyone who matters is watching you.”

“Tell it to Mister Holmes here,” Rhys shoots. “Who’s about to turn this place into a battlefield.”

“Excuse me?” Cassian looks to the quiet man.

“Flair for the drama, Rhys,” Azriel retorts. “Besides, you’re the one—“

“I don’t want to fucking hear ‘he said, she said’.” Cassian interrupts. “Cut it short.”

Azriel stills, for a second, before looking over his shoulder and turning to stone beneath Cassian’s hand. “Careful, Rhys, your wife’s ex-fiance just walked in. Don’t want me to handle it?”

Rhys and Cassian both seize up, and he squeezes Rhys’s shoulder tight. “Don’t make a scene.”

Violet eyes fix themselves onto a moving target, and it’s like the man has turned into a predator. “Five minutes, he’s not gone, I’m throwing him out the window.”

Cassian looks over his shoulder, catching sight of the unmistakable blond man in the swarm of people. “What the fuck does he want,” he mutters. “He’s not stupid to think he could touch Feyre. He wouldn’t make it out alive.”

Azriel looks to the side. “I have it on good authority others might show up.”

Rhys freezes. “Say what?”

“Keep your head,” the detective replies smoothly, his hand brushing his waist and Cassian realizes that his holster’s on beneath the suit jacket. Cassian himself has his Ka-Bar knife attached to his belt, but it’s only due to attachment issues—he doesn’t go anywhere without it. “I’ve got it covered. Don’t do anything.”

“Azriel, I swear to God, he says a word to Feyre and I’ll lose my shit.”

“She’s with Nesta,” Azriel reports softly. “I’ve got someone shadowing them both and someone on Tamlin. He won’t touch her, I promise.”

“Get him out of here.”

Their brother nods once, before quietly slipping away unnoticed. Cassian watches Rhys cut through the crowd towards an unaware Feyre, busy smiling and grinning with someone she knows—

Where the fuck is Elain?

Cassian’s blood pressure skyrockets as his heart rate spikes when he doesn’t find her, not dancing with anyone or speaking to someone, and he’s suddenly pushing people out of his way, hunting down different faces for Elain’s. Last he saw her she was dancing with Rhys and grinning sheepishly, giving an unaware Azriel fleeting glances over Rhys’s shoulder while he said something that had her laughing.

“Where the fuck are you?” Cassian rasps into his phone when the call goes through and Elain’s phone answers.

“Um,” his heart deflates at the sound of her hesitant voice. “Next to the stairs with Mor? What’s wrong?”

“Fucking hell,” he sighs. “Nothing, I couldn’t find you anywhere. Panicked.”

“Is everything all-right?”

Instead of answering, he hangs up as she comes in his line of sight, and gives her a smile as he comes to stand by her.

“Everything okay?” Mor asks curiously. “I just saw Az dashing off. What’s the matter?”

“They saw Shitface,” Cassian mutters. “Tamlin. Rhys’s going to murder him if he gets anywhere near Feyre. Can you go, make sure he keeps his head?”

Mor heads off with a nod and a frown.

Elain turns to Cassian, her hair let down and streaming down her back in well-groomed waves, minimal makeup on her face and sparse glittering jewelry accessorizing her black dress. He’s not sure if it suits her—though elegant and charming, Feyre and Nesta wear the black better than she does. Elain’s looks like it would swallow her hole and make her part of the background, makes her collarbones stand out all too well—color suits her best. He’d kept his thoughts to himself, of course, and continues to do so; no man sane enough would mention anything while sat next to Azriel who spent the entirety of Christmas Eve and day bowed over the dress, adjusting it for Elain better than a seamstress would.

“He’s not going to hurt Feyre, is he?” she quietly asks. “He wouldn’t. Right?”

“Not if he’s got sense in his head,” he replies, keeping an eye out around them. Azriel talking to one of the staff. “But some men don’t have any, Elain.”

“I know.”

“Anyway he can’t. He’d have to go through Az’s nameless soldiers and Rhys. Not to mention Mor and Nesta. I’d like to see him try.”

“Of course he has back-up security to the actual security,” Elain mutters, looking around them. “Wonder who’s ours.”

“You need any security with me around, petal?” Cassian jokes, as Azriel makes his way back to them.

“You need any with me around?” she jokes back, her attention drifting to the man coming to stand beside her, his arm finding a home around her waist. “Hi.”

Azriel smiles down at her. “Hi.”

“Who’s our security, then?” she smiles.

Azriel’s lips turn up, moving easy as breathing. “Cassian doesn’t need any with you around.”

Elain softly chuckles, absently shifting closer into him. He tightens his arm around her as he adds: “And I’d worry for whoever trying to pick a fight with you.”

“Don’t make fun of me,” she quips. “Just claim to be my knight in shining armor and get over it.”

Azriel keeps smiling, staring intensely at her as if there’s no-one else in the entire world much less the room. Cassian doesn’t figure ‘knight in shining armor’ could ever be used to describe Azriel; it’s not a sentence that adequately describes him. But with the way he’s attached himself to Elain’s side, quiet and unassuming, Cassian would say he’s more reliable than a knight on a gleaming white stallion with shining armor that would let the enemy know he’s coming from a mile away. More like a shadow, overlooked and easy to miss, until you felt a knife in your back and saw your organs tumbling out onto the floor.

Cassian’s recollection of that night is a series of pleasant mild events, with the exception of the unsavory people showing their faces that had strained the night but he reckoned then that things could go much, much worse. He remembers a smile stuck to his lips, easily conversing with his family, teasing laughs out of Elain and watching Azriel whisk her off for a dance that had rendered her speechless by merit of some small speech that he uttered in her ear. Speechless and beaming. Grinning wide. He checks in with Kallias, keeps an eye on a blissfully unaware Feyre shadowed by a less-than-blissful husband who manages to still make civil and polite conversation with those he needs to and overall keeps to himself, monitoring everyone and everything while having a mildly pleasant time himself.

Cassian recalls the time that travesty struck so very well, if only because they’d been keeping track of midnight’s approach. On the quarter mark, his eyes slide away briefly from laughing with someone he knew, land on Rhys for a moment and look away but are brought back by the frown on his brother’s face and the disbelieving staring match with his phone. A similar smile wiped slowly off Feyre’s face when she checks a notification on her phone in passing, only for Cassian to watch it clatter to the floor, sliding from between lax unaware finger like soap slipping from wet hands and Rhysand’s face contorting. Cassian recalls it all so clearly, as if he was watching it retrospectively in slow motion, how Rhys’s hand latches onto Feyre’s shoulder and how some words are senselessly falling from his lips, Nesta straightening up with Feyre’s phone, concern laced in her face. What she is asking, but somehow Cassian isn’t hearing anything. It is all quiet and numb in his ears. A chocked sound escaping Feyre, Rhys looking sharply left and right as if he is looking for his guardian angel, the one to fix all his worries. Only for his eyes to meet with Azriel’s, already crossing the distance between them, for him to mutter a sentence that Cassian could read on his lips aided by dread and despair.

Felix…someone broke in—

It is all that Azriel needs, all that anyone needs to leap to action, for Cassian’s limbs to jolt and his body to make contact with adrenaline once more, for Feyre to make a run for it, hitching up her delicate dress in two rough fistfuls and Rhys to bolt. Azriel shooting orders down his phone and at people, something about setting up roadblocks and sending police cars and road names. They scatter, making runs for the exits and cars and Cassian’s run is impeded by a tight prosthetic leg, enough for Elain to catch up with him and loop her arm through his, tightly latching on, asking what is going on in a tight worried voice as they break into the outer car park, Rhysand and Feyre dashing for their car.

“Rhys you’re not driving!” Cassian roars after his brother’s back, snatching his brother’s car keys off a stunned valet. “Feyre, with me!”

“Elain!” Azriel calls out as they break into the cold winter air, Nesta shadowing him with her heels hanging from her fingers and making a beeline towards them with a furious determined expression. Elain’s arm falls from Cassian’s, turning as Azriel catches up with her, her brow furrowed. “You and Nesta are with me.”

“What’s going on?” Cassian hears her ask fearfully, wasting no time getting into the car. He doesn’t hear what she’s told, as he turns on Rhys’s car and slams the door shut behind him, the couple sat in the backseat frozen stiff and petrified.

On a normal occasion, the ride to the estate would have taken the better part of fourty minutes, but a recklessly driving Cassian makes it in thirteen, and if asked then he has no recollection of the exact order of events. He knows they happened, was aware of them, but if asked he wouldn’t be able to confirm the police cars tailing them, the three near crashes that were avoided by some miracle and Cassian’s driving experience, Rhysand throwing up in a bag, Feyre tearfully trying to make sense of the notification on her phone from their security system alerting them of a break in, of some footage from the cameras and Cassian doesn’t want to hear, but he catches words thrown around like they took them, the sight of an army of police cars parked around the estate, the yellow tape being set up, the flashing red and blue and the never ending prayer uttered over and over and over in Cassian’s head: please no. Please no.

An officer coming to meet them, his face tight. Azriel’s car screeching to an abrupt halt behind them, kicking up a roaring storm of dust and smoke behind it, the sisters hurrying out of it, Elain’s face damp with tears. The parents running into the house, Cassian following behind, the officer speaking to Azriel and Cassian hanging behind to know what is going on.

“The kid’s gone,” the officer tells Azriel, who towers over him with hunched shoulders and hands latched on his waist and eyes sharper than that of a hawk’s. “We have footage of it.”

Cassian freezes. Feyre’s cry sharply erupts from the foyer inside.

“And—And the other—“ Cassian finds himself saying, mouth dry as a desert in midday.

The officer’s eyes meet his, brown eyes veiled with sadness.

A sob.

He curtly nods. “Two kids were kidnapped. We haven’t identified the second, do you—?”

Azriel roughly shoves past him, quiet as a storm before it breaks, and Cassian follows him with a sudden flaring pain shooting up his thigh that has him gritting his teeth and resting a hand on the wall as he walks. Surely it is physical pain. Not the sight of his friends devastated in the entryway, Feyre clutching the antique round table with a death grip to keep her standing and Rhys throwing up the acid in his stomach. Elain, standing numbly in the middle, her hands clasped over her mouth with white knuckles and wobbling tears in her eyes and her face paler than it had when she nearly bled to death. Her skirt whispers on the floor as she turns, facing them both, round horrified eyes finding Azriel’s.

Cassian has to stop at the wall, lean against it and clench his shaking hands into fists. His entire body’s trembling and he shakenly finds support in the wall, his jaw clenched tight and breathing accelerated and his eyes fixed on Azriel for some reason. Had some part of him seen him responsible for this? Or looking to him for answers and solutions?

Azriel swipes a scarred thumb along his bottom lip, unblinking eyes on the floor as if he is peering into the very near past, or listening to the echoes of the kids’ cries, for help, for mercy, for their parents. Oh God—Cassian finds a sob erupting from his mouths though he didn’t approve it and tears are splashing against his cheeks. And Azriel crouches down, for a moment Cassian thinks he is surrendering, but his arm reaches out over the black and white checkered floor, picks up something off it, and stares long and hard at the small tyrannosaurus rex in his scarred palm.

Cassian watches something dark and unholy swarm the entirety of his face, snuff out any light to be found in his hazel eyes, one that clenches his jaw and ices over his face and when Azriel looks up at Elain, stands up straight and meets her eyes, Cassian swears it is a demon that does so. The stare in his unblinking eyes is unnatural, no longer human. He cups his hands around her jaw, while her mouth bubbles with tears and sobs, presses his forehead to hers, and wipes away her tears with the pad of a scarred thumb. It seems all that Azriel is reduced to: a resume of scars and experience and bloodshed and effective ruthlessness. Someone's organs were about to tumble on the floor, a knife out of someone's back.

“I’ll bring her back,” he quietly whispers, something of an oath, staring into the very depths of Elain’s soul. “I swear.”

She’s got his arm under her neck, stretched out neatly and the other hand holding one of her own between them like a subconscious promise that breathes hope into her mind despite her reserves. The blanket falling short of his chest, mussed and bunched at his waist and the majority of it over Elain. And still he is warmer than she is. A portable, live heater. She curls closer into him, careful not to majorly move.

The door handle turns, before the door cracks open slowly and pauses. Elain figures who it is just from the momentary pause, where weight is dropped back from tip-toes to feet and she discreetly smiles to herself, hiding it in the duvet as Winnie wanders into the room.

“Mama?” the girl hoarsely whispers, still half-asleep as she makes her way over. 

Elain pushes herself onto her hands, and pulls Winnie up onto the bed as quietly as she can, her baby snuggling into her before Elain carefully deposits her on the mattress between them.

“Boo-boo?” Winnie mumbles, pointing at Elain’s mouth.

“Little,” Elain softly reassures, taking care not to move her mouth much, carding her fingers through her silk-soft hair. “Go to sleep.”

Winnie mumbles some more, her eyes sliding shut as she wiggles a comfortable burrow for herself and turns on her side, slipping into their familiar routine. Elain watches her notice the additional presence she finds herself against, and her eyes blink wider, as she makes sense of what she’s seeing. It’s like watching a cartoon character’s face transform with surprise. The mouth shape, the eyebrow curving and eye widening. Elain holds back a smile.

“Ssh,” Elain whispers in her ear, pulling the covers over her, careful not to tug it from under Azriel’s arm. “Don’t wake him.”

A beautiful smile appears on her small lips as she reaches out a hand and touches Azriel’s jaw softly.

“Tant ‘oo, Mama,” Winnie conspiratorially whispers back.

“Go to sleep,” Elain instructs. “He’ll still be here when you wake up.”

Something must have taught her daughter in her very short years not to trust that notion, because the girl tucks her hands under her cheek and shakes her head.

Elain can’t argue with that, nor can she force her go back to sleep.

“You wanna watch over him, huh?”

Winnie nods. “P..Potet.”

Her heart spasms and she kisses her small head. “It’s okay. Mama will protect you both, baby.”

“Tant ‘oo.”

The time passes by, and the house wakes up. Elain hears Felix go wake his parents, the housekeeper Alis arriving from the back door, Feyre moving in the hallways, Rhys going downstairs and then coming back up to interrupt their peace with a gentle knock on the door.

“Morning, sweetheart,” he whispers, voice hoarse, once he’s seen her awake. “Oh, princess is up too?”

“Nonin, Ree-Ree,” Winnie whispers loudly from her mother’s arms.

“Good morning, princess. Want to get up and have some breakfast?”

“Otay,” Winnie agrees easily.

“Amazing. Why don’t you go see Auntie Fey-Fey downstairs and hash out the menu together? Alis can make you your favorite.”

“Azeel sweeping,” the child points out.

Rhys smiles, the softness easily reaching his eyes in this undisturbed morning. “Is he? That’s good.”

“You want to wake him?” Elain pipes up reluctantly and internally protesting the notion.

“I’m supposed to drop him off at work,” says Rhys. “Didn’t think he’d get any sleep, really. You think another half-hour will do him good?”

Elain glances at his face, visibly exhausted even while he’s resting, dark circles and purple bruises beneath his closed eyes and lines accentuating the fact. She nods, and swiftly extracts both her and Winnie from bed without a hush of disturbance, crosses the room on swift tip-toes, fleetingly smiling at Rhys who closes the door after them softly. 

“How’d you sleep?” he asks as they climb down the stairs.

“Not much,” she admits, lowering Winnie to her own feet. “But I’m okay.”

The morning is a balm to Elain’s heart, as her nephew vocally delights at the sight of her and gives her a tight embrace, and Winnie’s already squealing and laughing with her family before long as Rhys and Feyre argue over breakfast till Elain interjects and takes the wheel.

Coffee and showers and lots of subdued laughter. Brushing teeth, braiding hair, getting dressed and the quiet reassurance that things can be okay, will be okay, if they’re together to look out for each other, holding on to each other.

“Remember I have that thing at two,” Feyre presses a kiss to Rhys’s cheek and loops her arms around his shoulders as he scrolls through his phone with his coffee absent-mindedly held aloft in one hand.

“Mm, yeah, I remember. I’ll be there.”

She leans close and audibly whispers in his ear, as he looks up and bears witness to his sentence. “I swear to God if your secretary ‘forgets’ to clear a meeting you magically happen to have, I’ll punch her in the fake tits so hard she won’t be able to breathe for a month.”

He barks a startled, loud laugh as Elain snickers discreetly into her coffee and Felix is staring at them blankly wondering what is so funny.

“Don’t worry,” Rhys stands, and kisses her with the sweetest, tooth-rotting love-infested look in his eyes that makes Felix pretend to gag in his pancakes. Winnie giggles at the spectacle, which only triggers further gag-reflex semantics from her cousin.

“What’s going on?” Elain asks her sister as she takes a seat next to her.

“Nothing serious, just a doctor’s appointment,” she reassures her, as if the mention of doctors called for normalcy in the first place.

“Everything all-right?”

Feyre shades the side of her face with her hand so her son can’t see her mouth ‘Might be pregnant.’

‘Ooh’ Elain responds and then grins at her ‘I knew it!’.

Feyre shrugs exasperatedly before glancing at the time on her smartphone. “Better get a shift-on, Mister My-Secretary-Isn’t-Into-Me.”

“She’s not,” Rhys warns, before stretching. “I’ll go get dressed. Would you do the honours of waking Sleeping Beauty, Elain?”

As if she’d give that opportunity up.

But the day’s already out to get him. Sinks her fangs and nails into his flesh before he has a chance to wake up, betrayed by his own mind into frightful dreams he cannot suppress or control, the irony of finally managing a night of deep sleep that betrays him too cruel for Elain to bear. Elain catches him lash out just as he leaps up in bed, a strained shout of “No!” escaping him before his mind registers his surroundings, his outstretched arm slowly dropping to the mattress.

His body deflates, and he buries his face in his hands. Elain’s gathering him in her arms before she tell herself to move, and he’s sobbing in her shoulder before she can even say a word.

“I can’t do that to you,” he sobs, the syllables breaking in tone and rising sharply muffled in her clavicle. He clutches her tightly, with shaking arms, pulling her close, sobbing more, so fucking petrified in a way she’s never seen him be before. She’s never seen someone more terrified in her entire life, and she’d watched her entire classroom of children hide for their lives in a shooting.

“Calm down,” she murmurs, running her fingers in his hair, pulling him close as he latches on tightly enough to permanently fuse her to himself. “It’s all-right. It’s okay to be scared.”

He cries, shattered wheezes and broken breathing and a spillage of precious crystal tears overflowing like they’ve never had before. Like she’s already dead and it’s his fault and her blood’s covering his body.

“I’m here,” she whispers thickly, fighting back tears. “I’m still here. It’s okay.”

“Mama?”

Fuck, she didn’t hear Winnie come up. “Baby, it’s okay. Go downstairs, Winnie. It’s okay.”

The girl lingers in the doorway, fearfully watching them, wide-eyed listening to Azriel’s unquiet sobs. She walks in, ignoring Elain’s sharp order to go downstairs, and holds onto the pants of Elain’s jeans. Azriel trembles the way buildings in earthquakes do, too far gone to gain his wits back. Elain desperately rubs his curved back, over and over, incessantly shushing and hushing him.

“I can’t lose you.”

“You won’t.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay. Life’s not guaranteed for anyone. It’s okay to be scared.”

“Azeel,” Winnie pipes up, tears wobbling in her eyes as her lips pout. “Iss okay.”

“Hear that? Winnie thinks everything’s going to be okay. She’s not wrong. Come on, Az, take a deep breath. It’s going to be all-right.”

“Azeel,” Winnie reaches out, pats his knee. “Azeel. A-zeeel. Azeel!”

He violently hiccups, face buried in Elain’s shoulder, hands fisting her sweater. She rubs her hands over his back, rhythmically, repeatedly. When he stops shaking, and Elain’s shoulder’s positively soaked, she tilts his head to catch his eyes.

“It’s okay,” she softly insists, glistening eyes flickering between hers, face damp and distressed as he looks up at her. “You’re gonna make sure we’re all ok, aren’t you? Yeah, ‘cause you’re the smartest, kindest person I know and you can make sure we all are ok.”

He presses his lips together, the skin around his eyes tightening.

“You can do it,” she insists, leaving no room for doubt, vanishing it the way she vanishes cobwebs with a duster. “And you will.”

“Azeel,” Winnie reaches out her arms. “Won hurt, bees strong.”

His expression crumbles, slumping against Elain’s chest as he sadly looks at Winnie.

“Oh, Bunny…”

She climbs on the mattress when she’s not lifted up, and determinedly worms her way into his lap, squishing herself between them. She throws her arms around his torso, barely reaching his sides, and stubbornly presses her face to his chest.

Azriel deflates against them. Eyes sliding shut, sigh fading away like wind in the mountains.

___

He didn’t think that so soon again he’d be staring down the barrel of the executioner’s gun. But there he was that night. Had he suspected it, maybe he would have stopped Nuala from dashing after the too-good-to-be-true tip she receives on the phone. He was too busy grabbing his coat and running after her as her partner, the backup she didn’t ask for but Varian felt was best someone went with her and he had his hands tied with a new case. And had he known, damnit, he’d have made her sit down and stay. But he hadn’t heard what she was told, what her tip was, too busy in his office piecing his incriminating memoirs into a sensible prosecutable case. Only that Nuala had shot off like a bullet escaping its chamber, shouting over her shoulder something about jackpot.

“Ask for fucking backup,” Azriel shoots at her the second he is out of his haphazardly parked car and she is checking her gun. He studies the construction site, empty and abandoned at the late hour, and the large building before them. “What is it?”

“Tamlin Monroe,” she slides the gun in its holster and makes her way towards the building, ducking under the red and white tape restricting entry into the site. “Meeting Amarantha. In there.” Azriel’s heart drops and he follows her in.

“My source said she’s giving him an assignment,” Nuala adds quietly, her feet silent as she climbs the front stairs into the empty open space meant for a large entrance.

“Amarantha?” He repeats, just to make sure he’s heard her correctly.

“Meeting Monrose,” she confirms softly. “If I can tag them…”

Azriel’s heart has escaped his chest. Then she’d lead them to Hybern, to Anvil, right to the burial site where most skeletons are buried.

He pulls his gun out.

“We’re not going to engage,” Nuala warns.

“But I’m not taking chances,” he slides the magazine out and clicks it back in place. Debris and cement crunch and scratch beneath his shoes. “And we won’t split up.”

“We’d find them better and—“

“No,” he says flatly. “Together or not at all.”

“Fine,” Nuala grumbles.

“I didn’t know he got out,” Azriel says softly, his mind darting to his sister in law and his brother. A warning is due to them, a non-alarming notice. Tamlin was obsessed with Feyre even after she’d betrayed them, Azriel’s not sure that a few years in a cell cleared it out of his head.

Empty first floor, they sweep it together quiet and quick as a late night breeze passing over a hill. Azriel palms his gun, shoulders hunched and ears finely tuned and feet treading with more care than they would over cracked ice in a frozen lake. It is in times like this that his mind absolutely shuts up, and nothing is heard as every muscle and bone in his body is tensed up in anticipation, an army called to standby, waiting for the announcement—a drill or action?

A scuffing sound and he’s whipping around, arm outstretched, heart hammering in his ears—drill or fucking duty? Nuala at his five, just as tense and quiet.

Mistaken tip or jackpot?

Five floors they search, like listless shadows on walls, the cold violent air numbing the skin on his face frozen until the sixth floor yields something interesting.

It’s the smell of perfume. Feminine, and distinct.

“Someone was here,” he murmurs. “Or is. Take the right, I’ll go left.”

Nothing. He checks and double checks, sweeping empty rooms and checking building equipment. Goes so far as to check the exterior of the walls just for the off-chance someone’s waiting or hiding outside—

“No!”

Heart drops as he shoots off, gun at the ready, leaping over mounds of cement and blocks and half-finished walls, towards Nuala. Where he finds her staring in horror at a darkened corner, her arms slack at her side, her flashlight rolling at her feet and her eyes wider than they’ve ever been—

“Nuala—?”

“No, no, no, no—“ she panics, stumbling over the words and her own feet. Azriel’s stomach lurches, because light or none, those are a pair of human bodies hanging against the wall. He snatches the flashlight off the floor, shines it on their faces and wishes he hadn’t because Jurian’s face is missing an eye, face infested with rot and maggots worming their way out of his empty socket and a gunshot in his forehead, grey and pale. And hanging next to him with his hands swinging from his neck is someone Azriel’s never seen before but Nuala’s horrified intonation of “Henry” says enough, the swinging of his detached crushed jaw and the blood coating his entire front a morbid image speaking of the Heptad’s execution.

Nailed to Jurian’s chest is a board that Azriel forces himself to shine the light on: REAP WHAT YOU HAVE SOWN. And beneath it, the venta black executioner’s mask stamped starkly clear.

“Oh fuck,” Nuala hoarsely whispers, numbly stepping into the doorless room just as Azriel finds his voice.

“We have to get out o—“

But he never managed to finish his sentence, or hear what Nuala was saying to herself in horror, or say anything when Nuala’s foot trips a thin wire. His hand shoots out before it happens, or maybe as it does, he doesn’t have any recollection of what was or is or any sensible comprehension of the series of events. Only that his hand clamped on her shoulder, violently yanked her back as the room exploded, and in an unholy violent consecutive series of explosive events other bombs are triggered like dominoes falling on each other. And he’s on his back, fire exploded everywhere, a severed limb over his chest, his ears ringing and head spinning when he realizes he’d momentarily blacked out. He stumbles upright, though he’s unaware what is up or down and where he is, isn’t sure where gravity is tugging him because it’s everywhere and his vision is blurry. It’s smoky. And loud. The ground beneath his palms and knees trembling violently, threatening collapse. Something falls on his back and he cries out, loses his holding and collapses on his side. Everything is in circles. He wants to close his eyes but his heart is screaming with the way it’s hammering inside him. He tries to breathe. Grasping at pure air and smoke and trying to find anything to get himself upright. When he does, violently coughing and heaving for breath, he tries to look through the smoke.

Nuala, he tries to shout, but he’s lost his voice and any mental function. What he sees is a head and part of a shoulder beneath stone and dust. His vision hazes out, his head tips to the side but the order is clear in his mind. Forward. So he does. Makes himself grab her shoulders and pull her out from beneath the rubble, to stumble up on his feet—or is it his hands? Where is up? Where’s down?—and heave her into his arms. It’s entirely autopilot, his mind and body running a coup while the system that governs them crashes. Right, they order. He runs so, towards where the stairs had been. Explosions going out all around him, walking-stumbling-running through fire. He twists his ankles, falls to his knees, drops to the floor, gets back up, never once letting go of her limp body clutched against his chest in a death-grip. He falls down the stairs, multiple landings, crashing against walls. Hands tight on her, her. Nuala. Get them out. Outside, outside, outside, outside. OUTSIDE. GET OUTSIDE. THE WALL’S GOING TO DROP DOWN ON THEM.

It’s like running in his dreams and perhaps this is all one big nightmarish hallucination? He cannot think, at all. Running towards the nearest opening, narrowly evading rubble falling down before him, the black night outside the brightest finish line in sight—one more, one more step, one more, one more!

He collapses onto the outdoors stairs and rolls the entire landing down, Nuala’s body crashing a foot before him as the pair of them finally reach a stop on the ground outside, bones crunching. The stars wink at him, he feels himself forcefully blinking, but doesn’t know if he is, or if those are the stars, he’s getting up. Falling back down. He cannot move anymore. Mind and body calling it quits now that he’s outside.

Pushing himself up, only to fruitlessly collapse against his side. Nuala in his sight. Eagle-spread body and matted hair and dust coating her body white. It coats him like violently exploded baby’s powder save for the red blood on his palms and sleeves.

His eyelids collapse shut against themselves.

-----

If there is any place on Earth that Rhysand actively dislikes being in, it has to be the intensive care units of hospitals. Other departments he can stomach: paying a friend a brief Get-Well visit after a burst appendix; a nasty chest infection needing monitoring; congratulating someone on a new baby; broken bone—whatever the manageable reason. But the ICU meant something personal, dangerous and entirely out of his hands.

He wonders when Azriel put him as his emergency contact, how confident had his brother been in him being his saviour in crisis?

Rhys stares at his ashy-coloured face and tries to find it in himself. All there is in him is fear. It makes his hands freezing cold, clenched over his cellphone, his heart rate higher than normal. When the phone buzzes he nearly jumps out of his skin, the buzz revealing a short text from Elain, of all people.

He clenches his jaw, his eyebrows knitting together as he assess Azriel spread on the bed, his breathing irregular and noisy. Another buzz. Cassian.

Another.

Another.

Another.

Rhys stuffs the phone in his pocket and clenches the side railing, screws his eyes shut while counting, very slowly, to ten. By eight, he’s calmed down enough to wilfully control his breathing. Takes one mighty breath in, holds it as his abdomen trembles and then slowly lets it out.

His brother’s going to be all-right. Smoke in his lungs and an infection and little burns and scratches and cuts and bruises but fucking alive and well. He was told that had they remained in the burning building, neither would have lived. Whoever pulled them out saved their lives. Rhys reaches out and clenches the hand without the cannula, excessively warm against his skin, and tells himself: he’s going to be all-right.

Nuala, on the other hand…

Her sister’s behind the curtain of the other bed, quietly crying. Rhys is thankful, entirely so, that their places aren’t reversed. He can handle Azriel being like this: asleep. Not a coma with brain haemorrhage.

He reaches for his phone, taps out a message to Elain—‘ICU’—and a status update to Cassian, Morrigan, tells Feyre it’s going to be all-right and asks her to kiss Felix and Winnie goodnight for him.

When Elain comes, quiet and subtle as a breeze, it feels like the weight of an anchor has been lifted off his chest. He can’t help the smile that flits his lips briefly before she tightly hugs him, asks him how he’s doing—smoke in his lungs, he starts, but she says that she meant him—gives him a bottle of water from her handbag as she perches next to Azriel’s legs, her hand lightly tucked around his, and her concern something warm and reassuring. Does to him what a warm blanket thrown around him does. It leeches the anxiety and fear out of him, and Rhys gets the familiar strength back to be himself.

“What happened?” she asks softly, her eyes trained on his brother, shoulder pressed to his. Still in her uniform. Elain had gone back to her job the day after she was attacked, as if nothing had happened. Pulled that red t-shirt on like armour and marched right back into the store and if that doesn’t make Rhys feel he can take on the world, there’s little else that can.

“Varian said they were following a lead,” Rhys quietly responds. “They found two bodies.”

Her eyes widen.

“They probably walked into a trap—“ Rhys begins, before he’s interrupted by Azriel’s chest spasming followed by a series of violent coughs, the man waking up roughly as he tries to sit up, limited by the attack on his lungs, shoving the oxygen mask off his face like batting away a mosquito.

Rhys and Elain hurry to elevate him by the shoulders and make him sit upright while he coughs up his lungs. Rhys holds an empty cup before him, into which he spits up a bout of grey and black rusty sputum, while Elain rubs his back. Azriel gasps out when he finally calms down, his eyes a terrifying watery red wide in their sockets.

“Hey man, it’s all-right,” Rhys reassures him, feeling a chill run down his back when their eyes lock together, Azriel heaving for breath under his hand. “It’s been a few hours, you’re all-right now.”

Elain brushes his hair away from his face, the act drawing attention to her. Azriel deflates immediately, under their hands, enough to lower him back against the mattress. Elain gently brings back the oxygen mask up over his face, and cradles her hands around one of his.

“How’re you?” she’s barely heard. Azriel’s eyes squint momentarily, trained on her lips, his brows furrowing and twitching.

Rhys leans forward. “Az?”

Again, Azriel’s eyes train on his lips. One shaking hand rises and points to his ear.

“Oh,” Rhys’s mouth forms. “From the explosion, probably. Should be fine. I think.”

“Both of them, Az?” Elain asks, holding up two fingers. His eyes flutter shut as he nods. He pulls off the mask to rasp one word that makes Rhys’s gut sink.

“Nu-ala?”

____

Nuala doesn’t wake. Several sentences are thrown around that float around her beautiful body like permanent curses of an ancient civilization keeping her locked up, away from them. There, but not there.

Brain damage.

Elain held Azriel while he sobbed on the bathroom floor.

Life support.

Cerridwen broke in the hospital’s well-acclimated-to-grief halls. Elain sobbed with her, held her while her own heart fractured and disappeared under the torture of this senseless pain and the words evaporated off her tongue—what can she say? There’s nothing in her vocabulary to offer. Only a tightness in her chest, and how can you share the existence of something like that?

There’s nothing of the incident in the press; a small marginal column about an explosion and two wounded officers. And nothing comes of it.

When they discharge him, a few days later, Azriel stays at her house night after night, something she insisted on to keep him looked after—the look he carried in his eyes said he’s not thinking of anything but his obsession, much less looking after himself. He agrees, bringing with him his devilish schedule of staying up all hours and never sleeping, spending more time on his laptop and outside the house doing God only knows what. There’s no smile to be found on his face, or any of that easy-coming contagious laughter, his face growing more and more sullen and withdrawn with every day that passes and work is nothing more than additional weight on his limbs. He says little, has little desire to do anything but his work and exist in Elain and Winnie’s vicinity. Elain doesn’t ask what it is he’s currently doing—she has no interest in cases of new crimes and deaths, and an obstructed justice, her concern limited to only what they do to him.

However, on the night he returns, visibly devastated and looking like he’s had his spirit run over, she asks.

“The evidence we’ve been gathering is missing and what’s left is destroyed,” he discloses, throwing his jacket on the hanger and yanking off his boots.

“W-What?” she blurts.

“You heard me,” he quietly replies.  

“All your work’s gone?” she whispers horrified. “Do you know who did it? How?”

Azriel brushes past her, his jaw clenched tight. “Yes.”

“What are you doing to do?” she follows him.

“Nothing.”

___

His mind will be the death of him.

It is a conviction he has the utmost of faith in, of no particular reason to only recently come to believe in, but it’s one that is reinforced tenfold all the same. His problem used to be a lack of sleep, but now that he’s getting some, his problem is the content of his sleep. As if a poor quantity isn’t enough, he has to now face quality issues. Which is exactly what the doctor ordered, thank you very much.

She is to blame for this development, of course, surely. Completely. No one else is at fault. Before her, Azriel was perfectly content to stare at the ceiling for hours and overthink himself within an inch of sick death, but now that she’s in the picture, Elain asks from him shit like: “Come to bed?” which he counteracts—well, used to—with the pointlessness of it, to which she cursed him with the plague of his curse:

“I sleep better when you’re there.”

So.

Which brings them here. This trickery of hers that has gotten him to go to bed at reasonable hours, holds her with no intention of falling asleep himself, only to be roused awake by daylight on his face and a squirming toddler kicking him in the ribs in her sleep only five minutes before his alarm is due, flashes of distressing images echoing their trauma on his brain as he blinks sleep from his eyes.

Checkmate, Bougainvillea.

But, his nightmares are a distant echo of a memory long forgotten when he looks into her eyes, as Elain lathers shampoo between her fingers and reaches up on her tip-toes to work it into his hair. He has no thought in his head, standing obediently still before her.

“What?” she murmurs, catching his eyes and the intensity with which he practically feels himself staring at her, his heart thundering painfully in his chest. The sensation of her fingers scratching his scalp brings about a feeling so foreign but familiar enough to call tingling pleasure that runs down the back of his neck and makes his eyes drift shut a little, bowing his head to give up more of himself, his forehead resting on her shoulder.

“Nothing,” the word doesn’t make it past his lips, which feels glued shut, comes out as a throaty hum.

“No-one’s ever washed your hair for you before?” she asks.

Can’t remember, he means to say. Instead, he deflates, and would have fallen if not for the wall behind him.

“Hey, look at me,” she requests gently, withdrawing her fingers, to tilt his head up. Doe eyes flicker between his, she rubs thumbs against his jaw. He frowns at the bruises around her mouth, reaches to cup her face, only for his hands to imprint blood on her skin.

“Az?”

Streams of it spool down her neck. His heart picks up.

“Look at me.”

He does. Only to stare into blank dead eyes. Dirt and blood on her beautiful face, swollen with bruises, cuts marring the skin, and a gaping red empty hole in her forehead.

“It’s your fault.”

“No!”

His heart bursts in his chest as his body jolt, and his eyes snap open. He is frozen still, and dare not move as his eyes take in his surroundings. Living room. Afternoon. Fuck. He’s fallen asleep.

“Ssh,” a quiet voice hushes, and he registers then that he’s sleeping against someone. Elain. Her fingers in his hair lazily scratching his scalp. “Just a dream.”

He stares so hard and long at the Lego set on the ground, the television turned on to a nature documentary, and Winnie watching it silently from the ground, Rebel’s curled in her lap. He’s on Elain’s chest, arms looped around her torso, and his sides sharply aching.

“You fell asleep,” she quietly says, her voice faint and hard to make out with the tinning in his ears. “It’s a little past two.”

Slowly, ever so slowly, he sits up, peeling the side of his face off Elain’s sweater and feeling an imprint of a button on his cheek. His hand grips his forehead as he tries to regain his bearings, remember his fucking name and what day it is. Her hand rubs his back.

What the fuck was that?

“It’s okay,” she reassures. “You weren’t asleep ten minutes.”

He looks up, at her face, at the time, at his hands. Clean, same scars, same tattoos. He deflates with a trembling sigh.

“Your shift, remember?”

“Mmm,” he finds his voice as he rubs his face. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

Elain looks at him with a knowing look of sympathy, and it’s a sad pain in her pinched expression as she reassures him. He remembers the flash of her face in his dreams. Remembers Jurian’s face. Missing an eye. Azriel had gotten him put there. They buried him in pieces, not entirely sure what parts were him and what were Henry.

His heart sinks.

He doesn’t know if he can give her what she asked for. Not when he can practically see himself lowering Elain six feet into the ground.

By the flash in her sad eyes, she’s read it in his face.

“Give it time,” she quietly says. “It was just a dream.”

A very, very possible future if the past events counteracted by miracles are any indication. He grits his jaw. They nearly buried Winnie.

She was confident he could do something about it. Keep them safe. Make them safe.

His eyes flicker between hers, brow furrowing, before he looks away. Sight falling on Winnie’s back, the wavy strands of golden falling from her head, the shorter strands tightly curling up on themselves. Rebel’s tail swishes on the floor.

Despite his fears, he wants this, he realizes. Despite everything. The danger he’s brought to their doorstep. He wants it with his entire being, as he’s never been capable of wanting anything else before. Not only stolen moments between his shifts and Elain’s. But entire days, afternoons, endless time with them. Wants to have his hair played with and craves intimacy, sweet and vulnerable and terrifying as it is, with everything in him.

Throat dry, he stands up.

He’ll have work to do, in that case.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he murmurs.

Azriel doesn’t say anything when his trainee appears at his shoulder, remains leaning against the wall, throwing the cigarette filter aside and slides his hands in his pockets. Lucien stares at him quietly, waiting for something, but Azriel’s attention remains focused on the mental image imprinted before his eyes of the dead body lying in the alley next to them. Prone on his back, mouth split wide open due to the jaw snapped from its joints and loosely hanging by virtue of remaining skin and fascia only, the back of his skull smashed in.

“David Rogers, 38 year old male, from Hewn City,” Lucien finally breaks the silence, reading off a small notepad. “Forensics roughly estimate he’s been dead for five hours, at least. Dumped here.”

A small card slid between cold rigid knuckles, the hand limp and bloodied against dirty pavement. A small business card, wordless, with nothing but a venta-black executioner’s mask printed on it.

“Mm.”

“They’re not even hiding it anymore,” Lucien grits out, hand tightly gripping the notepad enough to bend it between his knuckles.

Azriel runs his tongue along the neat top row of his teeth, staring without seeing at a spot on the street. He shifts on his legs, heels scuffing against damp pavement as he crosses his heels and pats his trouser pocket for his Marlboro. Quietly he slides one roll into the corner of his mouth and holds it limply in place while fishing out his lighter.

“What are you thinking?” Lucien quietly asks.

A crimescene photographer passes them by, ducks under the yellow tape sealing off the alley, and Azriel blinks a few times to clear his dry damped vision. He forces a few, irritated by the flashing blue and red lights going mad around the block, and promises himself to pick up some eye-drops later because at this rate he’ll be blind in a few days.

“Well?” Lucien insists, voice hard.

Schick goes the lighter before a flame pops up behind a sheltering scarred palm and Azriel ducks his head, sticks the end of the cigarette in it and breathes in for a moment before letting it disappear. He fills his lungs up with the warm smoke, a comfortable contrast to the cold weather, and holds it in for as long as he is able before slowly letting it out.

“You can’t sweep this one under the rug,” Lucien coldly notes, shoving his hands in his pockets, forcing himself into Azriel’s visual field by firmly standing before him, his eyes alight with anger and resentment.

Azriel’s eye twitches, tongue running along the inner ridge of his lip. Shifts his shoulders against the wall and looks at the police dispersed throughout the street, and the citizens clumped at the roadblocks. Azriel immediately spots the unmistakable shiny blonde hair that Morrigan dutifully looks after, standing behind the block with her phone in her hand and her eyes hunting through the scene, looking for him.

His phone buzzes in his pocket.

Azriel’s unblinking gaze snaps to Lucien, the side of his face illuminated with flashing red and blue, squinted eyes locked with Azriel’s. A puff of wind forces his eyes to squint a little.

“Why’d you join the force?” Azriel finally asks, smoke rushing out from his nostrils.

“What?”

“Why’d you decide to be a detective?” Azriel takes another puff of the cigarette between his fingers. “Years being an outlaw, you know better than most how rotten law enforcement is. So, why? Steady pay-check?”

Lucien blinks. “Why do you ask?”

“Just asking,” Azriel clears his throat with a throaty hum, and lifts his foot off the ground, presses it to the wall he leans against. 

Lucien takes a while before he answers, tone clipped and words withheld. “I wanted to fix some mistakes.”

Azriel nods as he inhales more smoke. “So,” he blows it out, mixed with fogged up breath in the cold. “It wasn’t a condition of your pardon, was it?”

“Where’s this going?” Lucien warily asks.

“Answer the fucking question,” Azriel glances at the floor beneath his foot.

“No,” his supposed protégé replies. “My own decision.”

“The fuck you run back to Monrose like his bitch, then?”

Lucien has the decency to not deny it, to stare Azriel back square in the face with a set jaw and cold eyes. His jaw clenches, a muscle feather-twitching in the red and blue lights. Azriel doesn’t blink, momentarily squinting while drawing in another inhale.

Azriel puffs the smoke out the corner of his mouth. “David Rogers is actually James Stevenson. The ID you pulled off him is the one I gave him when he agreed to work with us four years ago. He works for Nathaniel, Lucien. They’re cleaning house. How am I going to sweep this one under the rug? No fucking clue.”

Lucien clenches his jaw. “You’re going to cover this one up like the others.”

Azriel narrows his brows, ticking off the ash in the wind. “Others.”

“Every other fucking case you never processed. I’ve seen the evidence, the files, everything hidden and locked up. I’ve fucking seen it.”

“And you gave it up to your old pal to trash,” Azriel replies, calm as a snake staring down its next meal.

“You can’t prove that,” Lucien replies softly, his face calm.

Azriel stares at the shortening cigarette and the glowing embers eating away at the end of the tobacco. “I’m going to say this, once, Lucien. You didn’t join the police for me, there were no conditions on your pardon and that’s why you have no fucking excuse why you went ahead and fucked an operation that’s been going on for seven fucking years, all-right?”

Lucien scoffs. “Right, you mean the sham you’ve been using to cover up your own shit, huh--?”

Azriel steps off the wall in the flashing blink of an eye, stands eye to eye with a frozen Lucien, and rams his index and middle finger straight into his chest, ash drifting sharply into the wind with every movement of his hand.

“No. Fucking. Excuse,” Azriel softly iterates, staring Lucien in the wide eyes, nudging him with every syllable. “A misguided sense that I’ve fooled you or not, Lucien, you had no reason to break the law and damage evidence.”

Lucien has the decency to not say anything. And the courage to stare Azriel down.

“Milo is dead, Nuala’s good as,” colder than ice, softer than snow, his own voice is alien to his ears. “We’ve lost three informants, good men actually fixing their mistakes, and who knows what’s going to happen to the rest of the network. And if it’s all for nothing, Lucien—if it’s all for nothing, then it’s all on your head.”

His breath stutters as it rushes out from his nose, Lucien’s lips pressed tightly together and trembling slightly as Azriel’s words sink in.

“If seven years’ worth of crime and sacrifice ends up being for nothing, God help you. I’m not going to do anything—I’ll be long dead, but all our blood’s going to be. On. Your. Hands.”

Azriel steps back, tosses his cigarette aside, and flashes Lucien a grim, cold smile while fishing out his buzzing phone. “And we’ll see if you can handle leaving the world worse than it was before you decided to help out.”

He turns on his heel in the middle of the street. “Oh and don’t bother showing up—your suspension’s immediate. Trial’s in January. See you then, Lucien.”

Leaves him standing rigid as a plank of wood as if he’d frozen him still, and swipes the answer button to Morrigan’s call while walking away.

“Yeah, I see you,” he grunts, making his way between the cars towards the crowd of people, most of them reporters and curious onlookers. She raises her arm when she catches sight of him and gives a big wave. The policeman gives him a questioning look, one Azriel nods briefly to and waits as Mor climbs over the cement roadblock and jumps it.

“Is it true this is a gang hit?!” someone shouts from the small crowd out the question at Azriel, who pauses. Attention shifts to him, all equally expectant. Morrigan too pauses, and looks at him curiously. Somewhere, phones are held up, flashes on, cameras recording. Azriel recognises a reporter or two aside from Morrigan. .

“This isn’t gang war, no,” Azriel answers, raising his voice. “Not inter-gang war, anyway. What happened here is a declaration of war against us, and you. Those who stand nowhere close to the top, and hold no ropes. The man murdered tonight was one of our informants as policemen on the Heptad; he’s been working with us for several years now, helping us gather enough evidence to prosecute those who think they’re above the law, or those who think the law is something they can control. Tonight, he was executed in their customary fashion—and I’m sorry to report he’s not the first. Earlier this week we were led to the corpses of two more of our similarly-executed informants, where an attempt on mine and my colleague Nuala Hoyle’s life was made. Shortly after that, while the department was distracted, all incriminating evidence we’ve managed to gather that could have led us somewhere worthwhile in prosecution was damaged. I’m sorry to tell you all that we’ve been ordered to shut down any investigations pertaining to any matter leading to the seven gangs that have festered in our state. Tonight was just an example of what they can do, and how confident they are that, with the right people in power backing them and our continued silence, they can get away with anything.”

An explosion of questions erupts after he finishes his statement, arms skyrocketing in the air, questions shouted but no answers given, and Morrigan’s eyes nearly bulging out of their eye sockets.

“What—“ she stumbles over her own words and astonishment, catching up with his hurried gait. “You don’t talk to the press. You never talk unless it’s--”

“Situation’s changed,” he cuts her off curtly, abruptly pausing somewhere empty by a car, hand holding her elbow. “Tell me, how willing is your paper to publish anything about this?”

“Are you kidding me?” Morrigan raises her brows. “The River wants anything with truth and sustenance to it.”

“I don’t know about the whole truth, but I can give you some of it,” he looks down at her, pushing his jacket back while holding his waist lightly. “Can you write it?”

“Of course,” she immediately replies, unlocking her phone. “What do you have for me?”

“What’s really been going on,” he answers. “Everything we’ve been doing.”

Mor pauses, and looks up from her screen. “And what have you been doing?” she quietly asks.

Azriel stares her down.

Easier said than done, isn’t it?

She lowers her phone, reading something off his face. “Azriel, without hard facts, this’ll just be noise—have you really lost all evidence? Why would you admit that on television?”

He tilts his head to the side a little, a small dark smirk tugging his mouth. “Come on, Mor. You’re the one who taught me the Dead Possum.”

Her eyes flash, red lips stretch into the sharpest shark smile ever witnessed by man. “So do you have something up your sleeve?”

He jerks his chin at her. “Depends. Will you be my ace?”

_____

The internet and news outlets have gone berserk. Elain can hardly believe her eyes. The endless Twitter threads and the stories shared under the hashtag #WontBeSilenced on every platform she opens. Anonymous forums online. Politicians yapping on the news about the unreliability of the situation, the outlets begging people to not believe the lies which flood the hashtags, the excited newspapers pumping one article out after the other. Almost everyone had something to say, and Elain cannot find the time to read them all in the excitement. Millions of stories shared, anonymously, of the law-enforcement’s incompetence, the corruption in government institutions, of loved ones who’ve never gotten justice, crimes gone unpunished.

People sharing stories of things that has happened to them or their loved ones. Attempted murder, coercion, rape, kidnappings and missing people, endless instances of assault and crimes gone unreported and uninvestigated.

Elain couldn’t help herself, or stop her fingers from creating an account on Twitter under a fake name and email address.

Someone wanted me dead and sent a hitman to kill me. It happened twice. The police showed up in time to save my life but refused to process him. I watched him walk out the station like he didnt just threaten to kill my daughter next. Hes still out there. #WontBeSilenced

Tweet.

It’s promptly taken down five hours later and her account suspended for violating Twitter’s rules, but not before a considerable number of people have seen it, liked and retweeted it, and shared their voices. Elain spent three hours glued to her phone, reading through replies wishing her well, safety, and justice, expressions of concern, promises of solidarity and shared experiences.

It does nothing, in truth, getting her own little voice out there with the masses. It doesn’t put her attacker in jail. Doesn’t bring his bosses justice or right the wrongs festered in the state, but listening to people actually talk about it, the issue, listen to politicians lie and argue and try to cover up what feels like a Mentos-in-Coke situation, listen to people argue and fight and shout and demand action brings furious tears of relief to her eyes and it’s the first time she feels like she has taken an actual breath of oxygen since Charles shot two of her students dead and her within an inch of her life.

If she wasn’t in love with Azriel before, watching him on television set the state on fire nearly sends her into cardiac arrest. She’s watched the clip of his statement countless times, bewitched by the quiet steel in his voice, the coldness of his eyes and the danger she reads in his very posture. He’s famously unreadable, but after spending considerable quality time around him, Elain can easily detect there’s a ploy he’s getting to, one she cannot wait to bear witness to.

“I don’t fuckin’ believe it,” Feyre quietly pipes up, spending the afternoon with Elain the day after. “He’s really going after the rest.”

“Are you okay?” Elain asks gently.

Feyre blinks, a dazed expression on her face. “Yeah,” her voice is faint. “I used to think he was a fraud at the beginning, when Rhys was begging me to go to him. I used to think that no one had the balls to do what Rhys was promising me he’d do, and sometimes I still can’t believe he got every one of my crew locked up, right to the top. I thought, after, that he was content with one of the seven. Getting one was a fucking miracle, Elain, you know? Now he’s seriously going after the other six? I don’t know.”

Elain rubs her palm. “He sounds like he has something up his sleeve.”

Feyre’s brow furrows. “I’m worried. With no hard evidence, Elain, it’s going to be for nothing.”

“But surely now that it’s public, and people know they won’t let it slide—“

“All this is just noise,” Feyre taps her phone against her knee, worrying her lower lip. “It’s going to die out in a few days. I’m sure he knows that. Rhys can’t get this anywhere without evidence, he’s told Az that a thousand times before. You don’t realize that the higher ups of the criminal underground can get out of anything.”

An article from The River gains popularity very quickly, one written by the one and only Morrigan, un-ironically titled: The Fuckening: A Look at What Could Have Been Justice of the Century.

“..What originally started as the tugging of a thread involved in a seemingly straightforward case of suicide of a twenty year old young man that then evolved into an elaborate plan to unravel the web of the criminal underground in Velaris, has now lead to several law-enforcers from the Velaris State Police Department sacrificing their lives for the sake of justice brought crashing down on the heads of those deserving of their over-due reckoning.

“..in a secret plan titled The Fuckening, the detectives of the state have carefully gathered whatever evidence they can, in secret from well-known moles in the police, in order to formulate the perfect bullet-proof case that can guarantee locking up every responsible individual and their benefactors and facing due judgement without any possible escape door. A plan that has recently been thwarted, much to everyone’s grief, by traitors from within the police department giving up what their colleagues have worked so hard to gather…”

When Azriel shows up, quiet and face guarded, she wordlessly throws her arms around his neck, trembles, and whispers a tearful ‘thank you’ in his shoulders that’s too obscured by hot tears. A hot relief whooshing out from her chest. Someone doing something. Wordlessly, he winds his arms tight around her back and gives her a squeeze. It was only that day that Elain felt she could finally breathe again.

_______

The moment Elain notices the holidays are at her doorstep, her heart sinks quietly in her chest as she realizes that the world’s continued to go on without them, as if every terrible thing that’s happened didn’t matter one iota to the universe. In a way, when retrospect will become an option, she supposes there’s comfort to be found in it. But now, the prospect of celebrating anything makes her feel exhausted.

Still, she knows that occasions like those aren’t an individual experience, but a social responsibility she has to tend to. Her friends send presents and cards in the mail, accompanied by messages and the occasional call. So she buys her friends and families presents, makes her calls, puts up a small tree, winds fairy lights around it. Winnie is the only reason that makes her arrange beautifully-wrapped presents under the tree, decorate the house, bake cookies, build snowmen and put on festive movies.

There is a silver lining to be found in the situation, as almost all things are prone to have, and that it’s an equally subdued holiday amongst her family, what with Nesta spending it with her friends, Feyre flying to England to spend it with her in-laws and their father off being everywhere in the world but by his daughters’ side. So there’s only Cassian for them to spend time with, and even he is preoccupied with his own social circles, though he manages to stay with them for Christmas Eve.

It’s one of those picturesque nights, with heavy snowfall coating the entire neighbourhood that coaxes the children out of their houses into their yards, into snowball fights and snowmen building. Winnie and Rebel quietly watched them play from the panelled windows by the front door, until Azriel noticed her standing by the door still as a statue.

“Does she know any of them?” Azriel asks, jerking his chin towards the kitchen window, as he kneads dough with flour coated hands with Elain.

Elain blinks, and glances outside as well. She recognises some of the kids, a little older than Winnie, but none by name. She knows their mothers, only a little, if only because she’s never really liked most of her neighbours. They’d been more than pleasant, initially, when she and Graysen moved in and Elain wonders now if only it’d been because they’d been the picture of a supposedly perfect family—because she’s never seen hide nor hair of them when Graysen cheated, when they separated, not even when she was shot. It’s only the one conversation that Elain recently had with her elderly neighbour next door, and a less-than-subtle disapproving comment on Elain’s leaving of Graysen had shut the door on any prospective friendship to be had. The favouritism of Graysen—blaming Elain for ‘breaking up her family’ even though Graysen was the one who did so—had prickled her skin more than she cared to admit.

“No,” Elain says. “Not really.”

Azriel cranes his head, looking over his shoulder at Winnie. “She still won’t go outside?”

Elain’s heart cracks some more, a barely plugged wound ripped open once more. She shakes her head. “Only if I’m with her, and even then she won’t let go of my leg.”

Azriel’s mouth flattens, his jaw clenched tight. “Have you thought about taking her to a therapist?”

Elain nods. “I called. She’s available in January, so she’ll start then.”

“Good,” Azriel nods, turning back to the dough.

Elain finds the question on her tongue. “What happened to him?”

Azriel’s clenched jaw twitches. “He’ll be psychologically evaluated. His lawyer’s gone for the insanity plea.”

“Oh. He survived.”

Azriel pauses. Then sends her a dark look. “Trust me—“

“I get it,” she cuts him off. “I’d have done the same thing. And trust me, I’m not bluffing.”

His eyes flicker between hers, keenly, sharp in their cutting look like he’s dissecting everything in her face to be found. “I believe you.”

She stills, breathing slowly. Then, she nods and turns back to the cookie dough she’s rolling into balls. When the bread’s in the oven, and he’s washed his hands, Azriel leans against the kitchen counter, looks out the window and has that contemplative look on his face that piques her interest.

“Cass’ll be here in a bit,” he muses. “What do you say I take her out back to play in the snow?”

Elain slides the oven mitts off her hands. “If she’d let you,” she says sadly.

“Out back’s closed off, and you’ve put up lights and decorations. She’d love it.”

Elain peers out the doorway into the living room, a quiet Winnie sat on the floor, flipping through a children’s book.

“If you can,” Elain nods.

She watches him breathe in deeply, fill up his chest with it, and it’s a sort of magic—what happens to his face: it’s like he’s pulled on a smile, brightened his eyes and erased the deep-set frown off his face. His gait changes when he turns on his heel, voice lighter and intentionally spirited.

“Bu-nny,” he calls out.

“Yeeees?” Winnie responds immediately, looking up.

Elain sees something precious and bright in his eyes, as he crouches down in-front of Winnie and says in a soft sing-song voice: “Do you wanna build a snowman?”

Tears blur Elain’s vision when Winnie’s eyes visibly widen and brighten, her entire small body puffing up and out, and small red lips widening in a smile. “Noo-oo-oo,” she drawls cheekily.

Azriel pokes her side. “Come on, let’s go and play!”

Winnie giggles.

“It doesn’t have to be a snowman!” Winnie shrieks when he grabs her, and hoists her into the air. Winnie’s laughing when he weasels her into her puffer jacket and wrestles her feet into her small boots, loudly singing the Frozen song over her giggles and protests. Elain hears her laughter still when he slides open the glass door to the garden and close it behind them.

Unable to help herself, Elain wraps the throw-blanket around her shoulders and steps out herself, plugs in the lights wound around bushes and the fence, and grins wide as the pair of them gather snow and roll it up together. Winnie tries to mimic cartoons by rolling a ball into a wider one from the end of the garden, and giggles her way through her failure to do so. Azriel makes up for it by building her a large base.

“Why don’t you join them?” she fondly asks the reluctant Rebel by her feet. Elain gives her side a nudge, and the cat immediately leaps onto her leg. Laughing softly, Elain gathers her into her arms.

“Mama, wook!” Winnie calls out, gathering meagre snow in her mitten-clad hands and patting it together. Then promptly throws it at the back of Azriel’s head.

“Oh!” Elain hides her laugh when Azriel rounds up on the child who’d just declared war.

“Build a snowman!” Azriel screeches. “Not attack Az!”

Winnie’s giggling fit is like music to Elain’s ears. She bends down and throws a haphazardly bunched ball of snow again in Azriel’s direction.

“Again!” he yelps incredulously. “She does it again!”

“Adain!” Winnie declares, this time throwing snow in the air above her.

“Winnie, notice who else hasn’t been snowed on?”

“Oh, no,” Elain realises. “No, no, no—“

“Mama!” Winnie runs towards her lopsidedly with the layers restricting her movement, her eyes bright with the fairy lights and the lanterns that Elain simply cannot resist allowing herself to be gently pelted by a little bunch of snow falling mostly on her slippers. Winnie’s smile alone drains the heaviness from her chest. Azriel’s catapulted ball breaking onto Winnie’s back makes the little girl shriek and run. 

“No, no, no!” she hops on her feet, waving her arms. “No, thowman!”

“Oh now you want to build him, do you?”

“Yes! Yes!” Winnie rushes to the half-build mound of snow, pats further snow onto the structure.

“Tell you what,” Azriel nudges her. “He needs eyes and a nose, doesn’t he?”

Winnie pauses.

“Come on, baby, I’ll give you a carrot.”

Winnie runs to her bedroom while Elain finds spare bottle caps lying around and miscellaneous buttons and a carrot.

“This one’s going to have a little bit of character,” Elain braves the snow, one hand bunching the blanket around her shoulders and the other holding out her offerings. “Couldn’t find a set worthy of Pinterest.”

“Gottem!” Winnie yells from inside, running out the house with a scarf of her own and a hat, shadowed by a solemn-looking Rebel who pauses at the edge of the porch not covered by snow.

Elain has to marvel at how easily the night shifts, how quickly she feels like normal as Winnie and Azriel fix buttons and a carrot nose to the snowman, shape his face and give him a hat and scarf. It’s all too easy to find them suitable twigs off the bare trees for his arms, to join in this menial little activity with little else on her mind. When Winnie goes back inside to fetch a very important accessory she didn’t think could wait to tell them what it was, Elain sighs in the quiet of the night, watches her breath fog up before her like smoke.

Azriel quietly lies down onto the snow, his sigh escaping sharply as he stares up at the sky. Elain, standing over him, studies their interesting snowman.

“He’s an interesting fellow,” she reaches out and presses his eye into place.

Azriel closes his eyes, bare hands pressed to his face, and his mouth in a soft ‘o’ as he steadily breathes out. “I think that’s my second ever snowman,” he remarks.

“How come?” Elain looks down on him. “And get up before you catch a cold.”

He holds out a hand and she helps him sit up. “Never been much around snow till I was older and by that time, Rhys wasn’t in the build-a-snowman phase. I used to make shapes in it while the others had snowball fights.”

Elain can see him as clearly as she sees him now. A little boy, drowned in jackets and layers, crouched aside and testing the moulding of snow with burned hands. She imagines he had a thick tuff of black hair.

She softly smiles.

“It was my favourite thing,” his lips shape the softest of smiles. “Soft and cold and pleasant. I loved the way it was in the sun. It was usually so quiet, and I’d tune out the racket of the others playing. So peaceful. I used to think this is what the world was supposed to be like, you know, what I was locked up from. And whenever it snowed, I never could stay indoors and just watch it. I had to be out, in it, laying down on the floor and letting it fall over me—it felt like, like the fire in my hands could only be put out that way, you know? Maji would find me all covered in it, and she’d dig me out, bring me back in. I always wanted to go back out.”

Elain’s smile remains on her lips as she cups her hands around his jaw. “Will you let me separate you from the love of your life and ask you to come inside?” she softly asks, pressing her forehead to his, and brushing snowflakes out of his hair.

He softly chuckles, eyes sliding shut. “I’ll come inside in a bit.”

She brushes his jaw, once, and nods. “Okay.”

Cassian comes shaking snow off his head and with a suspiciously inflated bag hanging off his shoulders, with an easy warm smile erasing the harshness off his face and coaxing one out of Elain herself.

“I’m glad you could come,” Elain says as he takes off his shoes. “How are the others?”

“Send their love,” he replies. “And a gift for you they all pitched in to get.”

“Oh Cassian! They shouldn’t have!”

“Don’t look at me, they’re the ones who did it,” he holds his hands up. “Don’t shoot the messenger. Where’s Az?”

“Out back with Winnie,” Elain hangs his coat for him and follows him into the living room.

Cassian’s lips soften, smiling faintly at the sight. “He always did that when we were kids.”

Azriel, lying on his back in the snow, arms folded behind his head, and mirroring him closeby is Winnie. Rebel dutifully standing watch from her safe spot.

“When’d you meet?” Elain asks curiously.

“I think I was ten?” Cassian muses, following her into the kitchen where the cookies have reached perfection in the oven. “Rhys just brought him over one day, randomly, said his parents adopted him and he’s stuck with him.”

“I imagine he didn’t like being signed up for big brother duties against his will.”

“Oh, on the contrary,” Cassian’s voice softens sadly. “He was pissed they adopted Az so soon after they lost Ella. Said they stopped mentioning her, like she was never there. Too busy with Az, cause you know, he had to go through all sorts of things to rescue his life. Doctors appointments and stuff.”

Cinnamon cookies haven’t smelled so good before. “Oh.”

“Yeah, and there Az was, weird as shit and so quiet. I wasn’t kind to him,” Cassian chuckles. “Mor used to defend him like hot fire. If you were a man, you talked shit about him in-front of her. She’d kick us to holy Hell and back. Someone pushed Az down the stairs once, and they had to leave school ‘cause their arm broke and they wouldn’t say what happened.”

“You’re kidding,” Elain grins.

Cassian hoists himself onto the counter. “Honest to God. Mor and Kallias both. Kallias gave less of a shit at first, but he got pretty used to Az. Liked that he shadowed him everywhere and took his word as gospel.”

“How’d Rhys get used to Az, then?”

Cassian blinks as he digs around in his memory. Then, he smiles. “Someone gave Rhys shit for something. I think it was his accent? Anyway it got under Rhysie’s skin, and he was sulking all day on the roof about it. Az wouldn’t leave him alone. Like a weird, persistent strangely-caring parasite.”

“It was his parents, actually.”

Elain startles. They hadn’t heard him come inside.

“What?”

“They had a fight. Maji mainly. He was upset about it,” Azriel sits at the table, rubbing his forehead. “Not cause of his accent, fucking hell. Whenever someone gave him shit about it, he sent it right back, Cass.”

“I don’t know man,” Cassian shrugs. “I just know you guys were cool after that.”

“Yeah he spent all of ten minutes telling me he hated my guts, wished I never existed, wished his parents never adopted me. Pretty much poured his heart out, you know?”

“Cleared it all up,” Cassian grins.

“Yeah, and then he started crying and ugly-sobbing and the fucker said thank you when I gave him a tissue.”

“The English, man, they’d colonize you but apologize for sneezing in-front of you.”

Elain tries to hold in her giggle but it just comes out regardless. She leaves the cookies to cool while plating the earlier batch of chocolate chip ones, plating them in a pyramid shape while Azriel talks.

“After he got all quiet and apologetic,” Azriel snorts, digging up his packet of cigarettes. “Didn’t mean to say that he wished I was still locked up, only that his parents were different. As if I gave a fuck, I was just glad he stopped crying.”

“He’s got an ugly cry, really,” Cassian leans back, licking his teeth contemplatively. “What about you, ‘Lainy?”

“What about me?” she mutters back, focused on cookies.

“What were you like as a kid?”

She freezes, and is promptly saved from answering by all their phones ringing simultaneously; Feyre on the group chat video-calling. Elain swipes the call on her phone and hands it off to Azriel.

“Cheers, Fey-fey!” Cassian calls out as her sister waves on the call. “Look, and the Wicked Witch of The West too!”

“I’ll dropkick your ass all the way back to Afghanistan and maybe then you’ll find your leg, Bigfoot,” Nesta shoots, shocking Elain into dropping one of her cookies. She turns wide-eyed to find Cassian fighting off a smile and Azriel burying his head in the crook of his arm, shoulders quivering.

“Nes!” Elain softly admonishes.

“Well you protested against puncturing his wheelchair the other day so what am I left with?!”

A muffled shriek escapes Azriel.

“I’m honestly sorry,” she turns to Cassian, stunned speechless by her sister’s lack of decorum. “But you’re probably used to it by now.”

“Ah, ‘s fine,” he waves her off. 

“Why are you up, Feyre?” Azriel manages to ask, looking up.

“Just checking in on the festivities going on behind my back.”

Azriel shakes his wristwatch down his arm and checks it with a frown. “You’re up at three o’clock in the morning because of FOMO? You realize Felix isn’t going to let you sleep after six, do you?”

“Ah what are in-laws for?” she shrugs them off. “Besides, little one isn’t letting me sleep.”

“Feyre, come on,” Azriel reprimands. “You can’t talk about your husband’s anatomy—“

“STOP!” Elain screeches, already laughing into her hands.

“Azriel, if you’re a fucking man say that to my face,” Rhys’s voice threatens from the speakers.

“Wait, wait, you think we’d be afraid to?” Cassian jeers. “Rhysie, it’s no secret—“

“I swear to God if I have to explain to my three-year-old why I’m laughing, I’ll kick you both out of this house,” Elain hisses, her face fire hot.

“What’d I miss?” Morrigan joins the call. “Are we making fun of Rhys yet?”

“You are my cousin, and you are morally obliged to—“

“I’m obliged to fuck all,” she cheerfully cuts him off. “What are we making fun of? His new haircut?”

“What is wrong with my haircut?” Rhys demands.

“Nothing, you look like you drive a van and offer kids candy.”

“Feyre.”

“Hmmm?”

“You said it—you said it looked fine.”

“Lying’s a sin, Fey-fey,” Cassian sings. “Remember that.”

“I…I did say that, yes.”

“Oofff. Going to Hell for lying! Of all the things.”

“I’m going to go in for murder too if you don’t shut up,” Feyre hisses. “Show me what Elain’s baked so I can seriously go cry to the housekeeper.” 

Azriel hums. “I kind of don’t want to get up.”

“Traitor. Show me.”

“Wish I could, but I can't. Well, can, but won't. Should, maybe, but shorn't.”

Elain whips on her heel, her eyes bright and wide and her grin splitting her face. Azriel meets her eyes and discreetly smiles into his elbow.

“I love you,” she fondly declares and the corner of his mouth shows with his smile.

“Love you too,” he easily responds.

“Elain, seriously, you can’t go around falling in love with people because they reference The Office,” Nesta interjects.

“When d’you watch it?” Elain ignores her sister.

“If I tell you it’s during all those times I pretended to be asleep, would you be mad?”

“Not really,” she grins. “No one’s ever watched something I recommend.”

“Elain I love you, but it’s usually because you recommend the most pointless of things,” Feyre apologetically interjects. “Like, what is the point of Pride and Prejudice?”

Azriel looks up the exact way Rebel does when she hears a possible future meal, alive or otherwise. He blinks at the screen and Elain remains quiet.

“Darling,” Rhys softly admonishes. “Come on. Don’t let them know how uncultured we are.”

Nesta’s too busy laughing her ass off to use it to her advantage but Elain turns back to plating her cookies.

“Wow, ok, I was just stating an opinion,” Feyre scoffs.

“You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope,” Azriel quietly quotes. “Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are lost forever.”

“But that’s—“ Elain turns, falling quiet once again when she sees Azriel’s gaze fixed on her. “That’s from…Persuasion.”

He shrugs.

“Did you read her books ‘cause I mentioned them the other day?”

Azriel looks away, mouth hidden in the fold of his elbow on the table. “No, just your copies in the study upstairs.”

“And memorised the shit she’d annotated, didn’t you?” Cassian speculates, his eyes bright and lips smiling. “Hopeless little shit.”

Azriel shrugs.

Elain bites her lip, keeping her smile at bay.

“I feel like a massive intruder,” Feyre whispers to her husband.

“Would you please get on with the actual reason for keeping us up at night, darling?”

“Wow! I’m the one with the nauseating fetus growing in my organs!”

Rhys sighs. “Don’t beat around the bush. Rip it off like Band-Aid. Come on.”

“What’s going on?” Morrigan’s voice sharpens.

“Okay. I’m just going to ask: did everyone get the news about Kallias and Vivienne’s engagement?”

Azriel immediately groans, burying his head in his arm, possessing no mental capacity to be thinking of social engagements and due responsibilities that Elain feels in her bones.

Cassian, on the other hand, is more wary. “Yeah...”

“Well Rhys wants to throw them an engagement party on New Years, and make it a grand whole thing, invite the city’s finest filthiest rich people so Vivienne can leech ‘em dry for her charity. You know, I’m talking black tie event.”

Cassian groans, and Azriel slowly lifts his head up, his eyes sharp and calculating. Elain clocks it in immediately, cannot help herself but notice how his movements become still and his breath subtly held.

“That’s one wedding I’m looking forward to,” says Mor. “It’ll be the leading example of elegance. Viv showed me the ring and that alone is promising the most tasteful, beautiful wedding. She says it’ll be a winter one.”

“Excuse me, isn’t New Years a week away?” Cassian sharply interjects. “How the fuck are you going to make that happen?”

“Oh, sorry, did I phrase it as a suggestion?” Feyre smoothly goes on, self-satisfied and smug. “We’ve got that fundraising New Year’s gala planned from last year. I’m just telling you that Vivienne and Kallias are the guests of honour, cause of their engagement, may many gorgeous diamonds come in fruition from that union.”

“They’re a pretty perfect fit once you think about it,” Azriel distantly speaks, staring at the stove across the kitchen though Elain suspects that the scenarios flashing behind his eyes have nothing to do with what’s loosened his tongue. She’d give more than a penny to find out what thoughts run through his head. “Vivienne builds wells in Africa and Kallias robs the mines dry.”

“..Azriel,” Mor softly admonishes while Cassian cackles. Elain bites back her smile while offering Cassian cookies which he gratefully accepts.

“None of that on New Year’s,” Feyre insists. “Besides, Kal’s done some pretty great charity work himself.”

Azriel nods, meeting Elain’s eyes as she sets the plate of cookies before him and calls Winnie into the kitchen. “Only because he kept wishing Viv would take him on as a charity case, which she apparently has if she’s agreed to finally marry him.”

“Fuck,” Feyre chuckles, despite herself. “Enough. I’m telling you lot only cause I don’t want any bullshit about prior engagements. And Azriel I swear to God if you pick up the night shift I will personally strangle you with my favourite, never-washed wired bra.”

“Ouch!” Elain winces while putting Winnie in her chair, picturing the poking wire—

“I don’t think I’m very comfortable with the imagery of my wife strangling my brother with her bra, darling.”

“No one is,” Mor insists. “No-one. Anyway, formal black-tie, Feyre?”

“Wait,” Elain freezes, in the middle of putting a cookie between Azriel’s expectant teeth, retracts her hand and instead points the treat at her phone. “Feyre, tell me that we’re not invited.”

“Who do you think I’ve been talking to?”

“Hold your fucking horses,” Nesta sharply interjects, only now seemingly connecting the dots. “Us too?! Elain and I?”

“Have I really got daft-headed ducks for sisters? Don’t answer that, Rhys.” Feyre seethes. “Yes you dim-witted—”

“How the hell am I going to find a black-tie dress in a few days?!” Nesta shouts.

“Exactly!” Elain gasps. “Feyre!”

“Don’t ‘Feyre’ me! When was I supposed to tell you? Last couple of months were shit, and honestly an engagement party was the last thing on my mind or anyone’s mind. And I forgot! Sue me, I was too busy with my shit state of health and current pregnancy that it slipped my mind to tell you guys of this really important event beforehand and I am sorry.”

“Not tell us last minute,” Elain groans, shoulders falling.

“Can I have my cookie?” Azriel interjects softly.

“Oh, right, sorry, baby.”

“Idiot, man, calling him ‘baby’ and feeding him cookies and you didn’t expect to be at least his plus one for the night?” Cassian sighs.

Elain stares distantly at the table while Winnie munches on her cookie and observes them all wide-eyed. “I don’t think I fit in my bridesmaid dress,” she glumly muses, shoulders slumped and dejected, the most recent formal dress she owns that she can think of.

“It’s a nice dress,” Azriel nods, wiping crumbs off the corner of his mouth.

“I second that,” Nesta agrees. “Which is why I’m calling dibs. If you wear it, I’ll claw your eyes out.”

“Hey!” Elain shouts. “I’m the one who thought of it first.”

“I don’t care.”

“Az!” Elain rounds up on him. “Tell her off!”

Azriel blinks, then grins. “Nesta—”

“No.”

“We can find middle ground—”

“Only middle ground you’ll be finding is your grave if you keep talking.”

“You gotta help me out here.”

“I don’t care.”

She traces her thumb along the ring on her index finger, brow deeply furrowed while contemplating her choices.

“What if I don’t go?”

“Absolutely not an option,” Feyre firmly shuts down that escape channel.

“Why not? I’m not in the mood, I don’t know the couple, I have no reason to be there—“

“Who’s gonna be Az’s plus one if you don’t?”

“Oh-that-well-who said Az is-“

He looks up with a wrinkled-up brow. “I’d totally ask you.”

“You’re not helping,” she says through clenched teeth. “Feyre, I really don’t think—“

“The thing is, I’m displaying my art there and we’re going to auction it off for Vivienne’s charity. And, cause, you know it’s the first time I’m doing something like that, I’d really like my family to be there, since Dad’s off gallivanting in fucking Morocco for the holidays.”

Elain’s shoulders fall.

The milestones attended by family card.

“You can wear some of my dresses,” Feyre offers.

“Too ballsy for me,” Elain mutters, leaning her hip against the table. “I’ll think it over. But fine.”

“Thank fuck, can we go to sleep now?”

“Sure. See you guys.”

“Night,” Azriel mutters before the rest disconnect.

“What?” Elain immediately prods.

“Hmm?”

“You got a look when she mentioned the gala. What are you thinking?”

Azriel sits straight, letting her phone clatter to the table. “Nothing,” he replies smoothly.  

“Is it safe for you to go?” she quietly asks. “You know, all those people, the open space…someone could easily get to you.”

“It’s going to be fine, don’t worry,” he stands up, swiping his cigarette packet with him off the table. “Security detail will be top notch. It’s not a suitable place for an assassination.”

Cassian snorts, hopping off the counter. “Any place is suitable for an assassination.”

Azriel vocally disagrees, opening the packet and placing a cigarette between his lips before promptly remembering himself around Winnie and putting it back in place.

_______

They're discussing the semantics of presidential assassinations and politics when Winnie raises her head from Cassian’s beat-up iPad and goes to plug it in the charger next to Elain. Her mother smooths her hair, and asks her if she's having fun.

"Uhu," she nods, and Azriel is about to interject with a classic teasing comment about kids playing on their electronics when there are guests over when she hesitates, and her small fingers curl together. He leans forward sharply, eyes trained on the girl clearly about to ask for something. "Can- Mama can you...me..." and the rest of her words are illegible mumbled sounds mushed together. Even Elain frowns slightly and asks her to repeat her sentence.

"I wanna... one," she mumbles shyly, and Azriel only hears her because he's close and straining his ears to listen.

"One what, baby?"

The girl points at the charging device, and Cassian opens his mouth to undoubtedly give it away when Elain smiles, like a woman who's won the lottery. "Do you want one, baby? To play games and watch videos on?"

Winnie bobs her bowed head once shortly. Elain presses a kiss on her head. "Of course. I'll get you one."

A beam lights up Winnie's face, rivaling the light of the tree next to them.

"In fact," Elain picks up her daughter and plops her right onto Azriel's lap. "I have something for you. Close your eyes, it's a surprise."

Winnie clamps her eyes shut dutifully while Elain crawls quietly to the tree and extracts a tech company bag from under it, grinning like the Cheshire Cat. Winnie opens her eyes when told so, to rest her eyes on a sealed tablet box in her lap.

Of course, Azriel doesn't hear anything for the next couple of minutes thanks to the shrill screams of one electrified banshee bringing ruin to his ears and the persistent lingering effects of having bombs go off next to his ears, and he loses all feeling in his legs thanks to seating a child with probable undiagnosed ADHD flaunting itself full time, but it is slightly relatable, with Elain's perfect timing.

He offers his help with the setting up process because the kid can't wait to charge the device, an affordable tablet whose sole purpose really is to download games and open YouTube, with the added bonus of a stylus pen.

"Eh," he regards the thing, and then Winnie who only picks up things for their color. He gives it three hours before the thing goes missing—but blessed with foresight, Elain’d bought the tablet with a bright Winnie the Pooh cover and a skin for the stylus.

"All right," Azriel swipes through the empty pages, having cleared up all unnecessary applications and put factory ones away. "Now we have a hideous background, let's change that. Smile, Bunny."

"Wait, wait, do it again, I wasn't in it," Elain hurries to them, slinging her arms around them both and giving the camera a perfect smile. Azriel snaps a picture which he promptly sets as the wallpaper.

It’s after that Elain decides to open the presents under the tree, and the excitement on the little girl's face is what has Azriel joining them on the ground, to see it up close, see that joy and hear that childish laughter erasing all preceding memories of her cries and grief he had witnessed first-hand.

He leans against the armchair next to the tree, legs sprawled out before him, eyes trained on Winnie and Elain whose eyes are softened by accomplishment, a sort of happy tired relief in her smile as she hands Winnie one wrapped present after the other. He resists the urge to run back the strands of hair from her face, and contents in the exploding sensation filling up his chest while he takes pictures on Elain’s phone.

"You give her that," Elain hands him the wrapped present he had brought, and suddenly he feels off-put about handing the girl his little gift. But the more the merrier, he figures, getting her attention and handing her the box.

It's the widening of her eyes when he offers the gift that does his heart in. As if she hasn't expected one from him—come to think of it, she probably hasn't clocked the fact that these gifts are from the people Elain said they were, aside from Cassian. Maybe handing it to her added a personal touch that means more to her.

Winnie unwraps it with unprecedented care, sitting next to his thighs and croons once the box is revealed. She gasps, taking in the pictures on the yellow box, the number of dinosaur figures. Azriel admittedly spent more time than sensible tracking down the best manufacturers of dinosaur toys in between his time spent tracking murderers and mob criminals down, sorting through contestants in search of the perfect complete set of the species and eventually he found one child-friendly: a company in Finland that had custom-made the set he needed, customized the chest it came in and engraved a little message on the bottom of each figure. 

For Winnie. With love, Az.

"Come on," he laughs when she only stares at the chest, painted in a scene of the dinosaurs. "Open it."

"Oh, Az," Elain's voice is hushed as Winnie opens the chest, and out comes little shelves upon which the figures are fixed to through clear grips. The shelves can be pulled upright, so that they are stacked like a true bookshelf, and can be folded back in for easier packing and travel.

"Dinos," Winnie breathes out, hushed, a slow wide grin splitting her face apart. "Azeel- dinos!"

"I figured there's an obsession there," he taps her nose, and reaches into the bag, finding the complementary metal dinosaur pin from the company. She holds her breath while he pins it to her dress. Then, she seems to grapple with the fact that she is awake, and this is not a dream, because the next thing he knows, he's being held in an unwavering chokehold and Winnie is saying 'thank you' over and over and he's smiling—when did he start smiling like that?—and Elain's beaming and it’s nothing short of perfection. It is happiness and contentment and a taste of what he figures divine reward to be like.

"Oh baby, look at all the species," Elain amuses her daughter when she finally lets go of him. There are little tags on the shelves before each figure, displaying the name. "You have so many now!"

"Yes!" Winnie giggles, a sound that easily takes the title of being the best to be heard.

Azriel leans back on furniture, ankles crossed, elbows bracing his torso and thinks if he’ll have nothing else in the world, this will be enough. More than enough.  

____

Lucien blinks, as he notices a scar on Tamlin’s left cheekbone enunciated with hallowed spaces beneath it. The blond of his hair appears closer to dirty-blond, falsely brown close to the scalp. He looks entirely different, painfully familiar. Lucien remembers the blood viciously coating the lower half of his face when he was arrested, the way he looked at him while he held his hands behind his head and knelt while the cops put him in cufflinks.

“Hey, man,” a small smile touches the corner of his mouth as he leans against the low wall overlooking the canal and its dark water. Lucien doesn’t know what his face is doing, as Tamlin’s green eyes flicker keenly over it, but he must be as changed as he is.

“Hey.”

“You look well,” a jerk of his chin. “Law enforcement suits you.”

Lucien stuffs his fists in the pockets of his bomber-jacket, gives a small shrug. “Like being on the side of the law for a change.”

Tam’s eyes soften as he tilts his head, further leaning back on his elbow. “Are you, though?” he says lightly and Lucien rolls his eyes a little, looks away and into the waters because suddenly he’s remembering too many things, recalling too many life lessons and promises.

“More than I was before,” he admits.

“Small victory, then.”

“Better than Blackthrone, I bet.”

“It is.” Tamlin’s voice hardens, into familiar rough tones of characteristic anger lurking beneath the surface. Always mad, Tamlin. Always angry at the world, angry at the dirt beneath his feet like it had personally insulted him. Angry little boy, angrier young man. His father and brothers hadn’t left a single morsel of his soul unhardened, try as his mother might have stopping them. “Back-stabbing took you a long way.”

“You went too far.” Lucien’s tone drops, quiet, hard as fuck and darker than night. “Took it too fucking far, Tam.”

Silence hangs like a heavy tapestry, except the shrieking winter wind and the water rocking in the canal. Lucien keeps staring at the water, busy keeping his mind clear of memories he spent enough time locking up and away from sight. When Tamlin next speaks, his voice is more collected, and calmer.

“Past’s in the past,” he reckons in raspy tones. Easy for him to say. Not as easy as it is for the families of victims, is it? Lucien clenches his cold hands tightly.

“Why’d they bring you out?” asks Lucien.

“You know why.”

“Hybern realized you could be useful, then?”

“Yeah.”

Lucien turns, faces his ex-best-friend. He can’t help the way his heart crumbles in his chest involuntarily, like a gaping wound allowed to weep blood. To find himself standing against him, all these years later. After he shut the door on that life, had one final conversation with Feyre before she married where she agreed to let him go and pretend to be strangers if they ever met. How could he find himself facing it down, now of all times?

It's neither triumph nor satisfaction on Tamlin’s lined face. God, he must be, what—twenty six? Eight? He looks in his worn-down forties. What had prison done to you? cries out one small part of Lucien that used to care, deeply, with every fiber of it. It’s the weariness that Lucien is well-acquainted with, an expression revealed every night Tamlin came home, when the door slams shut behind his heavy back and his head hangs heavily with the weight of their lives. A soldier brought back out into the field, for one last battle that’s never really the last one. Judging by the sunken look in those green eyes, it’s a thing Tamlin understands too.

“Give it up, Tam,” Lucien finds himself softly whispering. “That life—put it behind you like we have. You can do it.”

His pale face flickers, a flash of something morbid and grim appearing for a second in his eyes before it disappears behind a blank expression. “I can’t.”

“Fucking Hell, yes, you can—”

“I can’t.”

“The fuck have they got on you that doesn’t matter?!” Lucien finds himself shouting, too caring and honest for his preference. “Just cut it loose and fuck off somewhere with a new name! Who gives a shit how red is your ledger or what crimes you’ve committed?!”

Green eyes glisten, his jaw clenches tightly as fury reveals itself in his face. Lucien finds himself stepping close, closing the distance between them as he jabs a furious index in his chest and hisses; “Fuck revenge, fuck being even, Tam. You can get back at us for betraying you but it won’t change your life, it won’t make shit easier—use this chance to fuck off and start a new life.”

“You think it’s about revenge?” his tone shakes. “I didn’t give half a shit about being betrayed—Fuck I was jealous, so fucking jealous that I got left behind but you don’t think I’m happy you turned your life around? You weren’t made for the gutter, Luc.”

Lucien’s chest heaves as he stares his friend down. Was he guilty, deep down? Did some part of him feel horrible that he’d given up the brother life gave him, made him life taste just a little more bitter?

He hates the answer.

“What’s it about then?” Lucien quietly asks. “You can’t be working for them ‘cause you enjoy it.”

“I need your help doing a job.”

“Piss off,” he laughs bitterly. “Fuck no.”

“It’s nothing,” Tamlin softly utters. “I just need a few files from the precinct. Evidence removed. Nothing we haven’t done millions of times before.”

“I’m past that shit,” Lucien snarls. “I’m actually trying to be a clean-fucking-cop, all right? Trying to clean up the shit we spread all over this state.”

“Yeah, by working for Bougainvillea? How’s that working out for you?”

Lucien heavily sighs, stepping back to breathe in a sharp copious amount of cold air that pinches his lungs.

“Face it, Luc, you just swapped one lawless boss for another.”

“He’s not…”

“Who put three bullets in fucking Friedman? Advised Nathan? Executed the Heptad’s traitors? Luc you’re just working for another freelancing-Hybern convincing you it’s for the greater good or some heroic bullshit. No one is like that. He’s just another self-serving killer with a goody-two-shoes mask and he bought you with the act.”

Lucien looks down at his shoes. Is that not the loss he’s been making peace with? Finding out the mentor he looked up to was no more than a multi-faced snake moving from one opportunity to the next? Bring down organized crime and clean up the streets, his ass. Bougainvillea’s just like the rest, just with a more convincing tongue that whispered dreams into fruition in Lucien’s mind. That he could actually make a good difference.

“Answer’s still no,” Lucien says flatly. “I don’t need a boss to have my own principles. I’m sticking to the law.”

“Even when the law’s wrong?”

“Tam,” he glares. “Don’t tell me I’m here freezing my ass off arguing semantics of morals and politics with you.”

He clenches his jaw again and looks away.

“Curious you’d think I would have said yes,” Lucien notices softly. “You’re not that daft. You must have had strong reason to think I’d agree.”

“Thought you might pay back this debt and call us even.”

Lucien coldly laughs. “Fuck that if you think selling you out keeps me up at night. As if I give a shit.”

A wry smile flashes briefly on Tamlin’s pale lips.

“Seriously, what compelled you?”

Tamlin swallows, turns to the canal and leans his arms on the low wall. The curve of his stance and the way Lucien’s body automatically takes its place next to him on the wall, stands the same way, looking at him for answers, is another memory unmasked from his recollection. Blinds him a little more than it should.

So Tamlin confesses. And Lucien wishes he hadn’t asked.

_____

The end of the third hour approaches, and Elain still feels like someone is watching her. Paranoia, perhaps. She really ought to reach out to her therapist again and book a session for all the shit her life’s been shoveling but honestly who has the time?

Nothing alarming has occurred so far to warrant her doing something about the nagging thought in the back of her head repeatedly chanting: watch out, watch out! But it still remains: an incessant feeling, small but just enough to keep her centered in her head as she stocks the shelves and takes inventory. Just enough paranoia to have her continuously looking over a red-clothed shoulder, making fleeting eye contact with shoppers and exchanging flashing awkward smiles with those unfortunate enough to catch her eye.

The job she's picked up at her local hypermarket has come in handy in the silencing of the lambs jumping about in her mind, mundane but stressful enough to keep Elain focused, to make her find her footing again and sort her priorities straight again. School term’s been suspended till the start of the new year, one of the good things about private schools she supposes that allows them the leniency of their own ship-steering and Elain’s compensating her free time by submerging herself in work once more. The bakery won’t have her, and she’s still got a bit of pride left in her that stops her from asking Ianthe for her job back. So, drowning once more beneath the waves of trying to keep afloat and live.

Feyre's babysitting Winnie once more after practically forcing Elain to give her their honorary princess back with Nesta's return home, and Elain's fallen back into their previously established routine: all too-familiar, monotonous, distressing and the only solution Elain can manage. She doesn’t let herself think about it, chants the mantra just keep swimming over and over. Save and make enough money to afford living, to ensure a future for her child, to pay off their debts and mortgage.

Having come a full circle, an entire journey of events and heartache, it feels a little strange for things to be back to how they were. Elain finds herself appreciating Frodo Baggins in a whole new wordless light: how do you pick up the threads of an old life indeed.

Same routine, different heart. New crows of hardship stand on her shoulders amongst the variety of grievances already perched there. There's a new steepness to the frown on her lips, a little grave dug beneath her lower lip that she doesn’t remember being there before. Before. An additional slant to the corners, like there's even more weight pulling her lips down. More than once, Elain's poked and pulled the corners upwards in the cosmetics section in a few LED-lit mirrors, trying to figure out how to make her lips feel weightless in their movement as they were. Again: before.

Before what? She'd think, trying to pinpoint exactly when she's begun to feel like her body's been cleft in half, and she's now operating on one leg and arm and half a head. Her divorce had left her feeling a little hallow, sad, and betrayed, but she'd still been her: functional, operating within acceptable parameters, spread thin and exhausted but herself.  Now she feels less, or lost. Definitely lost and confused. Like someone's robbed her the recognition of being.

It had been a sledgehammer blow that left her dazed and blinded, and made her defense mechanisms kick in, and she's yet to blink away the haze and confusion to find clarity.

He’s definitely to blame, of course. None of Elain’s additional baggage she now lugs around would have existed if he hadn’t worked his way into her life and heart, and now he’s left behind a chasm that she grows to despise more each passing day. What had she expected when she’d let him become a staple in their lives in the matter of quick days? With every expectant look on her daughter’s face that she disappoints, a new notch is struck in Elain’s maternal esteem: that she’s to blame for the biting cold of his absence that Winnie’s hurt by. None of this hurt on Winnie’s face would have existed if Elain hadn’t let them find each other in the first place.

Elain would never have been shot or Winnie near-murdered.

Neither of them would have experienced happiness again, either.

Elain sighs quietly, pushes tomato sauce tins into formation on the shelf, and feels an additional tug on her lips. The hour is late, her shift’s nearly finished. Only ten more minutes.

That feeling, again, of being watched.

She looks over her shoulder, again, twisting in her crouch on the floor. Finds nothing. The back of the store is empty, the quiet filled with the noise of the freezers’ mechanical roar and giving off a chill that raises goosebumps along her arms. Elain keeps her inquisitive searching attempt, holding onto the shelf for balance, feeling the strain of her jeans stretching against her knees, and sweeps her gaze along the wide empty aisles.

Nothing.

Elain pulls the last of the boxes towards her, scratching and screeching against the floor as they do. Her dusty fingers, aching with some allergic sensitivity after prolonged contact with the tin of the cans, wrap around familiar canned tomato.

She’s thinking of Winnie’s quiet request today as she bid her goodbye when Elain hears footsteps.

It’s such a quiet quick single step, more of an accidental shuffle, that she’s not so sure she even heard it in the first place but one she swears that she has. It doesn’t happen again.

Elain picks a can, focused on the rows before her, gently lines them up, her wrist aching beneath the weight.

“Elain Archeron?” a deep voice rises above the silence, expected and unstartling.

She turns, calmly, a heartbeat later, some fight-or-flight blessing possessing her to look the tall man standing three feet before her with a furrowed brow scrunched up in confusion.

A heavily-accented “Excusez-moi?” falls from her lips.

The split second of confusion flashing across his face, making him falter, hesitate for a fraction of a second saves her life as Elain’s aching wrist catapults that hefty can of Autumn Sauce right into his face and she is bolting like a fired bullet before he can even process it, or her to process the gun in his hand with the silencer attached.

Her shoes squeak and slam against the floor, but she’s running without a thought, blood roaring in her ears as she makes for the nearest exist in the back. Hears his loud curse following the shout of pain and a curse, and doesn’t stop, doesn’t halt to hide, just run run run driving her to flee, darting through the warehouse past crates and shelves and out through the back into the quiet night that lies over the abandoned parking.

He’s loudly in pursuit behind her, and the ricocheting noises of bullets bouncing off walls and floors are just enough fuel to make her feet lighter, her mouth drier, and more desperate.

One such bullet pierces the gravel beneath her feet, right where her foot was one millisecond ago that it startles her rhythm, makes her jump and trip over pure fucking air—get the fuck up!. Enough to let him catch up, enough for Elain to get mad instead of scared.

Fucking psychopaths and murderers.

It’s the same kind of recklessness that possessed her in her classroom to face down Charles: the same drive which made her charge at her attacker armed with nothing but rage makes her abruptly stop and hang back, close the distance between her and the murderer who had not expected close confrontation.

Knives were trouble in close contact, Cassian had said in that workshop that seems ages ago now. Guns were a long-distance weapon, harder to control up-close, more likely to cause their shooter damage.

Turns out he is right, or marginally at least: her attacker is so startled by her sudden change in tactics and the bony fist she throws into his face that he leaps back, and drops his gun to engage her in hand-to-hand combat which she admittedly is very poorly skilled at. Other than furious cat-fights with her sisters over the years, Elain’s never really resorted to physical violence. But the flailing fear of dying unlocks something desperate in her, that fuels a bravery to struggle and fight even when she gets a mighty blow to her stomach (fuck right where she’d been shot) and another to her jaw that knocks her back. She keeps struggling, even when she’s not seeing straight and the sky is going in circles as he wrestles with her when he straddles her waist and his weight alone pins her down. She’s struggling like a fish out of water. Kicks her legs out, pushing up her pinned hips, anything, head-butting in a futile attempt when he leans away from it and pins her wrists to the ground and locks her in place—

There. That. Every woman’s fear. Her own as well. Staring up into the face of a man about to ruin her, body and soul, in the dead of night, pinned down by his sheer weight, helpless and at his mercy.

It breaks some part of her spirit off. Some of that fear must have shown in her face, because he catches onto it, of course he does, and a sadistic smug look flies over his expression, high off the knowledge that he’d put it in her—

“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” he murmurs in a raspy voice into her ear. “No time for that, you see. You’re definitely a catch though. Maybe your kid—“

A mighty cry erupts from her lips, one he muffles by biting his teeth down on her mouth and one moment she’s pinned by his knees on her shoulders, his hands choking her neck, his broken bleeding nose smashing her own to the side and his teeth clamping hard on her lips that Elain tastes blood amongst the disgusting smell of him, feels it on her face too as he almost tears off her lips before—

Many things happen: A bang echoes so loudly in the lot that Elain flinches. The man lurches over her, detaching abruptly. Another familiar bang has him crying out.

Elain kicks him off, smashes her elbow to the face already bleeding, drives her knee into his crotch with as much fury as she can muster which by God, truly Hell cannot rival it. Clambers to her feet, and she finds herself kicking him, over and over, with such rage and vehemence, even as he curls over, and there are heavy streams of blood on the floor. Elain kicks him, in his bones, his sides, hopes she’s kicking his heart like a football, aggravated screams through her clenched teeth as her eyes blur and every pent-up pint of righteous anger explodes out of her.

“Stay the fuck away from my daughter!” She screams, guttural, with each kick, punctuated by his cries of pain but she’s not really in her body. The part of her that had broken off and floated away seems now to be a much larger portion of herself than she’s anticipated. Even now she cannot feel herself. Bone cracks. He is screaming. Elain is furiously shouting from the depths of her gut.

“Elain,” a voice she was anticipating interrupts her destruction of revenge. “Elain! That’s enough.”

“What are you even doing here?!” She rounds up on Azriel, fists tight at her side, messed-up braid swinging over her shoulder, clenching her teeth so hard that an ache blooms at her jaw. His hands wrapped around the rest of a gun, lowered and pointed to the floor, with the stoniest expression on his face she’s ever seen.

“Step away,” he instructs firmly. “Get away from him.”

“Why are you here?!” She demands, kicking away the assailant’s gun before closing in on Azriel, coming up close and personal with his face. “Thought you didn’t want anything to do with us?!”

“I’m sorry,” his lashes flutter, brow furrowed, protocol broken because he can never stand to be the cause of her distress and not alleviate it in some way, even with a futile apology. “I didn’t want anything bad to happen to either of you—“

“It’s already happened!” She shouts, waving her hands to the blood on her face and lips. When did her mind approve of the sob that breaks free from her chest? It erupts from her lips with a shrieking gasp, trying to draw in air into lungs that just won’t comply.

“Where the fuck were you?!” she screams, and shoves at his chest because, because. It doesn't do much but make more sobs bubble past her trembling lips. She shoves him in the chest with enough force to make it hurt, and immediately she wants to collapse against him. “It happened, and you left. You left us and it’s not going away! You made it happen, you found out it was cause of you and you left me to deal with it on my own!”

His face contorts, pure agony, his free hand rises to her cheek, another apology threaded into every line of action. Everywhere she looks, there it is. In his eyes, his lips, the furrow of his brow, the tremble of his scars against her skin.

It breaks her. She sobs neurotically. Heaves for breath into trembling hands and he’s pulling her in to his chest, like a shelter, caging her with an arm round her shoulders warm and close but not pressing, not tight. Elain sobs. Azriel holds her like the Beast had obsessively protected the last of the magical rose’s petals. As if she were the only life to be had.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs, over and over. “Are you hurt?”

“You weren’t supposed to leave,” Elain sobs, in her hands and his chest. “I promised her you wouldn’t leave. I thought you wouldn’t leave me.”

A choked sound emanates from his throat, like the thought of her heartbroken daughter physically pains him—Good, it’s his fucking fault—and his arm falls from around her.

“I did too,” Azriel says quietly. “Elain I have to tie him up, Nuala’s just round the corner, can you find her—?”

They don’t have to, because the woman herself comes running into the lot. “Is she okay?” Nuala demands frightfully, stopping briefly to look Elain over before her gaze falls onto the moaning man and the hardest expression, like cold marble stone, freezes her face.

“Nu,” Azriel quietly intones. “We have to bring him in. Alive, Nu.”

The woman’s brows jump, and the little tremble to her chin is the only sign of inner turmoil. She clenches her jaw before nodding and making her way towards him.

“Are you all-right? What happened?”

Elain only shakes her head, when did her entire body start trembling like this? Her hands are aching, she presses them to her face, heaves in a deep breath that refuses to fill up her lungs. Azriel once again pulls her close, runs his warm hand over her arm.

“You’re okay,” he reassures her, sounds like he’s convincing himself of it. She can’t unhear the petrified fright in his voice, or unsee the pinched expression on his ghostly face when he saw her. “Nothing’s going to hurt you. Where’s Winnie?”

“At-at Feyre’s,” Elain gasps around the stutter. “I-I have to go m-make sure she’s-she’s all-al-al-all right.”

He pulls his phone out, calling Rhys’s number as Elain shivers in the cold. He tucks his gun back into the holster at his shoulder while the phone rings in his ear, shrugs his coat off and drapes it over her shoulders. Elain shakes in it, while he pulls out a handkerchief and gently wipes at the blood on her face, those hazel eyes never been darker before as they stare at the state of her lips and hear the hiss of pain when he attempts to clean up close to the bite marks. She remembers what he’d done to Charles when he got his hands on him—she wonders what’s stopping him from picking up where she left off. The desire is there in his face.

“Hey, Rhys,” he speaks into the phone, his voice remarkably controlled and so normal as he twists the handkerchief around his finger. “Wanted to check in.”

“We’re all-right. You?”

“Brilliant,” Azriel remarks back as if he’d never been better, meeting Elain’s gaze as he gently thumbs away a smear of blood from her cheek. “Winnie okay?”

“How’d you… yeah. They’re watching TV.”

“Okay,” he nods at her and Elain suppresses a relieved sob behind her trembling fingers.

“Where are you?”

“I’m with Elain, she wanted to make sure Winnie’s all right.”

“…you really think that’s a good idea?”

Azriel’s expression tightly twists. “Night, Rhys.”

“Az, we talked about this—”

Elain’s breath stutters in her chest as he puts his phone away and Nuala half hauls and half shoves the culprit across the parking lot. His hands settle over her shoulders as dry sobs spasm in her chest and he focuses his sight on her own. “Let’s go, eh?”

“Where?” she voices in a subdued tone, finding her legs too weak to move as one of his hands slide into her own and she tries to move her aching feet.

“The station,” he says and somehow she wishes he’d said home. Why would he? No business in that now, what with Elain wanting nothing to do with him as she’d colorfully expressed and his painful compliance. She’s shaking, she wonders when her body will calm down.

“I…I don’t want to be in…” her words fade on her bruised mouth, watching Nuala stuff her attacker in their car.

“Of course not, where’s your car? I’ll drive.”

_____

It’s half-past midnight when Elain barges out of the building, somehow angrier than when she had walked in, every part of her body begging to limp and crawl to her car but a stubborn state of mind forcing her to put one foot in front of the other with her head held high and her shoulders backed.

“Elain,” he follows her out, half a step behind and her car keys dangling from his fingers and long coat folded over his arm.

“I’m not in the politest mood, Azriel,” she forces out with as much calm as she can muster, pulling open the passenger seat door. “Please don’t provoke me into saying something I’ll regret.” 

The door slams shut behind him when he gets behind the wheel, turns the truck on and spares her a side glance as he pulls the car out of the parking lot. Elain stonily stares out the window, her bruised knuckles pressed to her bruised mouth and her legs aching as she stiffly sits and rests her head against the window.

Some time passes in the quiet car before he pipes up.

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t want your apologies.”

“I still am.”

“You let him fucking walk!” she explodes, despite her reservations, smacking the window hard enough it feels like it’ll give out. “I—you pulled him off me! You put bullets in him, he was armed, he wanted to kill me and he fucking walked?!”

The streetlights flash on his face, red and white illuminating his clenched jaw and fixed gaze.

“How on earth,” she seethes. “How could you? Look at me, Azriel.”

When he pauses at a red light, he does.

“Take a long, hard, fucking look at me,” Elain demands. “Look at my fucking face. I’ve still got your brother’s scars on me.”

Unfair, the kinder part of her sadly echoes as a violent flinch tears through his face.

“How could you?” her voice fades at the end, the ‘you’ more of a general accusatory statement to the police rather than the man himself who still protested nothing when a well-dressed individual sauntered into the floor and smiled a vile thing at Helion. Nuala did not hold her tongue, coming to furious tears that refused to fall as she visibly argued with their boss in his office though Elain couldn’t hear her. Azriel remained silent, standing next to Elain’s chair, ankles crossed and arms crossed and mouth shut. What killed Elain was that the fucker, still with the wounds in him bleeding, smirked at her when he was released and walked. Do something, she demanded of Azriel, who only watched them go, and did nothing.

“Azriel say something.”

His hand slides to the side of the steering wheel, with a soft sigh whistling past his lips. He blinks at the road in front of them. Elain roughly blinks tears from her eyes. “He works for—”

“Don’t fucking say it.”

“The Seven, Elain,” he glances at her before looking back. “You want to know why I got there in time? This isn’t his first rodeo. This isn’t the first time I’ve dragged his ass to the precinct to fail in processing him. Sometimes I think he fucks around when he’s bored just to have us not-arrest him.”

He blurs in her sight, and her vision stings. The tears spill on her cheeks. “Just—just have him killed or something…” she whispers hoarsely. “Accident…resisted arrest…anything. Come on…All those innocent people, Az.”

Azriel refuses to look at her. Then, his lips part: “Why else do you think I’m risking my neck?”

Her face crumbles. “Don’t.”

“One time we got tipped about…” he trails off and seems to decide it’s better to not dive into the story. “Point is, I saved this girl in the nick of seconds, Elain. She had her twin’s blood on her still. She was the only survivor, all her group gone in front of her. Weeks later, she called. I had to explain that—”

“No.”

“Sure as fuck, Elain,” he nods. “Had to tell her the people who murdered her friends weren’t even tried.”

“Why—How can anyone…”

“Don’t let it get to you,” he says emptily, leaning his head on the fist propped by the elbow on the car door.

“What if I press charges? Report you? I’m right here, I’m alive, I know the man’s name for God’s sake.”

“Won’t go anywhere.”

“You’re telling me the only way I can get any semblance of justice—”

“Not in our version of the state,” his lips smile, baring his teeth, but utterly humorless.

She clenches her jaw, and her nose flares and the hot air of the conditioner is merciless to the tears clinging to her lashes and cheeks. She wipes them away with a sniffle.

“Everytime, everytime it happens I think I’ll pop an artery,” he says quietly. “And I just boil on the inside for ages. And I remind myself there’s no justice here, only the one we make.”

She sinks in the seat, pressing a hand to her forehead. “Someone hired him to kill me? Who?”

“Does it matter?”

Elain blinks at him. “Maybe you’re used to having so many people wanting your head that you’ve lost count, but I’ve never so much as had a hostile co-worker, Azriel.”

“Mean to ask, what’s who compared to why?” he bleakly explains, voice hallow and croaking its syllables from his throat. “Travis knows he’s on my radar, he’s known to be closely watched by us, Elain. If he was sent to kill you, means they wanted us to know and see and get there too late. Fucking war.”

“And by us it’s really just you?”

Azriel glances at her. “Yes.”

“So,” Elain looks out her window. “The get-at-Bougainvillea-through-Archeron act strikes again. Fourth time, is it?”

“Has it really been four times?” he quietly asks.

“And you haven’t even taken me out to dinner.”

“You been wearing a ring behind my back, calling yourself Bougainvillea and I somehow don’t know about it?”

Elain presses her head to the glass. “I don’t change my name.”

“Sure, I’ll keep that in mind when I pop the big question.”

Silence descends on them. Elain likes the quiet of car drives which aren’t exactly quiet with the engine humming and the car speeding on the road. The view shooting past in the window gives its own sound to her mind as she watches. Like white noise silencing her thoughts.

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t want it.”

“I still am.”

“It means jack shit when nothing’s changing.”

“Do you blame me for it?”

The quietness in his question makes her look at him, despite the protestations of her entire body at the movement. Her mouth aches as she speaks, but she does anyways. “I’m angry at you for forcing me to leave.”

His brows arch. “I didn’t make you do anything.”

“My mother threw herself off a balcony, and I saw it,” she deadpans. “We don’t talk about it at all. So you’d imagine I’m not entirely keen letting my daughter or myself lose someone the same way.”

His brow furrows. “I’m not. I’m not.”

Elain clenches her teeth and settles back in her seat. “I’m mad at you because bad things happen and it keeps happening and you’re not there with me. I’m mad because you think somehow sulking off and leaving me alone will take psychopaths’ attention off me when they’ve illogically fixated on me in the first place. I’m mad because that won’t solve it. Cause I want to solve it, face it with you and you…can’t find it in you to do so.”

She watches his chin sharpen and jut slightly outwards. “I can’t in good faith, Elain.”

“Why not?”

“You even want me in the first place?”

“You’ve made that hard to express.”

He blearily blinks, eyes straight ahead. Then a small empty chuckle leaves him.

“What?” she hoarsely asks.

“Remembered that meme: not unless everyone gets real cool about a bunch of stuff really quickly.”

“I’m pouring my heart out to you and you’re quoting John Mulaney, Az?”

“Hey, I don’t control this,” he taps his temple, hand thudding on the steering wheel as it rests there once more. “Truth is I’m afraid. I’ve never anticipated having anything to live for in my life, Elain. Everything’s just been getting one task done after the other, not even driven by dreams. I didn’t have dreams, just trying to find someplace to fit and somehow I chose the worst career to end in and I finally had a dream—it’s more of an obsession, really. The magnum opus of career tasks. I say I’m ready to die for it because I don’t have anything to live for after. I have no clue what I’d do after everything’s said and done.”

Azriel glances at her and shakes his head. “But you. Fucking hell, you. Everything I’ve ever thought a dream to be.”

Her face falls. “Where does that leave us?”

“Fuck if I know, sweetheart.”

Elain crosses her arms over herself and turns away from him. “Okay.”

____

The minute Feyre takes a look at her, her sister visibly blanches and gasps. Rhys stares at her for so long, until Azriel suggests they let her inside. Thankfully the children are asleep, Winnie fast asleep when Elain checks on her. Explaining what happens breathes more life into the fury poisoning the incident, she makes her way through it softly and quietly while Feyre’s face drains of any color and Elain wonders if Rhys is throwing Azriel dirty looks or it’s just her imagination.

“Well, you’re not leaving tonight,” Feyre declares, glancing at her husband for support. “All of you. I…I think it’s better if you just stay the night. Please, at least for my sake.”

“You don’t need to convince me,” Elain mutters, getting up to wash and change. She cannot wait to sink into their guest bedroom’s mattress, to sleep on feather pillows and forget anything ever happened for the duration of her sleep.

“I should go,” Azriel tries to leave.

“Like fucking sodding bleeding bloody Hell you are!” Feyre stammers through her cursewords, that Rhys throws her a softly-amused look of surprise.

“What part of London you from, darling?”

“Piss off,” she flips him the bird before glaring at Azriel. “Besides, your car’s at the—”

“I really think it’s best—”

“What you assume to be best has been recently revealed to be shit, Az,” Rhys stands as he unkindly declares his statement. “Stay. Let some of us get a good night’s sleep.”

Elain leaves them talking still, and when she’s done washing and getting into the pajamas Feyre lays out for her, she hears Rhys and Azriel’s conversation from upstairs. She has no intention of listening, or focusing on it, but the tone is hard to ignore. She wonders why or when animosity sprung between them, but she figures that of all the calamities to occur, soured mood between worried brothers is the least of her concern.

“It’s just the one room ‘cause I’m finally making up the other two,” Feyre says to her. “Shall I tell Az he’s free to take the couch?”

Elain curls under the covers and oh heavens she was right. This is sublime. A couple of hours in this is sufficient to cure everything wrong in her. “If that’s your subtle way of poking around, Fey, I don’t give a damn.”

“Everything all-right?” her sister softly asks. “I’m not asking just to know. I’m asking if there’s something. You know, not drama-wise. Actually something I can help with.”

Elain feels her eyes sting and her chest tighten. “Nesta warned me about ambitious men,” she mutters thickly. “She’s right.”

The mattress dips at her knees and Feyre rests a hand on her. “Nesta’s also incredibly lonely. She might not be entirely right. I’m sure you and Az can figure something out. He definitely thinks you’re worth it.”

“He knows what I’m asking for,” Elain tells her bluntly. “Ball’s in his court to deliver or not. I haven’t got anything to say.”

Feyre pats her. “I’ll give him a nudge.”

“He doesn’t need one.”

Her sister flicks off the lights as she heads out. “Everyone does. Especially him.”

“Feyre,” Elain looks over her shoulder just as she’s about to shut the door. “Tell Rhys to lay off.”

Feyre pauses momentarily, a dark silhouette against the hallway light, before she bows her head and closes the door behind her. Elain lies in the quiet dark, lets her eyes slide shut and her mind to drift. It’s all too easy, see. To seek refuge in dreams instead of reliving reality. She’d rather fret over the semantics of simpler notions than overthink that matter of constant life-or-death situations she finds herself in.

So, she sleeps.

Until she’s not anymore. Barely two hours. 

She tries to fall asleep again, stares at the bedside clock with the hopes it’ll bore her to sleep. Nothing. Is everyone asleep? When she checks on Winnie, the girl is softly snoring, clutching stuffed animals to her chest and the duvet kicked off. Elain takes the time to properly tuck her in once more, to brush a kiss against her forehead and linger. She does the same for Felix, admittedly in a more raucous sleeping position that Elain wrestles back into formation.

In the living room, when she goes looking for him, she finds him in the same spot as she left him in. On the sofa, dress shirt rolled to his sleeves, leaning his elbows on his knees and head ducked beneath his hands, chain-smoking like he had no tomorrow to smoke them in.

“Please get some sleep,” Elain softly pipes up. “Just looking at you in this state makes me worried.”

He slowly looks up, ruffling his hair along the way, as he meets her eyes. The night light of the hallway sheds little light on his face, revealing just enough to let her know he’d been sat here doing nothing but stone-faced stewing in his thoughts.

“Can’t,” his voice rumbles, before the cigarette’s red cherry glows brighter in the dim light and more tobacco catches quiet fire. He exhales with a rumbling sigh, burying his forehead in his palm.

“What’s going on your mind?”

“Plotting murder,” Azriel replies with blatant honesty that stuns her.

“I…” she pauses. “I am sorry for how I lost my temper—”

“Don’t fucking apologize,” he scoffs, shaking his head. “Don’t make this worse. I’m this close to smashing things into dust, Elain.”

“You didn’t deserve my anger,” she leans against the wall. “Or my frustration. I made it worse by looking to you to change things when they’re not so easily changed. I realize now—I mean, I understand. Why you’re so driven by anger. I would be too.”

He looks up. “You think I’m doing everything I am cause of anger?”

“Didn’t you say so?”

“I get overwhelmed and pissed off most of the time, sure,” Azriel concedes, sitting back and crossing his legs. “But anger doesn’t get you far in my job—you have to keep a cool head, keep your distance to have that view of the bigger picture no one else does. I’m not doing it cause it’s personal. It’s necessary.”

“You sound pretty mad to me,” Elain points out quietly.

“Do I?” he smiles sardonically, blowing out smoke. Despite his gentle tone and soft words. “I’m actually pretty fucking livid.”

“Smash-your-brother-into-a-pulp-livid?”

He stands up, putting out the cigarette in the ashtray. “Don’t know who do I get my hands on kind of livid.”

Elain looks up as he steps close to her, smelling heavily of cigarette smoke and cologne. She blinks, leaning against the wall, hands behind her back and thinks that the smoke and cologne are a combination suiting only him. “Do you have to hack and slash at the world if you’re angry?”

“Dunno what else it’d make me do.”

“You’ve never gotten angry and think; fuck it, I’ll use it for something progressive and constructive?”

“This isn’t a community garden issue, Elain,” Azriel heaves in a deep breath.

“I’m aware,” she nods. “I’m just asking if you’d possibly find the strength in your anger to give me what I’m asking for.”

His face softens, his shoulders slump and his hands cup her face achingly tender and soft, hazel eyes flickering between her own. “Before Feyre went to bed, she told me my blanket’s upstairs in your room.”

Elain leans into his palms, closing her eyes. She might faint, as dizziness flares up in her head. “Sorry, you’ll have to share it. I’m a hogger.”  

“Now that’s a problem, isn’t it?”

“We can compromise. I’ll allow you close-contact cuddling to fit under it.”

“Don’t want to freeze to death, sure.”

Why do tears build up behind her closed eyelids and leak out? She sniffles, feels that shake in her come back in small tremors, and leans into him. His hands slide off her face, to let him wrap his arms around her and tuck his head on her shoulder.

“I want to be strong to face this,” she tearfully whispers. “I feel braver with you. Like I could handle anything.”

“Yeah,” he whispers back. “I get it.”

“Would you stop being too scared of being vulnerable and accept that you’re human like the rest of us, with people you love that can be used to get to you, with people who love you that worry to death about you? Would you accept that?”

“I’m scared to do it.”

She presses herself into him. “You have to. You’re one of the bravest people I know. I know it’s frightening, but please, for me—if you want me, us, I need you to accept that fact. And I need you to adjust your moves according to it or there won’t be an ‘us’ and I really want it to happen.”

He gently gives her body a squeeze. “That’s a lesson in human nature I wasn’t lectured on.”

She squeezes her eyes shut, and hot tears stream down her face. Sometimes she forgets the things that made him who he is, the isolated years and tortured childhood—something like that sticks with a person, is an integral part of who they are. It explains a lot, if she’s honest.

“I can be patient,” says Elain into his chest. “I’ll be patient for you.”

His knees bend a little, she feels them nudge her as his arms shift on her and she finds herself being gently lifted up. Makes the sore effort of helping him pick her up by latching her arms around his neck while he relieves her legs from the pressure of standing.  

“Don’t think I deserve you,” he murmurs quietly, holding her easily to his chest, his eyes sorrowfully dark and eyebrows low over them. His neck warm when Elain presses her face to it, splaying one of her hands on his back. “Let’s get you to bed. Get some rest.”

Cassian’s lips quip at the one corner they habitually curve at, the scar along his top lip adding further character to his smile alone. “True,” he concedes that at least, saluting the cold foggy weather before them mockingly before indulging a sip of a black coffee Elain convinced him to add a packet of sugar to.

The sigh that rumbles his chest as it leaves resonates deeply with Elain, who only smiles faintly at his eyes fluttering shut and his hand pressing the paper cup to his face. “Oh, Elain…”

“I know,” she nibbles on her cinnamon roll and stares at the cascading rain shower.

“You’re not helping me lead a healthier life,” Cassian mutters but sips some more. “I’ve been meaning to cut caffeine out of my diet.”

“You know it’s been scientifically proven that removing caffeine from your diet cuts out what’s estimated to be 90% of your will to live?”

Cassian chuckles, eyes still shut, lips still smiling and shoulders hunched. “Want to know how I know that’s bullshit for sure, without hesitation?”

Elain grins. “How?”

“Fucking Az is the most depressed man I know, and there’s not a form of caffeine he’s not addicted to.”

Elain can only smile faintly as she averts her gaze to her knees. “He is an anomaly in every way, so… doesn’t count.”

Cassian glances at her, before turning once more to the window before them viewing the cold of Windhaven in its foggy glory, Elain’s feet propped on the windowsill, curled in the café’s chair, and his own long legs stretched out before him. “Y’remind me of him, s’times,” he mentions quietly. “Don’t know how I missed it before, but you’ve got the same sense of humor. Makes me want to pull out my hair same way.”

“Yeah…” she says quietly, stares out some more and then glances at him. “Still hasn’t answered your calls?”

“Nope,” Cassian heaves a sigh before popping the ‘P’. “You?”

She shakes her head. “I’m going to his place.”

“Good luck,” the ex-soldier scoffs. “Tried that. He’s not there.”

“How’d you know?”

“Rebel’s at the neighbors.”

“Oh… Did Rhys mention anything?” 

“Can get about as much words out of Rhys as I can out of Az,” Cassian says darkly, then drinks more but only because he can’t seem to find anything else to do with himself. “Besides, he’s busy with work, I guess. All I could get out of him is Az got suspended while they investigate him and when I ask him for fucking what, all I get is ‘Fuck’s sake, Cassian, don’t ask’.”

“Do they… do they blame Azriel for… it?”

Cassian shrugs and stuffs the rest of his cinnamon roll in his mouth. “Don’t know. He’s blamed for something. I’ve got other fucks to worry about.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know, it’s probably nothing, but I’ve missed Ben—haven’t heard of him for a long while and the guys haven’t seen him either.”

Ben who, if memory serves her correctly, is the man Cassian served four tours with, fought to the death in many battles and ‘trusted him with his six’—she knows from Cassian’s circles and her volunteering that Ben turned his back on it all since coming home from his last tour and hasn’t refreshed his contract once it’s ended. He’d yet to show up at a single gathering, and what she knows of him is that he’d gone into business, for what she cannot remember or no one knows. What she does know is that his absence has been an amputation Cassian cannot forget or get a prosthetic limb for.

Elain scooches closer towards her friend, their jackets rustling in the silence as she lays her head on his shoulder.

“Worry’s good,” she murmurs softly. Cassian’s incessant bouncing of his knee pauses.

“You’re the first ever person I hear to say that,” if anyone’s voice could smile fondly, Elain figures it would be Cassian. “How so, sunshine?”

“Means we still care,” Elain responds quietly, her hands curled around a now cold-hot-chocolate, her eyes bleary with lack of sleep, and her back aching from waiting for so long in cafes and parks in her search for Azriel. “Means our empathy’s not gone, means we’re still all right. In a time where I keep fighting off indifference, I feel glad whenever I worry for someone that’s not family.”

Cassian softly chuckles, turns his head to press a kiss to her hair before resting his head on hers. “You’re always full of surprises, sunshine. Maybe I’ll start thinking like you do.”

“Good luck.”

_____________________

Elain didn’t know what she was expecting when she knocked on Azriel’s door, but the sound behind the door telling her he’s there alone silences some worry in her that had been ignited long ago. Yet the sight of him knocks the breath out of her, still, when he opens the door.

It’s his ruffled hair, sunken eyes dull with tire, and his downturned lips that make her all the gladder she’s decided to show up, unannounced as she is—there you are, every part of her sings. I’ve been worried about you.

“Hello,” she breathes as his arm falls from the door and he stands resigned before her. Her gaze rakes over him like an apt scanner, taking in his sweater and the sleeves that bunch at his wrist, his jeans and bare feet.

His lips twitch, and the sadness of it—not a smile, not even close—the way Winnie’s lips wobble and pout before she’s about to sob, says more than enough. Her hand tightens on the strap of her purse, before her hands fall to her side.

There is only silence as his eyes bore into hers, and hers –wide, unblinking—stare right back. It feels to her like there are no words needed, because something is sparking the entirety of her chest, the space between them charges, near electric as his eyes say more than his lips can ever lie.

His lips tighten, his brows narrow, and his chest shudders lightly as he breathes in.

Her throat clogs up and damn her, she understands. Truly, the depth of it all. She can tell.

“Hello,” she repeats quietly and Azriel looks away with a small resigned nod as he steps back and gestures she come inside.

Gingerly stepping out of her shoes, Elain shuts the door behind her with a soft snap as he disappears down the hallway and she follows. Rebel steps out from his office, and hurries towards Elain like lightening is sparking her heels. Despite the tension in the room, Elain smiles and gathers the feline cat in her arms when she pauses at her feet.

“...Coffee?” Azriel quietly croaks, standing hands behind his back in the living room and Elain shakes her head with a small smile, stepping through the arching doorway from the hall to the room.

She promptly freezes.

It’s a crime scene exploded all over his house in such a grotesque manner of odd reserved professionalism and the brutal nature of his profession. The television depicts a collage of graphic photographs; manila folders and files swarm virtually all space on the carpeted floor and the singular couch; printed photographs and official-looking documents with size 12 fonts and the General Ominous Feeling of Governmental Doom haphazardly litter the coffee table; his laptop, up and running on the coffee table with a flash drive connected to it, is open to what appears to be a report.

Elain blinks, but she’s frozen at the sight of the guns so innocuously placed next to the laptop.

She knows it’s not illegal to own firearm in Velaris, but she’s led such a sheltered life of…human, normal suffering where her life’s travesties were her mother’s suicide, her father’s neglect, her divorce… and now her school’s shooting, her daughter’s attempted murder. Seeing the firearm upfront is like existing in a reality where life and dreams are mixed together.

Her brows narrow as she stares at that black gun- Cassian probably knows the name for it, can tell her its caliber just by feeling it. She remembers what it feels like to be staring down the barrel of one, thinking of her daughter as she makes peace with dying and leaving her alone. The sound it would make, she wonders if it would be similar to the rifle that had ambushed her classroom. Pops or loud booms? Would it hurt the same?  

Rebel purrs in her arms and nudges her neck.

Elain blinks, repeatedly, turning her sharp gaze towards Azriel watching her closely, before he picks up the two handguns and the sight of them in his grasp awakens what feels like an epiphany in Elain.

See, look, she’s long since come to the terms she’s a visual person. She appreciates views and imageries more than she does words and descriptions, and recently she concedes her mind has been absent as of late. She doesn’t know when she’s fallen asleep like Aurora collapsing at the spindle—maybe her curse all along has been to fall in love with something that isn’t hers—yet the sight of Azriel, the truth of him; a haunting remake of a song once light, is the brush of a kiss that brings her a sort of clarity. All fairy tales originate from a darker core, she wonders if Azriel is true to that.

She looks again, truly looks, at his apartment, his work, and when she looks back to him she sees paranoia, a sharp edge, a man who’s been brought to light he cannot stand, and most of all she reads fear in his eyes. It’s not one of self-preservation, she’s long since suspected he is a failing misery at that front, but—if she dares think—it is something boyish, and if her instinct is true: it’s mournful.

Elain sharply inhales through her nose. “I worried about you.”

Azriel’s face is an arrangement so beautiful, so devastated and some blissful era ago, his eyes might have been allowed the kindness to gleam with tears. His teeth pull at the corner of his lower lip, and his voice is hushed when he speaks.

“I’m sorry.”

The way his chest caves with the words add more volume and emphasis than words can.

Elain’s fingers brush through Rebel’s soft fur. “I…”

Frankly, she had words prepared to say. There are many speeches she ran through her head as she drove over, words she handpicked and polished, yet they are insufficient in the reality where he is there, before her, alive, and all right—she cannot find herself wanting anything else from him.

“I worried about you,” she repeats softly, hugging his cat to her chest. “I needed you to be all right. Are you all right?”

He stands so still, at attention, hands behind his back like a stranger in his own home. “I’m sorry. I know it means nothing but I am.”

Her gaze softens. “For what?”

He looks down at his feet. “You honestly haven’t realized your life’s gone to shit because of me?”

“I also realize it’s been ten times better because of you.”

It’s the heat of her voice, throat tight, that makes him look up sharply.

Words fall short on her behalf but then; “Was it intentional?” she whispers. “Did you let him hurt us?”

“No.”

Her shoulders give a small shrug. “All our families are fucked up in a way.”

A strangled laugh escapes his throat, but it’s not the sound people make when they’re happy, or amused. “You’re seriously going to normalize that?”

“I think normalizing it makes it easier for me to deal with being shot. With having my daughter escape murder by sheer luck.”

“I’m sorry,” his voice cracks, his eyes glisten like she’s touched a frayed raw nerve mentioning Winnie’s miraculous escape. “I’m so fucking sorry. And I know- God, I know it changes nothing but I’m-“

“I know,” Elain steps close, until only his cat is between them and she can see the change brought to his eyes. She nods. There’s a missing gleam in his eyes she’s fallen in love with that’s lost. “I know you are. And I don’t blame you. I know you were staying away from him, and I know he hurt you. I could tell- you ran into him when we were shopping, didn’t you?”

Maybe it’s the fact she’s seen him, or that he believes no one could ever pay him the attention he gives to the world, or it is both, but there’s something that cracks like lines in dry earth in his beautiful hazel eyes.

Elain’s mouth is dry as a desert. “I realize we were used as a way to get to you... in whatever sick delusional way it was. I admit it took me time to acclimate myself to that but I know. I get it. I understand.”

“Do you?” he breathes out, full of doubt.

“Don’t do that,” she whispers back. “You’re the one person who’s not supposed to undermine me. You can’t think I’m blind or an idiot. You’re not supposed to-“

His hands abruptly rise, palms curling around her shoulders as he blinks and his lips tighten. “What kind of woman would understand the circumstances and still want me?”

Elain blinks and slowly bites her lip. “I don’t know if you’ve grasped this about me but I don’t take well to being told what to do. I don’t respond to threats; intimidation only angers me. I deserve—we deserve to decide if we want each other on our own terms.”

She strokes Rebel’s fur and glances down at the cat staring up at her. “I will only decide to stay with you or leave based on what you do, on who you are. Just because your psychotic brother doesn’t like me won’t mean I’ll back down. Dealing with in-laws who hate me is kind of what I do.”

It’s a wet laugh that escapes him. “Elain, you really don’t get it-“

“Hey,” she cuts him off firmly. “I know more than I let on, all right? I thought you understood that. I know you’re a detective and I know what that means—because you’re a clean cop, I know what that means, ok? The minute you helped Feyre get out, I knew what kind of a man you were—no one has the guts to publicly go after an entire gang and lock them up. Granted, I didn’t feel it all until now, and yes it terrifies me but what else did I expect?”

“Elain, please, listen to me, it was nice while it lasted-“

“I won’t let you break up with me for this,” her voice quiets as her brows narrow and she holds back her tears. “If you don’t like me, then just say it. If you don’t want to be with a woman who has a kid, say it. I won’t mind. But I won’t let you take this one good thing from me, because it might be exploited. Living in fear is everything our predecessors fought against-“

“Elain-“

“And you can’t lie, either,” her eyes brighten as she locks gazes with him. “I can tell, when you lie. So you can’t. Now take a deep breath, and tell me you never want to see me just because you don’t like me.”

His hands tighten on her shoulders. “If you knew, about me, you wouldn’t stay-“

“So tell me,” she insists. “I’m not marrying you, I’m just telling you that I won’t walk away for a reason that is not you or me. Now look me in the eye and tell me you don’t want me because you don’t like me.”

He stares, mouth parted faintly, as his face struggles so visibly to communicate what he is feeling—but perhaps it is not a matter of communication, but an internal struggle where he himself is helpless against navigating the surmounting mountain of patterned reactions he’s been told are emotions. Is it an emotion still if it breaks formation? What of the fractured scatters of single isolated happenstances where they don’t fit in any structure?

Finally, he breathes. “This doesn’t have a happy ending.”

Elain smiles, a watery thing with a bubbly chuckle. “Oh look, you’re a seer. Can you tell me the lottery numbers?”

__________________

Some time later, Azriel mumbles something about making them a bite to eat and Elain lets him, because the way his clothes hang on him and his arm is a little slimmer than she remembers weeks ago is worrisome. She wonders when he lost his appetite in the previous days, and realizes she hasn’t seen him eat since a night at her house—seems ages ago now—where the height of their worries was finding out the identity of the traitor in the midst of their Spanish drama, when Azriel helped her back into her life and everything—well, most things had been all right.

“I’m not sure about you, but an eye carved out of a corpse doesn’t stimulate my appetite,” Elain raises her voice as she nudges aside photographs and makes some room on the couch. “I’m gonna put them away, okay?”

A short-fractured laugh from the kitchen. “Yeah, sure, just keep them together.”

So she does, examining them with surface-level curiosity as she straightens photographs out and piles documents together. Many of them date several years ago, others months, yet she doesn’t read the contents of the reports out of respect for the privacy each victim is entitled to. These are actual people, who’ve met devastating fates and deserve retribution and acts put in place to make sure it doesn’t happen again. She wonders if his job has any part contributing to that—it’d be a nice thing if it did. A nice consolation for his hard work to bring forth something preventative.

“Are those unsolved cases?” she asks, tapping government documents into a shapely pile in her lap. “Is this what you’ve been doing all this time? Cassian’s been hunting you through the entire state and you were here printing out documents?”

“No, I’m building my case.”

Her head snaps sharply towards the kitchen. “You’re being prosecuted?”

“Uh, no. At least not yet,” a clink of silverware follows the ominous addition and he raises his tone. “Those are crimes the Heptad is responsible for. I’m assembling it all into one big Pandora’s Box kind of case for it to be prosecuted. The minute I open it, everything goes to Hell.”

Elain frowns at a document from two years ago.

“I guess you can call them unsolved,” he then concedes. “Cause they’re not processed yet. But they’re all solved. I’ve kept them off the books for safekeeping—the station’s full of moles, it’s not even a secret. I can tell you who gets how much bribes and when. It’s in there too—all the accomplices. It’s kind of a big deal. I hope I’m not further fucking up your life by telling you, so just keep it to yourself.”

“I don’t understand.”

He emerges into the room with a mug of tea he hands her, the fruity aroma of Earl Grey making some part in her brain to smile.

“I didn’t know you drank tea,” she pipes softly as she faintly blows the surface. He leans back against the wall, arms crossed, eyes visibly tired and yet a little smile glimmers just for her.

“Figured if you ever stopped by I couldn’t let you sit without tea. Found a brand that sells a dozen of types in one box so… if Earl Grey’s not your thing, there’s eleven others.”

She smiles into the black liquid and pretends that the heat in her cheeks is from the tea’s rising steam. “So,” she clears her throat and nods to the grotesque television. “Safekeeping?”

Azriel heaves in a deep breath, one that makes his shoulders tremble as they rise and the slouch of his body against the wall speaks more of a physical exhaustion than a conscious stance projecting an image. A click on the remote changes the contents of the screen, to a complicated board depicting what Elain can only recognize as a mind-map.

“What is it?”

“The Fuckening.”

The spluttering laugh escaping her lips is highly inappropriate, yet it crackles in the room all the same. “I’m sorry. What?”

The small gleam in the side-eyed look he gives her is comforting—he’s still there, she tells herself, relieved. Her Azriel’s still there—as his lips wryly curl. “You heard me. My life’s work. Right there. The Fuckening.”

Humor is the way he copes, she reminds herself. So she doesn’t fight the smile on her lips. “Your fascination with the word is unbelievable.”

“Listen, it’s everything-it’s a swearword, it’s a term of endearment, it’s an insult, an expression of anger,” he pushes himself off the wall and she grins in response. There he is, their ranting contemplative hyper-fixated Azriel. “It’s eloquent. It’s appropriate in every context.”

“And you’ve taught it to my daughter.”

He jabs an index towards her, and she ignores the way it shakes. How his whole arm trembles—she’d give anything for it to be out of suppressed laughter instead of exhaustion. “French word for seal. See? ‘Fuck’ is like the starting point for all matter. It can be anything and everything—”

“All right,” her brows curve before she braves another sip. “What’s The Fuckening, then?”

He crosses his arms again, yet this time he doesn’t slouch or lean against the wall. Stands still. “It’s organized crime’s reckoning,” Azriel says quietly. “In Velaris, at least.”

“The seven gangs?”

“Mm. Past seven years, crime skyrocketed in the state,” Azriel reveals. “Out of nowhere. I went from a bored, burned-out detective pushing around paper for domestic cases to being dragged out of my bed at all hours for murders, heists, masked suicides. Each body we found was a thread tangled into a network of stories and events. It got rare for me to close a case as a simple homicide—well, as simple as homicide gets. Most of the ones I do are just threads I haven’t tugged on. And they’re all linked back to those seven assholes.”

Elain blinks at the mind-map of seven large branches, with each gang name. Vultures, Bloodhounds, the 18th, Anvil, Black Swan, Ravens, the 16th. “But they’ve always been there, right? They haven’t… They didn’t appear out of nowhere in seven years.”

“No,” he nods. “They date back to the twenties, after World War I. Back then, they were just a crew run by Alfonso McIntyre. They’ve always been in the state—bloody, downright filthy bunch of lowlife nobodies. Then they expanded as McIntyre’s empire grew, got masked by legitimate business, subbranches with their own leaders, but all seven answered in the end to the head of it all, like a king.”

“Oh, like the Godfather! So the king died seven years ago? Was overthrown?”   

“On the contrary,” Azriel lowers his arms, and steps next to her only to perch on the arm of the couch. “The seven have been minding their own business for decades—so there hasn’t been a need for a leader. Everyone just operated as their own entity, there’s been an understanding with the law enforcement. A weird co-existence. Till that guy shows up seven years ago and declares fucking war on God’s green earth.”

He points at the center where Hybern branches everything else.

“The king?” Elain traces her finger along the rim of her mug.

“The king,” Azriel confirms softly. “Hybern. Reins them all in, back into the original ruthless formation, ignited a competitiveness between them and now they’ve gone out of control. Ten years ago to have someone killed, you needed explicit permission, you couldn’t just go around and do it. Now… well, now assholes can kill kids like Bunny just because they decided to.”

Winnie. Elain sharply blinks away the potential tears and looks to Azriel whose shoulders hunch, hands in his lap, as he stares blankly at the screen.

“And here I am left behind having to tell people why their loved ones were murdered.”

Elain swallows heavily, averts her gaze to her mug of tea, cups it desperately to fight the chill of the topic off her back. He sounds so hallow with the haunting words, his life revealed to be much darker than she’s realized. She wonders what it does to a person, to be that man catching serial killers and consoling families. Looking at him now, he looks so young but somehow his job lies over him like a shadow-curtain of age.

“So you’re locking up the mob?”

“I’ll let you in on a secret, Elain,” she can feel him look to her. “I’m trying to. I’m not supposed to, but we’re risking our lives and careers for it. I lost Milo because of it.”

She quickly blinks away the image of Milo’s death. “It’s…I’m proud of you.”

Silence stretches long after her words, that she has to look at him only to find him staring with blatant surprise on his face that’s utterly profound it confuses her.

“What?” she asks.

“No one’s ever had that reaction. You don’t think I’m—I’m an idiot? Reckless? Suicidal? A naïve jackass kicking at something he doesn’t understand?”

“Well, why are you doing it? This,” she gestures to his life’s work. “If your life’s on the line, if you lost someone because of it, and people think you’re mad, why did you start it? Didn’t you anticipate it to be this dangerous?”

“I’m on the useless spectrum, Elain,” he mutters quietly that her head whips around so sharply and suddenly—You feel that way too? She wants to scream—at his confession. “I’ve been taking and living off people for years. I need my life to be useful to someone, if only once.”

“You’re not useless,” she finds herself saying. “How could you think that?”

“Let’s see,” his voice, hoarse and cracked, splits something severe in her heart. He holds up a finger, the beginnings of a count. But then he pauses, heaves a sigh and lowers his hand. “I just am.”

Azriel stands, feet dragging as he moves, hands shoved in his pockets and his shoulders tense. “Doing this will be the most worthwhile thing I can do. I have the chance to do it, and I’ll be a selfish asshole if I don’t. This golden chance where my pressure points amount to zero? It has to be me.”

Elain frowns down at the still murky waters in her hand. “What makes you different?”

“Guy like me, with no strings attached?”

Her head snaps up sharply. “How are you different than any other human?” she repeats firmly.

He pauses. “I don’t get it.”

“You have the chance to do this,” she recalls, setting down her tea. “What do you mean by that?”

Azriel leans against the wall. “No family, loner, has enough advantageous connections, bit unimpressed with the concept of living… I can do what others can’t, ‘cause I got nothing to worry about.”

Elain slowly stands. “No family… So, the Blackwoods are what, friendly neighbors?”

Azriel blinks at her. “How’s anyone going to get to them in London? And Rhys’s more secure than I can make him.”

“But they’re your family,” Elain’s voice quivers, not with—is this anger? “You do have a family, Az.”

His lips part, words about to tumble before he holds them back and closes his mouth. This is the second time he’s refrained from speaking his mind.

“What?” she finds herself saying, sharper than intended.

He shakes his head.

“You had something to say, say it.”

“I don’t want a pity party,” he says quietly, yet firmly.

Elain heaves in a breath—when had her breathing gone off rhythm?—and turns to the screen. “So, loner…”

“Pretty self-explanatory—”

“I just spent an hour with Cassian in the cold, looking for you, he hasn’t gotten a single night’s sleep since the news came out,” her voice is sharp as a knife, but it seems to deliver her message adequately. “He’s been worried sick. I have. Nesta has. We’re worried sick cause we think your life is in danger with you being thrown in the open. My kid’s been asking for you nonstop for days. Loner, Azriel?”

“Elain,” he stands. “I misspoke. I didn’t mean to undermine your friendships—”

“What, then?”

“I just—all I said, I can do this job because-“ his tone softens, his shoulders hunch. “-because I got what it takes. I can give what—what others can’t. And it needs to be done—how many victims will I have to have nightmares about before I can’t stand it anymore?”

Elain pauses, hands grasped tightly, her shoulders stiffen and lock up with dread. “Give what, Az?”

His eyes squint, briefly. “I-“ he stammers, like this is the first time anyone’s asked or probed or cared—is it? She’d cry if it were. “Everything—”

“You think this’ll cost you your life.”

Silence.

Azriel stares blankly back at Elain, forehead creased, his lips pressed, but there’s no negation or disagreement. She wonders why he couldn’t say it—or wouldn’t, to her face?—as the words hang between them like a scythe about to drop.

She sharply breathes, the air cold and sharp as knives in her nose and a fine line down her chest. Her lips quiver. She presses them together.

“This is a slow suicide project.”

More silence.

Elain averts her gaze. Breathes deeply in yet it doesn’t feel enough. Blinks sharply at the ceiling.

“You can’t say that,” Azriel says quietly. “Not you too.”

“Oh, others have noticed, thank God,” her voice wobbles. “When were you going to tell me? Or were you just waiting for me to find out on some stupid Tuesday through the news, ‘Azriel Bougainvillea found murdered in a ditch, investigators think it’s a fair price—oh look, here lock up these five murderers. Cleaner streets, go VSPD!’. Just collateral, that Elain. Is that it, Az?”

“You can’t make it sound like that.”

“Like what?!” she shouts.

They both freeze, but Elain feels as if she’s opened a faucet to a tank that’s been filling up for years and years, quietly, sneakily building up…

“Like it’s nothing more than a suicide,” his brow narrows. “It’s not—”

“A suicide is still a suicide no matter the outcome, Az!”

His jaw clenches, she can see his fists clenching in his pockets as the knuckles protrude.

“Tell me this isn’t the case and I’ll drop this,” Elain whispers vehemently. “Look me in the eyes—tell me you want to live.”

His voice shakes. “Want to live? Jesus, Elain, do you not know me? Does anyone actively want to see another day? Every time I wake up, I just—I’m so tired of this. I don’t want to do anything, I haven’t felt alive ever—fuck it, other than when I was fired up on opium or snow did I feel at least like I can breathe. This isn’t a suicide project, the fuck? There are thousand quicker and easier ways, you think I’d choose this when it’s taking everything in me to do? Fuck if it just takes my life, that makes it ten times easier! This is me doing some good, meaning something for once in my goddamn useless life—”

“You are not useless!”

“You say that, but you’ve only known me a few fucking months! I’ve never done a single good fucking thing in my life—all I do is take and take, and I make people’s lives worse. Fuck, Elain, my own mother didn’t want me! I ruined Rhys’ relationship with his parents! And when I finally try do some fucking good, I get Milo killed. You think I’m particularly happy with this guy, me? I want him to live? Fuck it, if I can give the years on me to someone else, I’d do it gladly.”

“Oh my God…” her tears cloud up in her eyes, fog her vision—that’s fine, she doesn’t want to see him anyway, if he’s only going to die, why does she bother and hurt herself by getting attached? “You want this to kill you. You’re not resigned to the possibility, you wish it’ll happen.”

He freezes.

“You wish it’ll take your life, because then you feel like it’s a debt repaid? The world’s better of without you? Is that it?”

His nostrils flare, he presses his lips together, holds out his hands to the sides and with forced calm in his voice speaks next. “I’m saying… a high-risk job like this demands a sacrifice. And losing my life is just one option I’ve made my peace with. Extraordinary results demand extraordinary efforts.”

“Don’t glorify it.” Tears collect at her lower lid.

“Elain-“ he takes a step towards her, the movement snapping her into action as she shakes her head and holds up a hand. Azriel freezes.

“Don’t,” she’s shaking her head, stepping back. “I don’t want—you keep on glorifying your death, convince yourself it’s anything other than suicide, I don’t want any part of it. Just—”

She snatches up her bag from the couch and dashes to the front door, shoving on her shoes with cold shaking hands—he doesn’t stop her, follow her, deny anything—and marches out his apartment with as much of her heart held together as she can.

She won’t, will not, watch another person slip from between her hands.

If only I’d been stronger—

Her therapist had taught her well, she’s mended herself adequately, she’s learned to protect herself from being put into situations like this—oh God, but Azriel, why is he the last person she’d suspect? His smile so vivacious, so pretty, his laugh booming in her house, so full of life and unalike any man she’s ever met—

You know better than anyone how happy they look. They laugh, make you promises, no one else has a brighter smile, don’t they?

No—

You’d know. What did she keep telling you, Elain?

“My pretty daisy, you make life entirely worth it, baby.”

No, no, she squeezes her eyes shut as her fingers furiously jam the elevator button, her entire being shaking.

She wasn’t laughing though, on that balcony. So beautiful in white, her hair unbound. Mama had smiled to her death—

“No,” Elain sobs, jamming her fists to her chest as she chokes on the pure surge of emotions.

“Mama?” she whispered, dropping to her heels after successfully opening the door and wandering into the private hospital room. Her mother’s bed was empty, Feyre’s bassinet by it with the newborn soundly asleep. Perhaps in the bathroom, Elain figured as she strayed to Feyre and rose to the tips of her toes to grin at the baby. Peacefully swaddled in her blankets, hat on her little head and a cute button nose.

The bathroom was empty, door ajar and lights closed. That left only the balcony, whose heavy door Elain couldn’t open. The curtains billowed inwards and a breeze swept through. She was only two-years-old, yet everything about it is imprinted in her mind like a tattoo. The shade of beige, the tiled flooring, Feyre’s soft breathing. The feel of the curtain as she fought it to the side, discovering the heavy glass door in her path opened only a crack at the wall letting in a sharp whistling breeze. Papa was in the cafeteria with Nesta, they promised to get Elain sour candy.

Mama standing at the railing, atop the little chair Elain would sit on because the hospital bed and the chairs were too tall. Her nightrobe billowing around her, her hair unbound, so beautiful she remembers thinking her Mama was.

“Mama,” Elain tapped her hand against the glass. “’Emme out.”

“No, no, no, no,” she sobs, bowing over under the wave of grief breaking her back in its merciless will. Arms wrapped around her middle, she crouches right there and there, her chest cracking in two with each sob that rips her throat. The elevator takes its sweet time.

But Mama turning round, looking at her daughter over her shoulder. She wasn’t laughing, holding Elain against her hip and Nesta’s hand as they watch the elephant at the zoo wash itself and Nesta’s nose wrinkle. Mama looked so beautiful as her body turned on that chair, and the wind pushed her hair. Her lips smile, that one for Elain, her little daisy.

“Mama,” Elain sticks her hand through the space between the wall and the heavy door, and pushes. No avail. She was her daughter’s age. “’Emme out too. Wanna-wanna-“

“Lain,” Mama said softly, as Elain’s lips scrunched with determination and she pushed with her entire body at the door. It only brings pain to her wrist but it doesn’t stop her will to be with Mama.

“Mama-“ Elain stuck her feet in the ground and heaved at the door—if she huffs and puffs, will she blow the house away? “’Emme out-“

But Mama leaned back.

Elain pauses.

The empty balcony.

The curtain billowing behind her.

The whistle of the wind in her ear—like gale, a screaming gale in the current.

Her little curls nudged with the breeze.

Cold air on her damp lip.

“Mama?”

Elain shoved at the door with all her might, using her wrist as the connection. She grunted. Panicking? Shoved, pushed, feet firmly in the ground—“Mama?” where is her mother? They get hurt when they fall, is her mother hurt?

“Mama!”

A jolting shock of electricity and a snap vibrated in her hand, it made her freeze as her hand hurt all of a sudden, and it felt like she couldn’t move it anymore. Stuck in its pushed back position, Elain stared wide eyed at her hurt. Mama would definitely answer her now, now that she hurt herself.

“Mama!”

“Mama,” Elain whispers softly, covering her head with her arms. He’s slipping from her hands as well, isn’t he? She won’t have him, she won’t have him if he’ll only leave. He can’t leave as well. Not him as well.

The cry that leaves her chest contains everything therapy couldn’t fix, the sheer loss and devastation at seeing her slip from her fingers over and over in her dreams. She can’t do that to her Winnie. Let her have indestructible, invincible Azeel in her grasp, only to watch him set himself on fire.

Elain crouches in front of the elevator, and sobs into her knees.

___________________

“Now you look like you’ve gone and fucked every shit under the sun up.”

It’s relieving to finally hear Nuala’s voice light and humorous, even though she’s wielding it to poke needles into him, but at least it’s a normality, one he can rely on.

“Kinda my job to,” he answers, sifting through the files she’s presented him with. Nu’s fork spears through her cheesecake—cheesecake in winter, that woman, honestly—and she smacks her mouth as she chews and swallows just to piss him off. “And shut the fuck up.”

She slurps her coffee. A pair of woman passing by them recognize his face, if their nasty look and the loud “corrupt filth” one of them declares is anything to go by. Azriel remains slouched in his seat, having grown accustomed to the public’s less than favorable opinion of him if, again, the amount of hate mail he consistently throws into the bin is an indication. He’s had to delete his socials because it’d gotten pointless bothering even opening them.  

Aside from suspension followed by a prompt return-to-work-on-probation period and a thorough investigation, Azriel’s come out of this relatively, well, intact. Aside from the publicity and the way almost everyone and their mother now knows a fraction of his story that they think is the entire tale, and the fact that his undercover has been well and truly fucked up, he’d say he’s all right. In danger, at the end of his wits, at war with the fucking mob, but all right.

“I assumed—”

“Oh God, here we go,” he mutters.

“Shut up. I assumed this sudden motivation to get The Fuckening together was because of your cover getting blown up or that you were worried they’d kick you off it—but that’s not the entire story, is it?”

“No,” he reaches for his phone, opens it up and passes it over without looking up from the fine print of Nuala’s reports and statements. “I got that in the mail, night of. CD, untraceable, but it’s them. Nathan’s got a flare for theater that I really think he should have invested in, instead of human torture and mutilation but they’ve declared war so it’s only reasonable I line my soldiers up.”

Nuala’s silence says much. Then: “Your apartment?”

“Well they were kind enough to send multiple copies—my apartment, the motel I was going to spend a few days in, the safe house. Then I realized there’s no point hiding, they’d kindly expressed as much. They’re keeping me alive for a reason which I’m guessing is the fact that they know I have insurance and filth ready to spill and since I haven’t opened my fat mouth means no one’s firing the first shot yet which means—”

 She’s silent while she watches the video, her breath steady in the ambience of the outdoors café, merging with the mid-day’s noise. “They’re trying to clean house, and find whatever we have on them. One step ahead, I am, as always since I moved the evidence to an undisclosed place of my choosing—"

 Then, her breath catches.

“What the fuck—” she blurts, as the realization stuns the breath from her chest.

Yeah, he’d thought the same.

“Oh my god that’s you.” Horror colours her words, an emotion he feels desensitized to. Strange to be feeling generally calm and desensitized when his life’s gone to shit—expected outcomes, but still some part of him thinks: where are my feelings?

“Ten points to Gryffindor,” he mutters.

“What the fuck?!” she repeats in a hiss. “That’s—that’s how you got those scars—”

“Yeah. Just promise you won’t spoil my Joker act, all right? Wanna know how I got these scars?”

“Az, I didn’t know—”

“I really appreciate the fact that you’ve respected me enough to not look me up but don’t lie to my face and say you didn’t recently find out like everyone else.”

He finally looks up, to the strain around her eyes and the tightness in her jaw. “I didn’t want you to know cause I didn’t want it between us,” Azriel adds softly. “The fact alone’s messed up most of my relationships. Don’t let it now.”

She breathes in, till her chest expands to the fullest and she looks away. “It does fuck with me when I find out my best friend was tortured and imprisoned in a basement as a child, but it doesn’t change how I see you, Az.”

“Thank you,” he responds gratefully and looks down. “I’ll be honest, when they sent that CD it…felt like I was underwater, couldn’t find up from down. So I’ve been preparing.”

Nuala’s forehead wrinkles as she gives a small nod. “I mean it’s about time,” she sighs, shifting in her seat and crossing her arms. “You think now’s the time to—”

“Not yet,” he cuts in. “We still haven’t gotten anything on Amarantha or Hybern and we both know there’s jackpot.”

Nuala rubs her face. “We have enough, Az,” she reasons. “Charges that won’t let any of them see the light of day.”

“I don’t want to lock up the lackeys,” he quietly responds. “If their bosses are loose it’s all for nothing.”

“Not for nothing,” Nuala chides. “Take their crew away, what are they?”

He rubs his thighs, deep-set frown. “Whoever managed to build this can do it again, and can get their crew back. I need the brains behind it, Nu.”

His partner heavily sighs and buries her face in her hands. “Feels like a fucking disaster about to happen. The wait’s killing me.”

Azriel watches a car speed by, cold wind tousling his hair as he stares off into something more distant than reality but more solid than a dream. A cancerous wish made up of hope and poisonous ‘what if?’ that he’s never entertained. But he feels himself stare it down, the possibility, this new outcome amongst the others to consider losing or gaining. When he started his project, getting side-tracked by the opportunity of having his own family and the love of his life was simply an incomprehensible and impossible future.

He'd lined his ducks accordingly, calculated his steps and chances and realized he had a solid chance at succeeding.

He hadn’t accounted for wanting to fail, to have an After to live for.

No point wondering, though. The look in Elain’s eyes said enough.

Still, he stares down a hope he knows might end up killing him.

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