Uninvited
Azriel x reader Fluff / banter / slow burn
Azriel has a favorite healer when it comes to treating his injuries. The problem is, sometimes he doesn't know what to say to show up. A fluffy, banter-filled one-shot about bad excuses, and a confession that slips out before either of them means it to.
The knock came well past midnight, not that it was really a knock. It was more of a scrape, three shadows dragging themselves against your door like they weren't quite sure they were allowed to ask.
You knew before you opened it who it would be. You always did. Your magic had a way of humming low in your chest whenever he was near, a warm little pulse that had started months ago and never quite stopped.
"You're late," you said, opening the door to find Azriel leaning against the frame like the wood was the only thing holding him up. Which, to be fair, it might have been.
He didn't answer right away. He just looked at you, the particular way he always did in that first unguarded second before he remembered himself, like the sight of you undid something he'd spent the whole flight over trying to keep tied down.
"I wasn't aware I had an appointment."
"You always have an appointment. You just never bother to schedule it." You stepped back to let him in, and your eyes did the quick, practiced sweep: shoulders, ribs, the set of his jaw, the way he was favoring his left side by approximately nothing at all. "You're not even bleeding."
"It isn't bad."
"You say that every time. Last month you said that with an arrow still in your leg."
"It was a graze."
"It was lodged in bone, Azriel."
He had the decency to look faintly sheepish about that one, shadows curling around his shoulders like they were trying to hide him from the memory. You loved, you were fond of, you corrected yourself, fond of, that was all, the way his shadows behaved around you. Skittish with everyone else, prone to whispering secrets and slipping away before anyone could catch them.
But here, in your small candlelit room that smelled like crushed chamomile and clean linen, they draped themselves over the back of your chair. Utterly at ease. Utterly unbothered by you rifling through your case of tinctures two feet away.
Traitors, all of them.
Your cat was no better. A sleek black shadow of her own, she uncurled from her spot by the hearth the moment Azriel stepped through the door, abandoning you entirely to wind herself around his ankles, purring like he'd personally hung the moon. His shadows, delighted, promptly wove themselves between her paws, and the two of them commenced their usual game, dark tendril and darker cat chasing each other in lazy circles across your floor.
"She likes you more than she likes me," you said, not for the first time. "And I feed her."
"She has excellent taste. Just like her owner, it seems," he said, with the shameless, easy smile of a man who knew exactly what he was doing and had no intention of stopping.
You sighed, fighting a smile you refused to let him see. "Sit," you said, nodding at the low table you kept for exactly this purpose, Azriel-shaped emergencies at ungodly hours.
He sat. He always sat.
That was the part that unraveled you most, if you were honest: Azriel, who took orders from no one, who Rhys himself had to ask rather than tell, folded himself onto your stool without a word of protest, every single time, like it had never once occurred to him to do otherwise. Cassian had made a comment about it once, something about a leash and a good boy, and Azriel had thrown a knife close enough to part his hair.
"So," you said, kneeling in front of him. "What is it this time."
"Ribs. Rockfall, northern border. I think one's cracked."
"Did you at least win?"
"I'm the one sitting in a healer's chair at two in the morning. What do you think?"
"I think," you said, letting your magic uncurl from your palms, warm and gold and slow, "that you came here anyway, even though Madja's closer to the border camp than I am."
Something shifted in him at that, subtle, the kind of thing you'd have missed a year ago, before you'd learned to read Azriel the way you read wounds. A stillness. A held breath.
"Well, what can I say." He shrugged, unbothered. "Madja doesn't make tea."
"Seriously, that's your reason?" You raised an eyebrow, not quite believing him.
"It's a good reason," he said, entirely too serious for how absurd it sounded.
"I know you hate my tea," you shot back, fighting a smile.
"I never said I did." He said it too fast to be convincing.
"You don't have to. You make a face everytime you drink it." You said it standing, towering over him for once, arms crossed, thoroughly unimpressed.
"Someone is very observant," he teased, his hands settling soft at your hips like they'd been waiting the whole visit for an excuse, thumbs pressing absent, distracted circles into the fabric there.
"Show me where it hurts," you said finally, stepping back, magic already gathering warm at your fingertips, "before you distract me into forgetting why you're here at all."
He reached for the hem of his shirt instead of answering, pulling it over his head with unhurried ease, far slower than the task required, leaving himself bare-chested in your candlelight and entirely too aware of exactly what he was doing and exactly how long he was taking to do it. You swallowed, and hated yourself for it, and hated him more for noticing.
He guided your hand to his side, low along the ribs, and hissed, right on cue, a beat too early to be entirely convincing. You pressed two fingers there and let your magic unspool further, gold light sinking beneath skin the way it always did, reading bone and muscle like a book you'd long since memorized.
You waited for the telltale snag. The place where healthy tissue gave way to something torn or fractured.
It didn't come.
You pressed again, harder this time, right where he'd flinched. Nothing. No bruise. No hairline crack. Nothing but warm, unmarked skin over perfectly intact bone, and a heartbeat under your palm that was going faster than it had any business going for a man in genuine pain.
You sat back slightly, frowning. "There's nothing here."
"It's a deep bruise. Sometimes those don't show right away."
"I've pulled arrowheads out of muscle by feel alone in the dark. I think I can find a bruise, Azriel."
"Healer's magic isn't infallible."
"Mine is, actually."
He just held very still, the particular stillness of a man doing rapid, silent math on whether brazening it out was still a viable strategy.
"You flew across half the territory," you said slowly, "for an injury that doesn't exist."
"I didn't say that."
"You didn't have to. I just told you." You crossed your arms, watching him with the same narrow-eyed patience you usually reserved for actual wounds. "So. What is it this time. And don't say nothing, because we've already established that whatever it is, it isn't your ribs."
Silence, for a long moment. His shadows had drawn close around his boots, quiet in the particular way they only went when he was about to say something that cost him.
"It's late," he said instead, which was not a denial, which was somehow worse than a denial. "I should let you sleep."
"You are not leaving this room until you tell me why you actually flew here at midnight and lied to a healer's face to do it."
Another silence. Longer this time. You watched something war behind his eyes, the same careful calculation he probably used on interrogations, except this time he was the one being read, and he knew it.
"Fine. I didn't have a reason to come," he admitted finally, quiet, like the words cost him something to hand over. "So I made one up. Happy?"
You opened your mouth. Closed it again.
"You faked an injury," you said, "because you wanted to see me?"
"When you say it like that, it sounds significantly more pathetic."
"It is significantly more pathetic."
"I'm aware." He had the grace to look almost chastened about it, shadows curling tighter around his shoulders like they were trying to hide him from his own confession. "You could pretend not to enjoy this quite so much."
"I could," you agreed. "But I won't."
He exhaled, something in his shoulders finally, finally dropping, the tension of a man who'd been caught and found, against all odds, that the world hadn't ended because of it.
"So," you murmured, more to yourself than him, magic settling back into your palms, unused and faintly amused. "No fracture. No bruise. Just a Spymaster with terrible instincts for lying to the one person who can literally feel the truth under his skin."
"You sound really smug."
"I earned it. You've lied to me in this exact chair eleven times. This might be the worst one yet."
"You're counting."
"I'm a healer. Documentation matters."
He watched you while you knelt there, which he always did, dark eyes steady in a way that should have felt clinical, and never, ever did, not even now that there was nothing left to treat.
Your hand was still resting against his side, entirely unnecessary at this point, warmth long since finished doing nothing at all. You caught yourself and pulled back before it became something worth commenting on, though not quite fast enough to miss the way his jaw tightened, the way his throat worked around something he didn't say.
"You nearly convinced me you were in pain."
"I nearly convinced myself." He said it lightly, but something underneath it wasn't light at all. "Didn't plan it. Just happened, somewhere over the mountains, once I'd already decided I was coming."
You busied your hands capping tinctures you didn't need to cap, giving yourself something to do that wasn't reaching for him again. The candle had burned low enough now that his shadows had gone soft and half-transparent in the dim, still curled loose and unbothered around the cat's tail by the hearth.
"Why," you said finally, not quite looking at him, "do you need an excuse at all?"
The silence that followed lasted long enough that you almost regretted asking.
"I don't know." He said it low, the words coming out rougher than he meant them to, like he hadn't planned on saying them at all. "I just... I wanted to see you."
You looked up at that.
He was watching you with an intensity that had nothing to do with tactics, nothing to do with the careful games he played with everyone else in his life, and for a moment neither of you said anything at all, both of you caught in the kind of quiet that usually came right before something changed, like he was still deciding whether he regretted letting that slip out at all.
"Oh," you said, which was not eloquent, but was the only thing that made it past your throat.
"Yes. Oh." A ghost of dry humor crept back into his voice, like he was using it to climb back to solid ground. "Feel free to never bring it up again."
"You're impossible," you said instead.
"You're the one who let me in."
"I let injured people in, it's my job."
Something flickered across his face then, quick and unguarded, gone almost before you could name it, like he'd nearly said something even truer and swallowed it back down at the last second. When he spoke again his voice had smoothed back into something safer. "I'll think of a better excuse next time."
"There won't be a next time."
"Good," he said. "Next time I won't need one."
"Azriel." It came out as half warning, half something else entirely, and he had the audacity to look pleased about it.
"That tone," he said, "is new."
"Don't get used to it."
"Too late." The almost-smile again, small and real and aimed only at you. "And by the way, I like startling you." A beat. "The noise you make is my favorite part of the visit."
"I do not make an undignified noise," you said, folding your arms like that settled it.
"You squeaked last time." A ghost of a smirk.
"You came through the window," you said, narrowing your eyes, "because you didn't want to wake Cassian, not because it was tactically necessary."
"Cassian gossips."
"So you'd rather startle me," you said flatly, though you couldn't quite keep the corner of your mouth from betraying you.
"Considerably rather." His thumb moved, slow, deliberate, against the back of your hand, scarred skin against yours, and he watched for your reaction the way he watched everything, cataloguing it. "You're very easy to unsettle."
"I'm not unsettled."
"Your pulse says otherwise, sweetheart." His gaze deepened. "I can feel it. Right here."
His shadows had gone quiet around your feet, watching the two of you the way an audience watches a game neither player will admit to playing, and the space between you had somehow, without either of you moving, become smaller than it should have been.
"You should go home," you said. "You clearly don't need me here."
"Are you asking me to leave?"
"I'm telling you to."
You held his gaze a beat too long to call it professional, and broke it a beat too late to call it nothing.
"Get out, Azriel."
"Why don't you make me," he said, voice dropping low, and didn't step back. If anything he stepped closer, close enough that you had to tip your head to hold his gaze, close enough that you felt the words more than heard them.
Neither of you moved for one long, suspended second. His eyes dropped to your mouth, unhurried, deliberate, and didn't immediately come back up.
"I have a very sharp needle," you said, voice not quite as steady as you wanted it, "and no patience left for a man who's already wasted my night on a lie."
You strode past him and hauled the door open to make the point for you, and nearly walked straight into Cassian.
He was doubled over on your doorstep, one hand braced against the frame, wings heaving like he'd flown the length of the continent in under an hour, which, judging by the state of him, he might have.
"You absolute bastard," Cassian wheezed, glaring past you at Azriel like you weren't even there. "You flew so fast I nearly clipped a mountain trying to keep up. What in the seven hells was the emergency, I thought you were dying—" Cassian stopped for a second.
You looked him over anyway, out of pure reflex, and found nothing worse than windswept hair and deeply wounded pride.
"Are you okay, Cass?" you asked.
"I am not okay, I nearly had a heart attack watching him dive off like the world was ending—" Cassian froze mid-sentence, one hand still raised in the air, and you watched the realization dawn across his face in slow, glorious stages: confusion, suspicion, and finally something like pure, radiant delight. "Wait." A beat. "Wait." He rounded on Azriel with the look of a man who'd just found gold. "Mother above, you made it up."
He put his hand over his mouth, wheezing. "You made up an injury. To come here." Cassian looked between the two of you, grin spreading slow and merciless. "Oh, wait until Rhys hears about this. He is never going to let it go."
"Rhys hears about this," Azriel said, very evenly, "and you lose a wing."
Cassian did not look remotely deterred.
"Alright, both of you, out," you said, which didn't really solve anything, but effectively ended the conversation.
You shooed them both toward the door eventually, one significantly more amused than the other, and Azriel lingered on your threshold the way he always did, like leaving cost him something he wasn't willing to name.
He looked at you, slow and unhurried, and for one unguarded second his mask slipped, something raw flashing behind those dark eyes before he banked it, buried it the way he buried everything, leaving only the smirk, giving nothing away except that he knew exactly what that look was doing to you.
"Next time," he said, "I'll come up with something more convincing."
"You won't need to." You said it before you could think better of it, quieter than you meant to, though you didn't take it back. "Next time, just come."
He held your gaze a moment longer, something burning low and unhidden behind those hazel eyes, then stepped back over the threshold, wings cutting the dark as he went. "Goodnight, y/n."
"Goodnight, Azriel," you answered.
You stood in your doorway long after he'd gone, arms crossed, telling yourself the warmth in your chest was irritation at being lied to, and knowing, with the particular clarity healers reserved for diagnoses they didn't want to make, that it was not irritation at all.
--
a/n : I had so much fun writing this one, I just love when Az is already gone for reader 🤭
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