Azriel x Reader bookclub

AZRIEL x READER SERIES

Bond and Unbound / 28 chapters / Finished

Fifty years of silence. Fifty years locked behind iron and fear. When Azriel — the Shadowsinger of the Night Court — lands on your forgotten shore, the world shifts. You were a secret buried by blood and magic, but he looks at you as if you were something worth saving. In his arms, you remember what it means to breathe. In his shadow, something ancient inside you begins to stir — a darkness that knows his name.

After the Silence / 14 chapters / Finished

After feeling the faint tug of a mating bond between you and Azriel, you panic and leave the Night Court without a word, refusing to risk trapping him in something he might not feel. Decades later you return to Velaris and step into the House of Wind to find the world has moved on without you—and Azriel looks like he has, too.

Carved from the Same Edge / 10 chapters / Finished

When the Night Court’s spymaster meets his match, the shadows themselves start to misbehave. You’re a lethal shadowsinger with feral, wild-hearted shadows and a mouth too sharp for your own good. Azriel’s shadows are calm, obedient… until you arrive in Velaris on a long-term assignment and his control starts to crack. Forced proximity. Relentless banter. A threat outside the borders. And one spymaster who can’t decide if he wants to throttle you or kiss you.

What the Shadows Want / 7 chapters / Finished

When a political mission pulls you into dangerous territory, Azriel finds himself unable to keep the careful distance he’s maintained for years. He watches too closely, lingers too long, tries to protect without ever crossing the line — until the line starts to blur, and you finally lose it.

Truths That Don't Speak / Finished / 20 chapters

Azriel returns from a long mission to find you in the House of Wind—as if you’ve always belonged there. Your power allows you to sense emotions and detect truth, but with Azriel, everything goes quiet. He’s unreadable. It’s unsettling, and strangely refreshing. You’re loud, sassy, and painfully observant; he’s reserved, restrained, and made of shadows. Azriel is absolutely terrified of you—and of how easily you fit into his home. He doesn’t know who you are or why you’re here, and that uncertainty unsettles him. But one thing is clear: you’re a mystery he’s already determined to unravel.Yet beneath the banter and unease, you begin to realize that you share far more than either of you expected.

The Day The Spymaster Broke / Finished

You were never meant to be theirs.But they kept you anyway.Raised by the Night Court. Secretly loved by the Shadowsinger. Bound to a darkness older than Prythian itself. When the gate opens and the world begins to fall, you make the ultimate sacrifice — stepping into oblivion to save Velaris.But the darkness was never meant to destroy the city.It was meant to bring you home.

Unraveling the Shadowsinger / Finished / 18 chapters

Your power was never meant to exist.And yet—it’s the only thing that can silence the Shadowsinger.

When the Shadowsinger... - Collection of moments - ONGOING

A small collections of moments between Azriel and Reader. Some take place before the mating bond, some after. All can be read as a standalone.

The Things We Left Unsaid - Finished

Twenty years ago, you left Velaris with no intention of ever returning. When Rhysand's wedding invitation arrives, you convince yourself you can endure one night beneath familiar stars. One night among old friends. One night in the same room as the male you spent centuries loving and decades trying to forget. You were dead wrong.

The Rescue - Ongoing

Azriel x reader Hurt/comfort - Angst

When you go missing behind Hybern's lines, Azriel doesn't need the word to know what you are to him. The shadowsinger goes full rage mode to bring home what belongs to him.

AZRIEL X READER ONE SHOTS

What the Shadows Know : Winter Solstice one-shot (angst + comfort, slow burn, emotionally intense)

Word count : 5.8K

She’s always felt him watching from the edges. He’s always left before she could ask him to stay. On Winter Solstice, the shadows stop listening.

Snowlight and Shadow : Winter Solstice one-shot (fluff + comfort)

Word count : 5K

Solstice morning turns flour-dusted and dangerous when Azriel finds you in his shirt—and by nightfall, the River House reminds you what family truly feels like.

Not a Damsel in Distress : Action, protective Az, reckless intimacy Part 1 / Part 2

Reader goes solo on a mission she shouldn’t have. Azriel finds her before she can make it worse. Even with enemies watching, they can’t keep their hands off each other. Fire and shadows turning danger into background noise.

What Settles between Us : soft angst / hurt comfort

Decades into a quiet, loving bond, you and Azriel have settled into something safe—routine, familiar, unquestioned. But when his missions stretch longer and his presence grows thinner, the silence between you starts to ache. Watching others be chosen loudly forces you to confront what’s been missing. Sometimes love doesn’t disappear—it just needs to be seen again.

Blinfolded : banter / mates Part 1 / Part 2

Azriel has been watching you train for weeks, and when he finally steps into the ring, things get a lot more intense.

Uninvited Part 1 / Part 2 / End

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

Part 6 - Masterlist Azriel x Reader

Helion arrived before dawn, and he looked like he hadn't slept in days.

That alone was strange enough to notice, even through the fog of exhaustion and fear that had settled over the house since Rhys had left to find him. Helion's whole presence usually announced itself before he did, gold light, easy charm, the particular radiance of a High Lord who'd never once had to work at being noticed. Tonight there was none of it. Just a tired male, hair disheveled, eyes shadowed, moving through the house like every wasted second cost something he couldn't afford to lose.

You heard him before you saw him, his voice low and urgent in the hallway, explaining everything to Rhys in quick, clipped fragments that carried through your half-open door. Source. Working. Untested. You caught only pieces of it, not enough to understand what was about to happen, only enough to know it mattered enormously, and that no one in that hallway was certain it would work at all.

Then the door opened fully, and they were all there. Rhys first, grim and focused. Cassian just behind him, hovering near the doorframe like he wasn't sure whether to come closer or give you room. Mor, arms crossed tight over her chest, jaw set, something fierce and frightened both at once in her eyes. And Azriel, closest of all, settled at your side where he'd barely left in days, his hand already finding yours before you'd even asked for it.

Helion knelt in front of you first, and for a moment simply looked at you, none of his usual charm left in his expression at all, just quiet and tired and entirely focused. "I'm not going to promise you this will work," he said. "I don't know that it will. But I intend to try everything I have. Are you ready?"

"Yes," you said, without hesitation.

He nodded once, pressed two fingers to your temple, murmured something low under his breath, and let gold light spill soft from his palm.

You held very still. You could feel it, distantly, a gentle pressure at the very edge of your mind, patient, careful, asking rather than forcing.

The door didn't answer. Didn't so much as shiver.

Helion's jaw tightened. He adjusted the working, tried a different angle, a sharper phrase. Still nothing. The silence stretched long enough that you felt your own hope start to curdle at the edges, and you watched him finally withdraw his hand, breathing out slow through his nose, some private frustration crossing his face before he schooled it away.

Rhys stepped in without being asked, impatient in the way he only ever got when something mattered too much to wait politely for. He reached for your mind the way he always had, that familiar, steady pressure, except this time there was force behind it, real effort, real daemati will bearing down.

He was rejected instantly.

Not painfully, not violently, just entirely, the same seamless nothing you remembered from that very first night, like the door didn't recognize the shape of what he was offering it at all. Rhys pulled back hard, breathing rough, and for a long moment simply stood there, staring at nothing, turning something over behind his eyes.

Then, slowly, his gaze sharpened, and he turned to Azriel.

For a long moment he didn't say anything at all, just studied him, some private calculation working itself out behind his eyes, the way he might study a locked room he'd just realized he'd been looking at wrong the entire time.

"You try."

Azriel went very still. "Try what, Rhys. I'm not a daemati. There's nothing for me to try."

"I know." Rhys didn't look away from him. "That's not what I mean."

"Then what do you mean?" Azriel's voice had gone tight, something wary threading through it now, like he could feel the shape of whatever Rhys was circling before it had been said out loud.

Rhys stepped closer, until he stood right in front of him, and lowered his voice like the words themselves were too fragile to be spoken any louder.

"I don't think this is about the mind." He held Azriel's gaze, steady, though something uncertain flickered behind his own eyes now too. "Not anymore. Not really." A pause, heavy with everything neither of them had ever needed to say aloud between them. "You've felt it too, haven't you. That pull. The way something in your chest goes quiet the second you're near her, and wrong the second you're not. Every night you sat outside her door, you weren't guarding her out of duty. Something in you simply couldn't be anywhere else." His jaw tightened. "Try it with your heart instead."

The room had gone very still.

Azriel's throat worked, something raw and uncertain crossing his face, the particular fear of a male being asked to offer up the one thing he'd never once let anyone examine, not even himself.

For a moment nobody moved.

Then Azriel didn't argue further. He simply turned back to you, took both your hands in his, careful, sure, and closed his eyes.

His shadows rose slowly at first, then all at once, spilling off his shoulders in a way you'd never quite seen before, not restless, not scattered the way they usually moved, but focused entirely, completely on you. Something in his chest had gone taut and singular the moment he closed his eyes, a pull he'd spent weeks refusing to name, sharpening now into something undeniable, a thread drawn tight between the two of you that had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with whatever this actually was. They curled around your wrists, wove between your fingers, gathered close against your skin like they'd been waiting for exactly this permission the whole time.

You felt them, and something in you rose to meet them.

You weren't going to sit here and be a locked door waiting patiently for someone else to find the key. You reached for the power still sleeping dormant in your own chest, the same gift that had built this door in the first place, and instead of flinching from it, instead of fearing what it might cost you this time, you seized it.

You mimicked him back.

A thin, uncertain tendril of your own darkness rose to meet his, small at first, then stronger, gathering confidence with every second, until the two shadows moved as one, indistinguishable, twin threads of the same dark weaving together toward the same lock. You couldn't tell anymore where his ended and yours began, and it didn't matter. Helion cast his working once more, gentler now, a thin line of gold guiding the two of you rather than leading, and you felt everything converge together, entwined, searching for the same door as a single, unified thing.

You saw it from the inside, all at once, vivid and complete.

A door. Old, heavy, grained like something grown slowly out of the earth rather than built by hand, familiar in a way you had no memory to explain. A keyhole set low into the wood, small and dark, waiting.

One shadow, slender and certain, drifted toward it.

It slid into the keyhole, and for one terrible second, the door fought back.

Something ancient and frightened reared up from the dark behind it, some last, desperate remnant of the girl who'd built this thing in a moment of pure survival, and it did not want to let go. Pain lanced through you, sharp and sudden, a phantom echo of that tent, that blade, that voice demanding answers you'd rather have died than give. You heard yourself cry out from somewhere very far away, felt the shadow strain against a resistance that had teeth in it, real and vicious, one last desperate wall thrown up by whatever part of you still believed opening this door meant losing everyone you loved all over again.

In the room, your body flinched hard against the mattress, a raw, wounded sound tearing out of you that had nothing gentle in it at all. Azriel's hands tightened around yours instantly, his whole body going rigid.

"Something's wrong—" His voice cracked with alarm, already half-rising, shadows flaring dangerously at his shoulders.

"Wait." Rhys's hand shot out, gripping his arm, holding him in place. "Don't pull back. Not yet. If you stop now you could seal it worse than before."

Helion's jaw had gone tight, his own concentration visibly straining to hold steady despite the sound you'd just made, gold light flickering unsteady in his palm. "Almost," he said, low, urgent. "Just a moment more."

Azriel didn't move again, though every line of him strained against the need to, his grip on your hands turning bruising, his eyes locked on your face like he could will the pain out of it through sheer force of attention alone.

Then, slowly, the resistance broke.

Not violently. Just, all at once, exhausted, like the part of you that had been fighting so hard for so long finally understood it no longer had anything left to protect against.

The shadow turned the lock.

The click of it echoed through you like something enormous, and then, after everything, light spilled out from the seam of the door, golden and warm, flooding outward in a slow, gentle wave, the pain already fading behind it like a storm passing out to sea.

You gasped back into your own body like surfacing from the bottom of the sea.

"Easy. Easy, I've got you—" Azriel's voice, close and frantic, his hands already finding your face, tugging you gently closer, cradling your jaw like he thought you might slip away again if he didn't hold on tight enough.

The first thing you saw when your eyes opened was him.

Only him.

"Az?" you breathed, the word cracking in half, and you reached up, slow, trembling, to touch his face, tracing the familiar, scarred line of his jaw like you were making sure it was real.

You felt it happening before you understood what it was. Recognition, real recognition, nothing like the careful, learned kind you'd built these last weeks piece by fragile piece. This was the old kind. The deep, bone-certain kind. Memory came flooding back around the shape of his face like water finally finding its way home after being dammed too long, and you felt every year of him settle into place all at once, unmistakable, undeniable, entirely yours again.

He watched it happen. Watched the recognition cross your face in real time, watched your eyes finally, truly see him, and something in him broke open completely, right there, in front of every person who'd ever seen him keep himself so carefully composed.

For once, he didn't hide it.

Tears spilled down his face, unchecked, his breath coming ragged, every careful wall he'd built over five hundred years simply gone, nothing left standing between the two of you at all. You had never once seen him like this. You doubted anyone in that room had.

"You're here." His voice broke on it, cracked wide open. "You're really here."

You clung to him, and he clung back just as hard, face pressed into the curve of your neck, his whole body trembling with the force of it.

The room, when you finally became aware of it again, had erupted into quiet, disbelieving joy. Cassian had a hand pressed hard over his mouth, eyes suspiciously bright, and when he finally lowered it his voice came out rougher than you'd ever heard it. "There she is." He laughed, wet and disbelieving, dragging a hand down his face. "There's our girl. Gods, I missed you. I missed all of you, every ridiculous, sharp-tongued bit of you."

"Don't you dare do that to us again," Mor said, though her voice wobbled too badly to carry any real reprimand in it, tears spilling openly down her face, one hand fisted in the front of her own shirt like she needed something to hold onto too.

Rhys said nothing at first. He simply stood there, watching the two of you, and you saw the exact moment his composure finally gave out, the careful High Lord's mask he wore even in front of family cracking clean through. His eyes had gone glassy, jaw working like he was fighting to keep himself together and losing. When he finally spoke, his voice had gone rough, unsteady, nothing left of his usual measured calm at all. "Welcome back." He had to stop, swallow, start again. "I don't, I genuinely didn't know if we'd get this. Any of it. I'm so glad we did."

Something in your chest ached, warm and overwhelming, looking around the room at all of them, Cassian's ragged relief, Mor's open tears, Rhys's rare, unguarded honesty. You hadn't remembered, until this exact moment, how much you had missed being looked at like this, like your absence had left a hole none of them had known how to fill.

"I missed you too," you managed, voice thick. "All of you. So much."

They gave you time after that. Nobody rushed to speak, nobody rushed to touch, they simply stood there a while longer, letting the relief settle over the room like something physical.

Then, one by one, they left. Cassian squeezed your shoulder on his way out, then paused at the door, throwing a grin back over his shoulder that was equal parts fond and knowing. "Congrats, by the way," he said, to neither of you in particular, and didn't elaborate, though something in the way he said it made your chest go warm and strange all at once. Mor pressed a kiss to your head. Rhys lingered longest at the door, something warm crossing his face, before he too slipped out and pulled it shut behind him.

Then it was just the two of you.

Azriel hadn't stopped looking at you. Not once since the door had clicked shut behind Rhys, not even to blink for longer than necessary, like he was afraid that if he looked away for even a second, all of it might slip back out of reach again. His eyes moved over your face the way a starving man might look at food, slow, disbelieving, cataloguing every detail like he needed to memorize you all over again just to be sure you were real.

"You keep staring," you said, quiet, almost shy under the weight of it.

"I can't stop." His voice came out rough, stripped of every careful wall he usually kept between himself and the rest of the world. "I keep waiting to wake up. I keep thinking this is a dream I'm going to lose the second I close my eyes." His hand came up, hesitant, and brushed a strand of hair back from your face, lingering there far longer than the gesture required. "I've imagined this so many times these past few weeks. Getting you back. I never let myself believe it would actually happen."

The silence that settled over the room afterward was nothing like the silences you'd grown used to these last weeks, the careful, guarded quiet of two people circling something neither would name. This one had weight to it. Charge. You were still sitting close together on the bed, his hands not quite letting go of yours, and the air between you had gone thick with everything five hundred years and several lifetimes of memory had left unsaid.

"You remember all of it," he said finally, quiet, testing the words like they might not hold. "Every day. Every year."

"I do."

His throat worked. He didn't look away from you, but something in his jaw had tightened, some old, careful restraint fighting to reassert itself even now, even after everything. His eyes were bright, too bright, and he made no move to hide it this time.

"Then you remember every time I almost said something," he said, "and didn't."

"I remember." You held his gaze, steady despite the way your own heart had started to pound. "I remember all of it, Az. Every almost. Every time you looked at me like there was something enormous sitting right behind your teeth and swallowed it instead."

He didn't answer right away. He looked down at your joined hands instead, something shy and uncertain crossing his face, an expression you'd never once associated with him before now.

"There's a, a hollowness," he said finally, low, stumbling slightly over the words like he wasn't used to reaching for them. "In here." He touched his own chest, briefly. "It's been there for as long as I can remember, honestly. I never had a name for it. I just learned to live around the shape of it, the way you learn to live around any old wound." His eyes lifted to yours. "These last weeks, watching you not know me, it got worse. So much worse. Like the hollow place had finally found a name for itself and didn't like what it was missing."

Something in your own chest ached in answer, sharp and immediate.

"I feel it too," you admitted, quiet. "Something. Right here." You pressed your palm flat over your own heart, then, hesitant, reached out and rested it instead over his, feeling the fast, unsteady rhythm beneath your fingers.

The moment your palm settled against him, something answered.

A low thrum, warm and electric, moved through you both at once, a current with no visible source, humming low beneath your palm like a second heartbeat layered over his own. You felt it. You knew, without either of you saying the word, exactly what it was.

You looked up at him. He was already looking at you, and his eyes had gone glassy, wet, no longer even trying to hide it.

You were both crying, you realized. Neither of you had noticed when it started.

He lifted your hand from his chest, slow, reverent, and pressed his mouth to your knuckles, then, lower, to the soft skin of your wrist, right over the place where your pulse beat fast and unsteady beneath his lips.

"I knew," he murmured, against your skin. "I knew you were special to me, long before I understood why. I never let myself hope you could actually be mine. Not really. Not fully." His voice cracked. "I've loved you for so long, and I could never find the right words, never found the courage to hand them to you, and all of this, everything you went through, everything I almost lost, it's made me realize how much I should have said it years ago. How much time I wasted being afraid."

He lifted his free hand to cradle your face, thumb brushing gently beneath your eye, catching a tear before it could fall.

"I love you," he said, plain and unguarded and entirely undone. "I love you."

"I love you too." The words came without hesitation, without searching, simple and whole. "I always have."

His gaze dropped, slow, to your mouth, and you felt the moment stretch, taut and trembling, before he finally closed the distance and kissed you.

It started soft. Reverent. But it didn't stay that way for long, deepening by degrees, his hand sliding into your hair, your hands finding his chest, until soft became something hungrier, something five hundred years in the making finally allowed to want without restraint.

"Mate," he breathed against your mouth, wrecked, reverent, like the word itself was a gift he'd been saving.

"Mate," you echoed back, and kissed him again like you meant to make up for every year you'd both spent too afraid to say it.

The shadows curled loose and content around you, and outside the window, Velaris settled slowly into morning, soft and golden and ordinary.

For the first time since a tent full of smoke and a decision made in half a heartbeat, neither of you had anything left to guard.

You were, finally, entirely, unmistakably, home.

---

a/n : well we're done ! Thank you so much for reading ! I have a few other ideas for Az, coming soon 🤭

Part 5 - Masterlist Azriel x Reader

Azriel was filling out some report in the living room, the fire burned low and golden beside him, while you were sprawled by the hearth with tea in your hand, knees drawn up, the warmth of the flames pressing pleasant against your skin. You liked this. The comfortable silence, only broken by the scratch of his pen against paper, the occasional pop of a log settling in the grate. You watched him without meaning to, half your face hidden behind your cup, tracking the small, unconscious furrow that appeared between his brows whenever a sentence wasn't coming out the way he wanted it to. One of his shadows had drifted down at some point and now lay curled across your lap, heavy and still, almost purring under your fingers whenever you absently stroked it.

It had become, without either of you commenting on it, a kind of ritual. Evenings like this. Quiet, undemanding, nothing that needed to be solved or survived.

Something warm stirred in your chest without warning, unfamiliar and sudden, and it made you jump. For a second you straightened forward, breath catching, tea sloshing dangerously close to the rim of your cup.

Azriel caught it immediately. Of course he did.

"Are you all right?" he asked, already crossing the room in two long strides to kneel beside you, his pen and papers forgotten entirely on the table behind him.

"Yes," you answered, without more explanation, though your heart was still doing something strange and unsteady beneath your ribs.

His brow furrowed, the same small crease you'd been watching him make over paperwork a moment ago, except now it was aimed entirely at you. "Are you sure? I saw you flinch." His hazel eyes bore into yours, searching, and you found you couldn't look away from them even as you scrambled for an answer. Your hand went automatically to rest flat against your chest, as if you could physically hold whatever had just moved through you in place.

"I, uh." You started, then stopped, then tried again. "I was just lost deep in thought," you added, with a small smile that you hoped looked more convincing than it felt.

He didn't look convinced. You watched him decide not to push anyway, some careful restraint settling back over his features. "You should rest," he said instead, gentler now. "Come. I'll take you to your room."

He extended a hand. You looked at it a moment, at the scarred, careful shape of it, thinking, not for the first time, how strange it was that something built for violence could look so beautiful resting open in front of you, before you finally slid your palm into his and let him draw you to your feet, and up the stairs.

Something was wrong. So wrong.

The dark had teeth in it tonight, a pressure building behind your closed eyes that had nothing to do with the ordinary shapes of fear you'd grown almost used to. You felt it coming before you understood what it was, some vast, cold weight pressing down from the inside, and there was no time to brace for it, no time to do anything at all.

A second later, your scream tore through the house.

The door slammed open hard enough to crack against the wall. Azriel was bare-chested, hair a mess, shadows frantic and boiling off him in every direction, spilling out into the hallway behind him like smoke, and he crossed the room in a single stride, dropping to his knees at your bedside without a second's hesitation.

"You're safe, you're safe, I'm here—" His voice had cracked wide open, hands hovering frantic over you, checking your face, your arms, like he wasn't sure yet what he was looking for and needed to rule out the worst first. "Talk to me, please, tell me what happened, I need you to tell me what happened—"

"The camp." Your voice came out wrecked, shaking, your whole body still trembling against him. "It felt too vivid. Like it was happening again, right now, like I wasn't dreaming it at all."

His arms had barely tightened around you when the door burst open a second time. Rhys, still pulling a shirt over his head, crossed the room fast, prowling toward the bed with singular focus, and nudged Azriel's shoulder, trying to make room.

Azriel didn't budge.

Rhys didn't push it. He simply crouched instead, close enough to reach but careful, waiting.

"Can I?" he asked.

Azriel opened his mouth, already halfway to an objection, but Rhys cut him off without looking away from you.

"You can't keep living like this." His voice was gentle, but there was no room in it for argument. "Nightmares that leave you screaming loud enough to wake the whole house. We need to find out what's happening in there. Tonight."

"She just woke up from—"

"I want to do it," you said.

Both of them went quiet. Azriel turned to look at Rhys instead, something raw and reluctant still moving behind his eyes, but after a long moment, some silent understanding passed between the two males, careful, wordless, an agreement neither of them said out loud.

Rhys's hand found your temple. For a long moment nothing happened at all, just the three of you frozen there in the lamplight, your breathing still ragged, Azriel's arm rigid around you, while Rhys searched. His eyes had gone distant, unfocused, the particular stillness that came over him whenever he was somewhere none of the rest of you could follow.

Then, slowly, he pulled back, something unsettled crossing his face, unlike anything you'd seen from him before. His hand lingered a moment against your skin, as if he wasn't quite ready to accept what he'd found.

"There is nothing," he said, finally.

The words seemed to take a moment to land.

"What do you mean, nothing?" Azriel's voice had gone sharp, the arm around you tensing further, and you felt his heartbeat pick up where your back pressed against his chest.

"Nothing." Rhys emphasized it, like the word itself frustrated him, like he'd expected better of his own gift. "Blank. Empty. I can't get inside. It's like there's no door to push against at all."

"That can't be it." Azriel's jaw had tightened, his voice climbing fast, pushing. "She has memories, Rhys. She has a mind. There has to be more you can do, some other angle, something you haven't tried. Try again. Try harder."

Rhys's jaw tightened at that, something flickering in his eyes, not offense exactly, but the particular tension of a male being pushed toward a line he wasn't sure he wanted to cross. He turned to you instead of answering Azriel directly, something grim settling into his expression. "There is one more thing I can try. But I need you to understand it might hurt. I'll have to search deeper into your head than I've ever gone before, further than what's comfortable, further than what's safe."

"Do it," you said, before either of them could second-guess it.

Rhys's hand found your temple again, and this time he pushed.

The pressure was immediate, and it was nothing like the gentle searching from before. You felt it as a physical thing, a weight bearing down behind your eyes, and your body reacted before your mind could catch up to what was happening.

You started to scream, your eyes rolling back, your whole body seizing against the pressure of it, back arching off the mattress.

"Stop." Azriel's voice cracked through the room, raw and desperate. "Rhys, stop, you're hurting her—"

Rhys didn't stop. Sweat had broken out across his forehead, running in a thin line down his temple, his jaw locked tight with effort, and he didn't so much as flinch at the order, too deep in whatever he'd found to pull free easily, his whole body trembling with the strain of holding the connection open.

Azriel was on his feet a second later, and for one terrible moment you thought he might actually tear Rhys away from you by force, his hands already curling into fists at his sides. Instead something seemed to catch in him, some idea arriving fast and desperate, cutting through the panic, and his gaze snapped toward your desk, toward the small wooden box still sitting where you'd left it weeks ago, half-forgotten beneath a stack of unopened correspondence. If Rhys could see it, and couldn't hold the connection long enough to describe it properly, there was still one way for all of them to see it together.

He crossed the room in three strides and opened it.

Inside, nestled in dark velvet, sat a small silver orb, no larger than a ripe apple, catching the lamplight in a way that made it seem, for a moment, almost alive.

"Show us," Azriel said, crossing back and thrusting it into Rhys's free hand, his voice raw. "Whatever you're seeing right now. Show all of us. Now."

Rhys's eyes flicked to the orb, then to Azriel, something grim passing between them, some understanding neither of them had time to explain to you.

"You won't like what you see," Rhys said, breathless.

"I don't care. Show us. Now." Azriel's voice had gone raw, urgent, brooking no argument at all.

Rhys closed his free hand around the Veritas.

Pale light spilled from the orb, clouding, swirling, and then an image bled into the air above your bed, vivid and complete. The tent. The smoke. You, bound and bleeding, a man circling you with slow, unhurried menace.

Azriel bared his teeth at the sight of it, a low, involuntary sound tearing out of him, something between a growl and a sob.

"Last chance, pretty girl," the man in the memory said. "Tell me where the others are. And I might consider keeping you here as a pet, instead of what I'll do to you otherwise."

"I will never tell you anything," you spat, defiant even through the pain, or the version of you trapped in that memory did, watching yourself from outside your own body. "You won't break my mind. Over my dead body."

The man's power surged forward, something cold and invasive visible even in the projected light, pressing against the edges of your skull. And then, so fast it was almost missed, you spoke again, quieter, almost to yourself, teeth gritted against the pain.

"You want inside my head?" you heard your own voice say, wrecked and furious and utterly unafraid. "Go take a walk, you sick fuck. I'll show you exactly what I can do."

The memory went dark.

The image dissolved, the Veritas's light guttering out, and the room fell into ringing silence. Rhys's hand slipped from your temple at last, and he sagged back against the foot of the bed, breathing hard, the orb rolling loose from his fingers onto the blanket.

Azriel had gone very still.

"'I'll show you exactly what I can do.'" He said the words slowly, like each one cost him something to speak aloud, like saying them himself was the only way to make them real.

He looked at you, something in his face gone entirely undone.

"That's not defiance," he said. "That's a weapon."

His voice cracked.

"Think about it. He's still inside her mind when she says it. His power is still moving through her skull, in that exact second." He dragged in a breath, unsteady. "She's not just talking, Rhys. She's aiming. Using the one thing she has access to in that moment. Him. Still touching her."

He shook his head slowly, like he could barely hold the shape of it himself.

"'What I can do' wasn't a threat she made with her own gift. It was his gift. Borrowed, mid-attack. She showed him exactly what she could do with it." A long pause. "She just didn't do it to him."

His hand found yours.

"She did it to herself."

"That's not possible," Rhys said, disbelief written plain across his face. "Whatever her gift is, it doesn't work like that. Mimicry needs a target outside yourself, Az, something to copy, something to reflect. You can't turn a mirror on your own reflection and expect it to do anything but show you your own face. She shouldn't have been able to point that at herself at all."

"She did." Azriel's hands had started to shake. "Her gift is stronger than any of us understood, Rhys. Stronger than she understood. She mimicked his power while it was inside her, and turned it on herself. Closed the door from the inside, so completely that the mind-walker would never be able to reach for it again." His eyes found yours, wild, wrecked, something between horror and reverence tearing through him at once. "Do you understand what that means? What that took?"

He gripped your hand, forcing your gaze up to his, his own eyes bright and wrecked in the low light.

"It was never him," he said, voice unsteady, breaking properly for the first time. "It was never the mind-walker keeping you locked away, love. It was you." He said it like the words themselves cost him something to release. "You took what he threw at you and turned it back on yourself. Not to hide something. To protect it. To protect us."

The room had gone utterly silent, the kind of silence that felt like it belonged to something enormous.

"So." Your voice came out small, thin, barely more than a breath. "I did this? I did this... to myself?" You said it like a question you couldn't quite make yourself believe, even as it left your own mouth. A short, disbelieving laugh cracked out of you, wet and wrong. "I don't, I can't, how did I—"

You couldn't finish it. The shock of it sat too large in your chest to fit into words, and the tears came anyway, hot and sudden, spilling before you could stop them.

Azriel pulled you against him without asking, and this time you went, folding into him entirely, your fingers curling into the warm skin of his back like you needed something to hold onto while the world resettled itself around this new, impossible truth.

"Breathe," he murmured into your hair, one hand smoothing slow, steady circles against your back. "Just breathe. I've got you. You don't have to make sense of it all tonight."

You stayed there a long while, wrapped in each other, neither of you in any hurry to move.

Then, all at once, Azriel went rigid, pulling back just enough to look at you, something fierce and sudden lighting behind his eyes.

"Rhys." His voice had changed entirely, urgency cutting clean through the exhaustion. "Helion. Get word to Helion right now."

Rhys, halfway to the door with the Veritas still cradled in his hands, turned back sharply. "Az—"

"He told us to find the source. Weeks ago, in his study, that was the whole problem, wasn't it? I killed the mind-walker before we understood what he'd done, and we thought that meant the source was gone with him." Azriel's grip on your hand tightened, something like hope breaking wild and unguarded across his face for the first time since you'd woken up in this house. "But the source was never him. It was her. It was always her. And she's sitting right here."

Rhys's expression shifted, understanding arriving fast. "If the source is still alive—"

"Then we have a chance." Azriel looked back at you, wrecked and hopeful all at once. "A real one. If Helion can work with the source directly, with you, instead of trying to force a door from the outside, this might actually be reversible."

You felt something crack open in your chest, fragile and disbelieving, not quite ready to let itself be called hope yet.

You didn't say anything. You simply looked at Rhys, pleading, wordless, everything you couldn't put into speech right now written plain across your face instead.

Azriel's arm tightened around you, stronger, steadier, as if your silence alone had told him everything he needed to know.

Rhys was gone within the minute, the Veritas already vanishing back into its box, his footsteps fading fast down the hall.

"I'm getting you back," Azriel murmured, lips still close against your hair. "I promise you, I am."

You believed him. You didn't need the memories to know that much was true.

Azriel had been the one steady thing through all of it, the key that kept finding pieces of you even when you couldn't find them yourself, never once failing to stand between you and whatever came next. But this door was never his to open. It never had been. You were the only hand that had ever known how to work that particular lock, whether you remembered learning it or not.

This time, you were going to tear it down yourself.

---

a/n : yeahhhhh i lied, next part will be the end. I couldn't fit everything in this part ! ;)

Part 4 - Masterlist Azriel x Reader

Days had passed since Helion's palace, since the golden light and the gasp of recognition you still didn't fully understand, since his parting words had settled into you like a splinter you couldn't quite work loose. No word had come from him since, no answers, no explanations, just silence stretching long enough that you'd almost stopped waiting for it every morning.

The training yard had become, somehow, without you quite deciding it, one of your favorite places in the whole house.

You didn't spar. You weren't ready for that, and no one pushed you to be. But you liked sitting on the low wall at the edge of the ring, tea in hand, watching Azriel and Cassian trade rounds, shirtless and grinning, the easy, brutal rhythm of centuries of practice between them. It was loud, and simple, and blessedly free of anything you had to remember to enjoy it.

"You're getting good at that," Mor said, dropping down beside you, nodding toward the tea. "The sitting and judging thing. Very Amren of you."

"I prefer to think of it as tactical observation," you answered, without tearing your eyes from the ring.

"Sure you do." Mor bit back a smile, easy and warm, settling in beside you like she belonged there. "You seem lighter today."

You considered that. It was true, in a way you hadn't quite examined yet. "I slept well."

"That's new."

"It is." You watched Cassian land a strike that Azriel absorbed without so much as a flinch, the whole yard rearranging itself around their energy the way it always did. "I think I'm starting to actually like it here. Not just tolerate it. Actually like it."

Something knowing crossed Mor's face. "Good. There's a lot to love here." Her eyes cut, deliberate and devilish, toward the training ring, toward Azriel. "A lot."

Heat crept up your neck, entirely out of proportion to the comment. You busied yourself with your tea instead of answering, which only made Mor's smile widen further.

Below in the ring, Azriel and Cassian kept sparring, wings flaring for balance, shadows curling loose and restless around Azriel's shoulders with every strike.

One of those shadows peeled away from him mid-exchange, drifting lazily across the yard, and curled itself around your wrist.

It tickled. A soft, cool, ticklish pressure circling your skin like a ribbon deciding whether to tie itself in a bow, and you laughed before you could stop yourself, a real, surprised, unguarded sound.

Azriel's head turned instantly, sparring forgotten, Cassian's fist sailing harmlessly past where his jaw had been a second ago.

"Sorry," you said, still laughing, wiggling your wrist gently at the shadow wrapped around it. "Hello to you too, I suppose."

Something in Azriel's face went soft, unbearably so, watching you talk to a piece of himself like it was the most natural thing in the world.

"They've missed this," he said, quiet, watching the shadow curl happily around your wrist like it had been waiting weeks for permission. "You used to do this. All the time."

You blinked at him. "What did I used to do?"

His brow furrowed, some old, easy assumption crossing his face before it caught, before he remembered, again, that assumptions didn't work anymore.

"The trick," Cassian called from across the yard, jogging over, sweat-damp and beaming, wiggling his fingers in the air in a crude, exaggerated imitation of shadow. "You know. The trick."

"I really don't—" You sounded confused, hating the fact that you didn't remember.

Cassian's expression faltered. "You used to copy his shadows. You used your gift, that copycat thing you do, mimicked right down to the shape and the weight of it, like you'd reached out and borrowed a piece of him for a minute. Little wisps of your own, dancing right alongside his, close enough to fool anyone who didn't know better. Used to drive him mad with delight, if I'm being honest."

"I used to?" you started, and stopped, the sentence catching somewhere you couldn't name. "I don't remember that." You sounded sad.

The yard went quiet for a second, that particular quiet that had followed you around this house for weeks now, the sound of everyone recalibrating around one more thing you'd lost.

"Try it," Azriel said, careful. "You don't have to remember it to still be able to do it. It's not a memory. It's just your power. It's you."

You looked down at your own palm, uncertain, some small, nervous part of you afraid of what might or might not happen. You hadn't used anything like power since the camp, not once, not on purpose, and the idea of reaching for it now felt like reaching into a dark room for a light switch you weren't sure still worked.

You tried anyway, buoyed by the quiet, patient encouragement in all three faces watching you.

It came slow, hesitant, a faint shiver of darkness gathering at the center of your palm, small and uncertain, barely more than a shadow of a shadow. But it was there, curling and flickering weakly against your skin.

Azriel's own shadows reacted instantly, several peeling away from his shoulders at once and darting toward yours, circling, delighted, weaving around the small tendril in your palm like they'd been waiting exactly this.

The two shadows danced together, yours small and shy, his bold and playful, spinning around each other in the space above your hand, and you laughed again, helpless, watching them.

Azriel looked at you like you'd hung the stars yourself.

"There you are," he said, soft, almost reverent, like he'd been waiting a very long time to see exactly this.

The shadows didn't leave. You tried to shake them loose, gently, laughing, but they only curled tighter around your wrist, your fingers, weaving between your knuckles like they'd found something they had no intention of giving up.

"They're not leaving," you said, half delighted, half bewildered, watching them resettle every time you moved.

"I think they've missed you," Azriel said, like the words held more meaning than he said.

Cassian, still catching his breath a few feet away, looked between the two of you, and the shadows still wound possessively around your hand, and pulled a face.

"Okay, that's actually too intimate to watch. It's like watching birds do a mating dance." He waved a hand in mock disgust, already backing away. "I did not sign up to watch Az's shadows court someone."

"They are not courting me." You answered too fast.

"They absolutely are courting you." Cassian turned toward Mor, still perched on the wall a few feet away, grinning. "Mor, look at this, it's disgusting!"

Mor leaned over for a better look, took in the scene, the shadows still refusing to leave your skin, Azriel's utterly besotted expression, and burst out laughing.

"Oh, look at that." Mor pressed a hand to her chest, mock-touched. "I think I might actually cry. Come on, Cass, let's give them some privacy."

Cassian threw an arm around her shoulders, already steering her away, and then it was just the two of you again, shadows still tangled warm and stubborn around your hand, and neither one of you in any hurry to make them let go.

You settled back onto the low wall, and Azriel folded down beside you, a careful, respectful distance between you, close enough to talk easily, far enough that nothing but the shadows themselves crossed the space between you. They seemed to take the stillness as permission to migrate lazily back and forth, weaving loose figure-eights around your fingers like they'd decided you were now, officially, a project worth their attention.

"They really don't listen to you at all, do they," you said, watching one particularly stubborn tendril curl itself around your thumb and simply stay there.

"They sometimes do." He said it fondly, no complaint in it at all. "I've spent five hundred years trying to convince them I'm in charge. They remain unconvinced."

"That must be humbling," you teased.

"Deeply." His mouth curved, easy, unguarded in a way you were coming to realize he only ever let himself be around you. "Once they have their eyes set on something, though, they're relentless. Impossible to talk out of it. Stubborn to a fault."

"Sounds familiar," you said, smiling.

"I have no idea what you mean." He tipped his head back, looking up at the sky, not quite fast enough to hide the smile pulling at his mouth.

You laughed, and one of the shadows actually seemed to flicker in response, a small, delighted pulse, like it was pleased with itself for causing it.

"Do they have names?" you asked, only half joking.

"They don't need them." He nodded toward the one still wrapped snug around your thumb. "That one's always been the boldest. Used to be the first to reach you whenever you walked into a room."

You smiled at that, you could see it, and as the early afternoon sun sat warm and bright overhead, the noise of the training yard settling into something quieter now that most of the recruits had wandered off for their midday break, neither of you moved to end it.

"I could get used to this," you admitted quietly. "Just, this. Sitting here. Not being afraid of what's going to happen next."

"You don't have to get used to it." Azriel's voice had gone low, careful, like the words mattered too much to rush. "It can just be what happens next. Every day, if you want it to be."

You looked over at him, at the soft, hopeful line of his mouth, at the shadow still curled loyally around your hand like it had no intention of ever letting go, and found, for the first time in longer than you could properly measure, that you weren't afraid of wanting exactly that.

"I want it to be," you said.

Something in his face eased, gentle and unguarded, and the shadows, as if they'd been waiting for exactly that permission, curled one final, satisfied loop around your hand and finally, slowly, settled still.

You slid down off the wall without quite deciding to, and lay back in the grass instead, the cool green of it soaking through your shirt. The early afternoon sky stretched pale and cloudless above you. Azriel watched you a moment, something unreadable and fond in his face, before he lowered himself down beside you, a comfortable arm's length of space still between you.

You tipped your head toward him, watching a lazy trail of cloud drift overhead. "Can I ask you things? Just, ordinary things. About me. About you."

"Always."

"What was I like?" You said it to the sky rather than to him, easier somehow without his eyes on you while you asked it. "Before. Not the parts everyone keeps being careful about. Just, me. Ordinary days."

Azriel was quiet a moment, and when he answered, his voice had gone soft, unhurried, the voice of someone choosing memories the way you'd choose which flowers to pick.

"You steal the last bite off everyone's plate," he said. "Never asks. Just reaches over mid-conversation like it's owed to you. Cassian's stopped even pretending to fight you for it." A small, private smile touched his mouth. "You did it to Rhys again just a few weeks ago. Didn't even look up from your book."

"That's appalling behavior."

"It's a little terrifying, honestly." He glanced over, something warm crossing his face. "You also talk to yourself when you're working something out. Full conversations. Arguments, sometimes, that you apparently win, because you'll nod like the other side just conceded."

"Do I win often?"

"Every single time. Suspiciously so." His mouth curved.

You found yourself smiling at the pale afternoon sky above you, some small, unexpected warmth blooming in your chest at the shape of a person who, apparently, hadn't gone anywhere at all, just quieter for a while, waiting to be let back out.

"What about you," you asked. "Tell me something about you. Something you wouldn't have told me before."

He went quiet again, longer this time, and you turned your head to find him already looking at you instead of the sky.

"I used to think I didn't deserve softness," he said finally, low. "That the parts of me built for killing shouldn't get to have the rest." He looked back up at the sky instead of at you, like it was easier to say to the clouds. "I don't fully believe that anymore. I don't think I've said that out loud before."

Something about the quiet honesty of it settled low in your chest, and gave you, finally, the nerve to ask the question you'd been circling for days.

"We seem," you started, and stopped, turning the sentence over before you let yourself finish it. "We seem pretty much closer than the others. With me, I mean." You picked at a blade of grass instead of looking at him. "Is there — was there — a particular reason for that?" You bit your lip, hesitating over whether to even ask the rest of it. If you were being honest, you sometimes thought you'd had a thing with him before all this. It was troubling, not knowing.

He was quiet a moment too long before he answered.

"We understand each other," he said finally, careful, deliberately vague in a way that felt more like retreat than an answer. "It was always — easy. Between us. I don't know how else to explain it." His eyes had drifted somewhere just past your shoulder, not quite meeting yours anymore.

He didn't say the rest of it. He didn't have to. You felt the weight of everything he wasn't saying settle into the space between you anyway, heavy and certain and entirely unmistakable.

You didn't answer that. You felt something growing in your chest, an insistent pull toward him ever since you'd woken up that night.

You lay there together through the long, easy stretch of the afternoon, and asked him a dozen more small, ordinary things: what his favorite meal was, whether he'd ever been afraid of anything besides losing people he loved, what Velaris had looked like the very first time he'd seen it. He answered every one of them, patient and unhurried. Somewhere in the middle of his answer about the first time he'd flown over the city at dawn, you realized you'd stopped cataloguing his answers as clues to a stranger's life and started simply listening, the way you'd listen to anyone you loved talk about the things that mattered to them.

You didn't have a word yet for what that meant.

But lying there in the grass with the sun still high overhead, a shadow curled loyal and lazy around your fingers, you found you weren't in any hurry to find one either.

---

a/n : Next part will be the final one :)

Part 3 - Masterlist

Azriel was not happy. If anything, he was boiling.

He tried to restrain his shadows, keep them tight to his shoulders, but they wouldn't listen. It made him look like an angel of death. He tried to suppress the frown pulling at his brow, but every time Helion drifted closer to you, something gave in inside of him, a low, ugly heat curling tighter in his chest with every inch of ground the High Lord closed.

He hated it. He hated that somehow, you remembered glimpses of Helion, but not him. He hated the easy way Helion said your name, like it belonged in his mouth. He hated that some petty, wounded part of him wanted to plant himself between you and every other male in Prythian and never move again. And he hated himself, most of all, for daring to think any of it while you were the one still lost, still frightened, still trying to hold together a mind someone else had torn open.

"What do you mean, how much is she allowed to remember you?" Azriel stepped in front of you, shadows whirling, completely protective, voice sharper than he meant it to be.

Helion, despite Azriel's silent warning, drifted closer to you anyway. His hand hovered over your face. "There is something there," he murmured, closing his eyes. "I can feel it."

A strange pressure stirred behind your eyes, like a shape hiding in the dark had finally been caught. Helion made a move to touch your forehead, but Azriel caught his wrist before he could.

"Do not touch her," he said, calm, lethal, "unless she's given her permission."

Silence fell over the two males. Helion's eyes drifted slowly to Azriel's scarred hand still wrapped around his wrist.

Anxiety took over. You didn't want them to fight. You didn't want to cause any trouble.

Helion smiled lightly. "You're upsetting her, acting like this."

Azriel didn't back down. His voice only went colder. "I'm not the one making her heart race. So I'd suggest, next time you want to touch her, you ask first." His face stayed blank, but the hazel in his eyes had turned to something closer to blazing fire. A vein stood out along his neck, ready to snap.

"I'm only trying to help, Shadowsinger," Helion said, arching a brow.

"I'm fine," you interrupted, before the tension could climb any higher. "Just, do whatever you have to. Please." You shook your head, trying to steady yourself.

Azriel's jaw ticked. He didn't let go of Helion's wrist right away, holding it a beat longer than strictly necessary, some silent, wordless warning passing between the two males before he finally released it, shadows still coiling low and restless around his boots, refusing to fully settle.

"Your mind is clouded," Helion stated, circling you slowly. "It's like something is warding it. Even from you."

"But how can I remember parts of you, then?" you asked.

"What do you remember about me, dear?" Helion stopped in front of you and smirked.

That drew Azriel's attention instantly, something sharp and dangerous flickering behind his eyes. He knew exactly where this was going, and every line of him had gone tense, coiled, a predator deciding whether the situation still warranted patience.

"I, I came here before—" you started, searching your own head. "Several times." You looked at Azriel. "I went to your library. We, we worked together sometimes." You didn't sound fully certain of what you'd just said.

"Yes. Yes, we did." Helion chuckled, throwing a sidelong glance at Azriel, clearly enjoying himself far more than the room warranted. "May I?" He waited, hand extended, offering to take yours.

You nodded, glancing once at the shadows pooling thick around Azriel's feet.

Helion touched your skin, and the room felt colder. "Try to remember something else," he asked, golden light spilling from his hands, slowly wrapping around yours.

Azriel's shadows lunged forward, sudden and violent, and it took a visible act of will, jaw locked, breath held, to drag them back to heel.

You closed your eyes, and reopened them fast. "Oh my gods." You gasped, heat blooming on your cheeks. You remembered the parties, now, Helion drifting toward you with that same easy smile, trying every time to talk you into staying the night. He read the memory off your face before you could hide it, and laughed, loud and delighted, the sound rolling through the room.

Something in Azriel's expression went entirely feral.

His eyes had darkened to something close to black, shadows no longer pooling but rising, curling up his arms, along the floor, a low, dangerous hum filling the air around him like a held growl. His hands had curled into fists at his sides. For one terrible second you thought he might actually lunge, might actually put Helion through the nearest wall for the crime of making you blush at a memory that wasn't his.

"Did you find anything useful," he bit out instead, voice like gravel dragged over stone, forcing the word out through gritted teeth.

Helion's grin widened, entirely unbothered, which only seemed to feed whatever was coiling tighter in Azriel by the second. "I think I did."

You held your breath. "What is it?"

"Whoever was torturing you, you wouldn't give them an answer. Would you."

"No," you answered, aware, even now, of Azriel's eyes still fixed on you, dark and burning.

"Did this male have any powers?" Helion asked, like he already knew the answer.

"I, yes. Yes, he did," you remembered, the words surfacing slow and strange.

"Ah." Helion's tone sharpened. "And what kind of power did this filth have?"

You closed your eyes, reaching for it, the way you'd reach for a word sitting just out of grasp. Flashes came first, disjointed, the smell of tallow smoke, a voice pressing at the inside of your skull like fingers against a locked door, a pressure behind your eyes that hadn't been physical pain at all. "Mind powers." You breathed it out, brow furrowing hard as you strained toward the memory of the camp. "He was trying to get information out of me."

"Did he do this to her?" Azriel didn't ask it so much as growl it, stepping toward you, shadows snapping out ahead of him like they meant to answer the question themselves.

Before you could speak, Helion answered for you. "He surely did. Trying to break her mind to make her speak." His hands tightened gently around yours. "I can feel it. The power of a mind-walker."

Something cold settled low in your stomach, a slow, creeping horror rooted in the plain, simple fact of it: someone had reached inside your skull and tried to pry it open like a locked box. You didn't need to remember the sensation to feel sick imagining it, the violation of it, a stranger's hands rifling through the most private rooms you had. No wonder some buried, desperate part of you had slammed every door in the house shut rather than let him find what he was looking for.

"How do we undo this," Azriel demanded.

"Well—" Helion hesitated, something careful entering his voice for the first time since you'd arrived. "I would have told you to find the source and force it to reverse itself. But—"

He didn't finish the sentence.

Guilt flooded Azriel's face, sudden and total, every trace of his earlier fury collapsing inward into something far worse. "We can't—" It came out barely audible. His hand dragged through his hair, gripping hard. "We can't," he said again, louder this time, ragged. "I killed him." He looked at you, pain written plain and unguarded across every line of his face. "There has to be another way."

His shadows, so violent and jealous only minutes ago, had gone still and small around him now, curling low against his boots like something trying to make itself disappear. "I did it with my bare hands," he said, voice cracking further with every word. "I felt his skull give way and I didn't think, not once, that I might be the one closing the only door back to you. I was so consumed with making him pay for what he'd done that I never once considered I might be erasing the way to undo it. I'm the reason there's no easy answer. Me. No one else."

He was visibly trying to hold himself upright, shoulders squared out of pure habit, but you could see the weight of it crushing down on him regardless, could see the exact moment self-loathing settled into his bones and stayed there. He'd done this. By killing the man, he'd sealed the only door that might have led straight back to you. All of it, in his mind, was his fault. Only his.

His wings dropped, just for a second, and something in you ached to close the distance and reach for him.

"You did what you needed to do," you said quietly.

"Did I." It came out bitter, aimed entirely inward. "Or did I just want him dead, and told myself that was the same thing."

His eyes lifted to yours, sorrow shadowing them entirely now, nothing left of the feral fury from a moment ago. "I will find a way," he said. "I promise you. I will give you back your life."

Something about the rawness of it, the way his composure had cracked wide open in front of a High Lord without him seeming to care at all, sat with you in a way you didn't fully have words for yet. This was a male who had just been ready to tear another male apart over a shade of jealousy, and in the very next breath had folded entirely, grief-stricken, over a mistake he blamed only himself for. There was nothing performed in either version of him. Both were real. Both, somehow, were entirely his.

You didn't know what to do with that yet. But you found you didn't want to look away from it, either.

Helion cleared his throat, gentler now, the earlier amusement entirely gone from his voice. "I'll study what I felt today, and everything else my scholars can find on mind-walkers and the wards that answer to them. It will take time. I won't lie to either of you and promise otherwise." His gold eyes moved between the two of you, something almost kind in them now. "But I intend to find a way to undo this. In the meantime, you should go home. Both of you. She needs rest, and you," his gaze settled on Azriel, not unkindly, "need to stop carrying all of this alone."

Azriel didn't argue. He simply nodded, quiet, hollowed out, and offered you his arm without a word, and this time, you didn't hesitate at all before you took it.

The world folded around you, darkness and pressure and the strange, lurching nothingness of winnowing, and then solid ground again beneath your feet, cool night air replacing the Day Court's golden warmth in an instant.

You stood on the lawn behind the townhouse, grass cool and damp beneath your feet, the River House quiet and steady behind you, its windows glowing soft gold against the settling dusk.

Azriel let out a breath, loud, ragged, like he'd been holding it since the moment Helion's hand had first touched your skin. He crossed to the low stone wall at the edge of the lawn without a word and gripped it, knuckles going white, shoulders bowed forward under some invisible weight he'd clearly been carrying the entire way home and refusing to set down until now.

You watched him for a long moment, unsure whether to approach or give him the space he so often gave you.

"You're quiet," you said, eventually, when the silence had stretched long enough to feel like its own kind of conversation.

"I'm thinking."

"About the man you killed."

His jaw tightened, but he didn't deny it. "About a lot of things."

You studied his profile, the hard, familiar lines of it, the shadows curling low and subdued around him now instead of boiling with fury or grief. Whatever storm had passed through him back in that study seemed to have settled into something quieter, heavier, a weight he was simply carrying instead of fighting.

You turned the day over in your mind, piece by piece, the way you'd learned to turn over everything unfamiliar these past days, searching for the seams. There was no version of this male you could remember trusting. No warmth attached to his name, no history to lean on, nothing but a week and a half of watching him from the careful distance of someone who didn't know if he was safe.

And yet.

You thought of the way he'd demanded Helion ask permission before touching you, every time, not just once. You thought of the shadows lunging forward to protect you and being dragged back before they could do anything you hadn't wanted. You thought of the guilt that had gutted him entirely, unguarded, in front of a High Lord he clearly didn't respect enough to perform for. None of it required memory to read. It was simply there, plain as the color of his eyes, evidence stacking up in front of you with nowhere to hide.

You weren't ready to call it trust. Trust felt like too large a word for something built in a single afternoon. But you were, perhaps, ready to call it a beginning.

"Can I tell you something," you said.

"Anything." His eyes lifted to yours immediately, steady, unguarded, like the word had cost him nothing at all to give.

"I don't remember trusting you. I still don't, not really, not the way I apparently used to." You watched his jaw tick again at that, watched him brace for the rest of the sentence like it might be a blow. "But today, watching you—both versions of you, the one who looked like he wanted to tear Helion apart, and the one who fell apart himself over a mistake that wasn't even a mistake—I noticed I wasn't afraid of either one. I don't know what that means yet. But I don't think it means nothing."

He turned his head to look at you properly for the first time since you'd left the palace, something raw and disbelieving moving across his face.

"You don't have to say that to make me feel better," he said, low. "I know what I looked like in there."

"I'm not saying it to make you feel better." You held his gaze, steady despite the strange vulnerability of admitting it out loud. "I'm saying it because it's true. You didn't perform either of those things for an audience. You were just, you, in both of them. That's not nothing to me. Even without the memories."

Something in his face cracked open, the same way it had in Helion's study, except this time there was no guilt behind it, no grief, just something quiet and stunned and achingly hopeful.

"I killed a man," he said, voice rough. "And it might be the reason we don't have an easy way to bring the rest of you back."

"I know," you said softly.

"That doesn't frighten you?"

You considered the question honestly, turning it over the way you'd learned to turn over every strange, unanchored piece of yourself these past days. "You didn't kill him for cruelty," you said finally. "You killed him because of what he was doing to me. I don't need memory to understand the difference between those two things—I just know it. The same way I knew the stairs in that house before my mind caught up."

He didn't answer right away. When he finally did, his voice had gone thick, unsteady in a way you were coming to recognize as the sound of him giving you more truth than he meant to.

"I don't deserve the grace you keep handing me," he said. "I keep waiting for you to stop."

"Maybe I will, someday." You said it gently, not as a threat, simply as the truth. "But not today."

He didn't answer right away. When he finally did, his voice had gone quiet in a different way, less unguarded, more resigned. "And if Helion never finds a way to undo it? If this is just, what I get. What you get."

You didn't have an easy answer for that. You weren't sure anyone did.

"Then I suppose we find out who we are to each other without it," you said finally. "Whatever that turns out to be."

He didn't smile at that. It wasn't the kind of thing either of you could smile about yet. But something in his shoulders eased, fractionally, the particular ease of a person who'd expected to be handed false comfort and had been given honesty instead.

Behind you, the River House's windows glowed steady gold against the deepening dusk, the quiet hum of Velaris settling in around the two of you. Neither of you moved to go inside. You simply stood there together in the cool grass, two people who didn't yet know how their story ended, and let the not-knowing be enough, for tonight.

---

Azriel x reader Hurt/comfort - Angst

When you go missing behind Hybern's lines, Azriel doesn't need the word to know what you are to him. The shadowsinger goes full rage mode to bring home what belongs to him.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

THE END

Masterlist

Courage finally found your way, but you weren't entirely ready for the truth waiting at the end of the hallway.

You hadn't left the room in three days. You couldn't. The only person you trusted right now was Madja, the healer. Something about her made you feel safe, the way she tended your wounds, the way she was always there, but also never truly. You didn't want to face the outside, hell, you didn't want to face the people living in this house.

The one named Azriel knocked on your door from time to time, announcing himself, but you never answered. You only stood at the window, looking at the starry night, trying to put back together the pieces, trying to solve this puzzle your life had become.

Sometimes, you caught a glimpse of a familiar feeling here, like you knew this place, but it quickly went away the second after. It was like your mind was clouded, like someone had put a veil there, making you unable to access your own head.

Something was off. You could tell.

The nightmares were getting worse. You refused to sleep because of them. You often woke up crying in the night, back there, tortured again. Every time you jolted awake you swore you saw a shadow curling under your door.

Madja was sorting vials, prepping formulas to heal your skin. It was still scorched in certain areas. She had been really quiet this morning, as quiet as she could be. You surveyed her, eyeing her every move.

"When you were younger, you used to come to my cabinet and watch me heal the patients," she said softly, clearly aware of being observed.

You tore your eyes from her, not answering.

"You would have made a wonderful healer," she murmured, sighing softly as she turned her back on you, grabbing another salve.

Healer? Did you want to be a healer? What were you, then. Here. In this court.

Hesitantly, chewing your bottom lip, you mustered the courage to ask her, "What, what am I here?" You lifted your eyes to hers.

She smiled softly. "Maybe you should discover that part yourself." You looked at her, confused. She got up and started to gather her medicine.

"You should get out of this room." She gave you a look of encouragement. "There are no beasts roaming free in this house," she added.

You stared at the door long after she was gone. Then you moved, fast, before your mind could catch up with your feet.

The hallway didn't feel unfamiliar. That was the strangest part.

Your feet knew the turns before your mind caught up with them, left past the window with the cracked latch, right at the second landing, down a narrow staircase you hadn't consciously chosen and somehow already knew would be there. The house was quiet at this hour, empty in a way that let you move without an audience, without anyone's careful, watchful eyes tracking your every flinch.

You didn't know where you were going. You only knew your body seemed to, some current pulling you forward that had nothing to do with memory and everything to do with muscle, with instinct, with a hundred small unconscious things your mind had lost and your feet apparently hadn't.

You ended up in front of a study.

The door was cracked, warm light spilling out in a narrow gold seam across the dark floorboards, and before you could decide whether to knock, whether to retreat, whether to do anything at all, you heard voices.

"—burn the entire camp to the ground, Rhys, I don't care what's left standing when I'm done, I want every single soul who touched her to know exactly what that costs."

Azriel's voice. Low, and viciously controlled in a way that was somehow worse than shouting, like something enormous being held down by sheer force of will.

"And then what?" Rhys, quieter, steadier, though you could hear the strain threading through it too. "You raze Hybern's camp and start a war we're not ready for, and she wakes up tomorrow not remembering any of it, not remembering you, and you're in a cell somewhere or dead, and what good does that do her, Az? What good does that do either of you?"

"I can't just sit here."

"You've been doing exactly that for a week and a half and it's the only reason she's still alive." Cassian's voice this time, rougher, but not unkind. "You want to be furious, be furious. Hells, I'll help you burn it down myself when the time is right. But not like this. Not off a cliff of rage with no plan behind it."

You crept closer, some old, careful part of you keeping your steps silent without any conscious decision to make them that way, until you could see through the gap in the door.

Azriel stood in the center of the room, wings half-flared, shadows boiling thick and restless around his boots, looking like something barely holding its own shape. Rhys stood in front of him, one hand braced firm on his shoulder, not gripping, just steady, an anchor thrown to someone who looked like he might come apart without it.

"I let this happen to her." Azriel's voice cracked clean through, all the fury draining out of it at once, leaving something much rawer standing in its place. "I wasn't fast enough, and now she looks at me like a stranger, and I don't know how to fix either of those things, Rhys, I don't know how."

"You didn't let anything happen," Rhys said, low, fierce. "You went into that camp and you tore it apart with your bare hands to bring her home. That's not failure. That's not something you get to carry like a debt."

"It feels like a debt."

"I know." Rhys's grip tightened slightly on his shoulder. "I know it does. But burning Hybern's camp tonight doesn't pay it. It just gets you killed somewhere she can't reach you, and I am not explaining that to her when she's finally strong enough to ask where you've gone."

Something in your chest twisted, sharp and sudden and entirely without explanation, watching a male you didn't remember come apart over you in a room you'd never consciously seen before.

That was when you felt it.

A cool brush against your wrist, faint, deliberate, like a current of air that had no business existing in a still hallway. You looked down. A thin tendril of shadow curled loosely around your skin, there and then gone, retreating back toward the study door like it had simply been checking, making sure you were real, before slipping away.

Azriel's head turned.

His eyes found yours through the gap in the door, and for one suspended second neither of you moved at all. You watched the fury and grief both drain out of his face at once, replaced by something startled, almost stricken, the look of a male caught entirely unprepared.

Silence fell over the room for a few seconds. Then Azriel crossed to the door and opened it fully.

"You're out of your room." His voice was careful, but underneath the care was something rawer, genuine concern that hadn't had time to arrange itself into anything more composed.

You froze.

He didn't crowd you. He never did. "Are you all right?" His voice was low, soft, careful in a way that did something strange and unwelcome to your heart, something you had no name for and no memory to explain. "Do you need anything? I can get Madja, if—"

For once, you weren't retreating from him. That was new. You hadn't seen any of them, not since the last time you'd all been in a room together, and you could feel the tension still clinging to the air, thick enough to touch.

You didn't answer him. No words formed in your throat. You just stared at the wall behind him.

There, hanging, a painting. You, with the three of them, and a few other people, opening presents beneath a tree. Solstice, maybe. You recognized the names now, tossed around often enough to stick, Rhysand, Cassian, Azriel, matched to the faces in the frame. Two beautiful women stood beside them, one small and brunette, one mesmerizing and golden-haired. The faces all looked so young, so unguarded. And there you were, right in the middle of them, a present in your hands, smiling so widely it looked like it might have hurt.

Your brows furrowed. Slowly, you stepped past him into the office, drawn toward the painting the same way your feet had known the stairs without asking your mind first.

You rose onto your toes, fingers brushing the edge of the frame, and murmured, mostly to yourself, "What…," the word dying somewhere in your throat before it could become anything more than that, no sentence behind it, nothing but the shape of a question you didn't have words for.

The three of them exchanged a look, none of them moving, none of them speaking, all of them clearly afraid that a single wrong word might be enough to break whatever fragile thing was happening in front of them.

It was Cassian, in the end, who moved first, slow and careful, the way you imagined a person might approach something wild and easily spooked.

"That was a few Solstices back," he said, quiet, nodding toward the painting without quite closing the distance between you. "Feyre painted it. She does that, sometimes, when something feels worth keeping."

"Feyre." You tried the name out loud, the way you'd tried Azriel's, searching for a shape underneath it and finding nothing but the general, aching sense that it should have meant something.

"The blonde." Cassian's mouth curved, small and careful, like even a smile felt risky right now. "Mor. And the small one, that's Amren. Don't let her size fool you, she's older than most things in this room combined."

Your eyes moved back to the painting, to your own face, so unguarded it barely looked like something you could have made. You didn't recognize the joy in it. You didn't recognize any of it, not really, but something in your chest pulled toward it anyway, insistent, wordless, like your body remembered even where your mind had gone dark.

"You threw a snowball at Az's head about ten minutes after this was painted," Cassian added, a little too casually, watching for a reaction. "Hit him square in the face. Mor nearly fell off the table laughing. Thought you should know you weren't always this quiet around him."

Something in you wanted to laugh at that, an odd, unfamiliar tug at the corner of your mouth that felt almost like muscle memory. You didn't, not quite. But you noted it, filed it away next to everything else you didn't understand yet.

"I was happy." It came out barely above a whisper, more observation than confession, like you weren't sure you'd earned the right to say it out loud yet.

You felt Azriel move closer, a step, no more, careful not to close the last of the distance between you.

You didn't turn around. Some old caution kept you rooted where you stood, even as something in your chest strained toward the warmth of him behind you. You simply looked at the painting a moment longer, then took a small, deliberate step back, putting a little more air between yourself and all three of them.

Rhys, still by the door, cleared his throat softly, something gentler than his earlier urgency now threading through his voice. "For what it's worth, that dress you're wearing in the painting is still in your closet. Third door on the left, upstairs. In case that's a place you'd like to start."

You looked back at the painting once more, at the woman smiling like nothing in the world could touch her, and felt the strange, hollow ache settle deeper into your chest instead of fading.

You didn't answer Rhys.

Azriel stepped closer instead, careful, unhurried, and offered his arm, palm turned up, an invitation rather than a demand. "I can show you," he said quietly. "If you'd like to."

You stared at his open hand for a long moment. Long enough that you saw the exact instant he braced himself for you to refuse, the careful stillness that came over him whenever he expected to be told no and had already decided he'd accept it without complaint.

Hesitantly, you reached out and took his arm.

You swore, faint and almost silent, that he sighed. Relief, maybe, or something close enough to it that you felt it more than heard it, a small give in the tension that had been sitting in his shoulders since the moment you'd appeared in the study doorway.

He led you up the stairs slowly, matching his pace to yours without seeming to think about it, and stopped in front of the third door on the left, exactly where Rhys had said it would be.

The room beyond it felt familiar in a way that ached.

Not the sharp, disorienting familiarity of the hallway downstairs, your feet knowing turns your mind didn't. This was softer, quieter, a sense memory more than a real one, the particular slant of afternoon light through the window, the low, warm color of the walls, a scent that lingered faintly beneath dust and disuse, something like citrus and old parchment that felt, inexplicably, like yours.

You stepped inside on your own, Azriel a careful distance behind you, and let your eyes travel the room. A wardrobe. A desk. A shelf of books you didn't recognize the titles of and somehow already knew the order of.

That was when you saw it.

Sitting on the desk, half tucked beneath a stack of unopened correspondence, was a small wooden box, carved with a pattern of vines curling around its lid. You crossed to it without deciding to, some magnetic pull drawing you across the room, and lifted it into your hands.

Behind you, Azriel had gone very still.

You didn't notice it, too absorbed in the weight of the box in your palms, but if you'd turned around you would have seen something flicker hard and fast across his face, recognition, and beneath it something rawer, older, a memory he didn't offer and you didn't think to ask for. His jaw tightened. His hands, loose at his sides a moment ago, curled slightly, like he was resisting the urge to cross the room and take the box from you, or perhaps to simply watch you hold it a little longer.

It was the same box from the painting. The same gift you'd been holding, mid-unwrapping, smiling so widely it looked like it might have hurt.

Your fingers traced the carved vines, and something in your chest went very still, very quiet, a held breath with no name and no memory attached to it, just the overwhelming, wordless certainty that this small object mattered, had always mattered, long before you'd lost the reason why.

You didn't say anything to Azriel. You didn't know how to shape the feeling into words yet, didn't trust yourself not to shatter something fragile and half-formed by speaking too soon.

You only looked around the room instead, slow and searching, cataloguing every object like it might hold the next piece of you.

Azriel didn't ask. He simply stood in the doorway, watching, something quiet and aching and endlessly patient in his face, and let you look. His eyes drifted, once, to the box still cradled in your hands, and something that might have been longing crossed his face before he caught it and smoothed it carefully away, offering you nothing more than his silence and his patience, whatever it cost him to give you both.

You stayed in that room until the light outside went gold, then gray, then dark enough that Azriel quietly lit the lamps without being asked, careful and unobtrusive, like he'd done it a hundred times before in this exact room and knew precisely where every match and wick lived.

You set the box down eventually, though you didn't let it go far, keeping it within reach on the corner of the desk like something you weren't ready to lose again. You sat on the edge of the bed instead, and found Azriel still there, still patient, settling slowly into the chair across the room rather than crowding the space beside you.

"Can I ask you something," you said, into the quiet.

"Anything."

"There's someone you mentioned once. Helion." You turned the name over carefully, the way you'd turned over every unfamiliar word these last few days, testing it for a shape you could hold onto. "You said his library might know what's wrong with me. Why haven't we gone?"

Something crossed his face, hesitation, or maybe guilt. "I wasn't sure you were ready. Or wanting to go there, honestly."

"I want to go."

He studied you for a long moment, something unreadable moving behind his eyes, hesitation warring with whatever else sat underneath it. Then, slowly, he nodded. "Then I'll take you."

The Day Court hit you like a change in pressure the second you crossed the border, the sun-warmed air, the golden light so different from Velaris's cool violet dusk that it felt almost like waking a second time.

And something in your chest, for the first time in days, eased.

You didn't understand it at first. You thought it was simply the flight, the relief of movement after so many days confined to that house. But by the time Helion's palace rose gleaming on the horizon, marble and gold catching the light like something out of a dream you couldn't quite place, the strange, suffocating fog that had sat behind your eyes since the moment you woke had thinned, just slightly, just enough that you noticed its absence.

You didn't fully understand the lightness settling into your chest, only that it was there, and that some small, buried part of you didn't want to question it too closely in case naming it made it stop.

The palace doors opened ahead of you, gold catching the afternoon light in a way that made the whole entryway seem to glow, and then he was there. Helion. High Lord of Day, tall and radiant and utterly unhurried, moving toward you both with the easy confidence of someone who owned every inch of the ground he walked on.

The second his eyes found yours, you gasped.

It came out of you unbidden, sharp and involuntary, like surfacing from underwater after holding your breath too long, air rushing back into lungs that hadn't realized how starved they were.

"I know you," you breathed.

Helion's mouth curved, slow and knowing, something warm and wicked in it all at once.

"Yes," he said, quieter now, something old and knowing settling beneath the charm. "I imagine you do."

He surveyed you with curious eyes. "The question is: how much of me are you allowed to remember?"

---

masterlist

As the days pass, Azriel unravels standing at your bedside. He's got more questions than fate is willing to offer. Something isn't right, and he knows it. Then your eyes finally open, and the answer is worse than the silence ever was.

Five days.

Azriel had started counting somewhere around the second one, not because counting helped, but because it gave the terror something to do besides simply consuming him whole. Five days since Hybern's camp. Five days of your chest rising and falling under his palm, steady enough to torture him with hope, shallow enough to never quite let that hope take root.

You hadn't woken once.

He'd watched you change in ways that terrified him more than blood ever had. The color had gone out of you slowly, day by day, your skin taking on a grayish cast no amount of lamplight could soften. Your lips had cracked despite the water Madja dripped patiently past them every few hours.

Your hands, when he held them, no longer felt like your hands so much as some cooling, borrowed thing. Every night he pressed his mouth to your knuckles just to check. Just to feel that warmth was still there at all.

Madja came twice a day now instead of once, her calm fraying by degrees each visit. She checked your pulse. Your pupils. The healing wounds at your wrists, mending exactly the way a body was supposed to, which somehow made the rest of it worse, not better.

"There's no fever," she said on the fifth morning, mostly to herself, mostly to keep from having to look at him while she said the rest of it. "No infection. Her body is doing everything right." A pause, heavy enough that he felt it land before she said anything else. "I don't have an explanation for why she isn't waking up, Azriel. I've never seen anything like this."

"Then find someone who has." His voice had gone hoarse days ago and hadn't recovered. His hand, wrapped around yours, shook without his permission. "I don't care who. I don't care what it costs. Ask Helion. His library knows more about old workings than anyone else in Prythian."

"I've already sent word to three healers outside Velaris, and I'll have someone reach out to the Day Court about Helion's library, if you think it will help." Madja set down her instruments, and something in the careful way she did it made his stomach drop before she'd said another word. "But I have to be honest with you, Azriel. I don't understand what I'm looking at. Her body is healed. Whole. There's no reason at all, by any measure I know, that she shouldn't be waking up."

"Then why isn't she."

"I don't know." It came out of her plainly, almost helplessly, an admission that clearly cost the healer in her something to make. "I've sat with dying fae. I've sat with fae in comas from blood loss, from head wounds, from grief so heavy it stopped their hearts. This isn't any of those. Whatever is keeping her under, it isn't happening anywhere my hands can reach."

Rhys, who had been standing at the window with his arms crossed through all of it, turned slowly, something sharpening behind his eyes.

"What did she say," he said slowly, each word deliberate, "right before she went under."

Azriel's jaw tightened so hard something in it audibly clicked. He'd replayed it a hundred times already, a thousand, the words worn smooth from repetition inside his own skull, the last true thing you'd said to him before everything after had become silence. "She said she didn't break. That she didn't tell them anything."

"Nothing else?"

"That's all there was time for." Something raw and dangerous moved behind his eyes, shadows gathering thick and restless at his feet without his permission. "Why does that matter."

"If it's not her body," Rhys said slowly, "it's something else. Something laid on her mind." He turned from the window fully now, violet eyes gone sharp, the High Lord surfacing hard over the brother. "Which means this wasn't punishment for talking. It was punishment for staying silent. That takes preparation. Intent. Someone anticipated she might resist, and decided exactly what would happen to her if she did."

The room went cold in a way that had nothing to do with temperature.

"What in the void were they trying to get out of her," Rhys said, quieter now, almost to himself, "that silence alone was worth doing this to her."

No one had an answer. The question sat in the room like something with teeth, and Azriel, staring down at your still, graying face, felt something inside him go past fury and into a kind of icy, focused dread he had no name for at all.

"Find out," he said finally, voice flat, final. "I don't care what it takes. I want to know who did this to her, and I want to know exactly what has to be undone to bring her back."

By the seventh day, Azriel had stopped pretending to sleep at all.

He'd stopped eating unless Cassian made him. Hadn't shaved in a week. Someone had gotten a clean shirt onto him at some point, though he couldn't have said when, or how. His hands trembled now, constant, nothing to do with cold. Madja had stopped saying she's stable and started saying nothing at all, which was worse.

Rhys had stopped trying to talk him into sleep hours ago. He'd left sometime after midnight, and the house had gone quiet around the two of you, nothing left but lamplight and the small, endless proof of your breathing.

It was somewhere in the deepest hour of that night, alone, that Azriel felt it.

Your hand, cold in his for seven days, twitched.

He went rigid, every part of him snapping to alertness at once. "Sweetheart?"

He leaned in close, watching your face with a desperation that bordered on violence, and there, behind your closed eyelids, so small he almost convinced himself he'd imagined it, your eyes shifted.

Once.

He would have sworn it on his own life.

"Come on. Come back. I'm right here."

Nothing else came, not for a long while. Your breathing stayed slow, your face stayed slack, and the room held its breath around you both, waiting for a sign that had already, finally, terrifyingly, begun. He didn't leave your side, refusing even now to loosen his grip on your hand, until exhaustion finally won and his head dropped, just once, just for a moment, chin to chest at your bedside.

He didn't feel himself drift. He only felt the jolt of waking to sound, sudden and wrong, your voice tearing through the quiet in a register he had never once heard from you before.

You jolted awake to darkness and the smell of tallow smoke.

Your body knew before your mind did, lungs seizing, heart slamming against your ribs, every instinct screaming the same single word: tent. You were back. Somehow, impossibly, you were back, and any moment now the flap would open and he'd come in to finish what he'd started, and you hadn't broken, you hadn't told them anything, but it hadn't mattered, had it, it had never mattered, they were going to hurt you again regardless.

"Don't hurt me." It tore out of you, thin and cracked, barely a voice at all. "Please. Please, I didn't tell them anything, please don't—"

A shape moved at the edge of your vision. You scrambled back, your spine hitting something solid, a headboard, your mind supplied dimly, though it made no sense, there was no headboard in the tent, and you didn't have room to wonder about it because the shape was still there, close, too close, and every part of you had gone into the kind of animal panic that didn't leave room for thought.

"Hey. Hey, it's me, you're safe—"

"Don't touch me." Your voice cracked wide open, raw with a terror that had nowhere left to go but out. You pressed yourself harder into the headboard, chest heaving, eyes wide and unseeing in the low light. "Don't, please, don't touch me."

The shape went still. Whoever it was, whatever it was, didn't come any closer, and slowly, achingly slowly, your eyes began to adjust, began to make out details that didn't fit the tent at all. Soft sheets. A window. Lamplight instead of torch smoke.

None of it made sense. None of it felt real.

"You won't be hurt." The voice again, low, careful, trembling in a way voices in that tent had never trembled. "I promise you. Nothing is going to happen to you. You're home."

You stared at the shape now resolving into a male, kneeling a careful distance from the bed, hands raised, palms open, dark hair, a face carved from grief and fear in equal measure. Something in you, some small, buried, exhausted part, wanted to trust the sound of that voice. The rest of you was still standing in a tent that smelled like copper and smoke, and it didn't know how to let the wanting win.

And yet. There was a strange familiarity to the shape of his hands, the particular scarring across his knuckles, something your eyes kept returning to even through the panic, as if some part of you that wasn't afraid at all had already decided those hands meant something, long before the rest of you caught up.

"Where," you managed, voice shaking, "where am I?"

"Velaris," he said. "Home."

The word meant nothing. You searched it and searched it and found no shape underneath it at all, no memory to hang it on, just the same suffocating blankness you'd have felt if he'd spoken in a language you'd never learned.

He watched your face change. You saw the exact moment he understood, something in him going gray and hollow all at once, like the floor had opened beneath him too.

"Do you know who I am?" He asked it slowly. Carefully. Like the answer might be the thing that finally broke him after everything else hadn't managed to.

You hesitated. You wanted, more than almost anything, to say something that would fix the look on his face. You searched every corner of yourself for his name, his shape, anything at all, and came up with nothing but a terrible, echoing absence where something should have been.

"No," you whispered.

Something in him didn't just crack. It caved.

"I just," you started, and the sob broke loose before you could stop it, ugly and raw, "I just want to go home. Please. Please, let me go, I just want to stop being here—"

You were sobbing in earnest now, folded in on yourself against the headboard, and the male in front of you didn't move to comfort you, didn't reach for you at all, just knelt there with his hands still raised and something shattering visibly behind his eyes, watching you fall apart and unable to do a single thing to stop it.

It was the sound of it, raw and unrestrained, tearing through walls that had never once muffled the sounds of this house's grief, that brought the door bursting open before either of you had a chance to brace for it.

Two more figures filled the doorway, one enormous and winged, one dark-haired with violet eyes gone razor-sharp the second he took in the scene, your scrambled retreat, the male frozen at your bedside, the raw wreckage of the room.

"Az." The dark-haired one took a single step forward. "What happened?"

"She doesn't remember." Azriel said it like he still didn't believe it himself, like saying it out loud might somehow make it true in a way it hadn't been a moment ago. "She doesn't know who I am. She doesn't know where she is. She looked right at me and she didn't, she didn't know me at all."

Rhys froze in the doorway, something in his composure genuinely cracking for the first time, like whatever he'd braced himself for on the way up the stairs, it hadn't been this. "I didn't think it would go this far." He recovered himself with visible effort, calculation slowly overtaking the shock in his face. "Let me try. If I can get into her mind—"

"No." Azriel was on his feet before Rhys had finished the sentence, putting himself between you and the door with a speed that startled even you, some old instinct in your battered mind recognizing, if nothing else, the shape of someone trying to protect you. "She's terrified, Rhys. She doesn't know you. You are not going into her head right now."

"She's awake for the first time in a week." Rhys's voice sharpened, urgency breaking through the careful diplomacy he usually wore, stepping closer despite the warning written across every line of Azriel's body. "This might be the only window we get. If there's something in there keeping her from remembering, I need to see it while she's conscious enough for me to find the edges of it."

"I don't care if it's the only window in the world!" It tore out of Azriel loud enough that you flinched, shadows exploding off him in every direction, swallowing half the light in the room. "You are not going anywhere near her mind while she's shaking this hard, do you understand me? You are not going to be one more thing that happens to her without her consent, not while I am breathing."

"And if this is permanent, Azriel?" Rhys's own temper finally cracked through, violet eyes flaring bright, voice rising to match. "If I wait and the window closes and we lose whatever chance we had, is that better? Would you rather she stay like this forever than risk one uncomfortable hour?"

"Don't you dare put that on me." Azriel's voice had dropped into something low and lethal, the air around him gone thick and cold, shadows coiling like something with teeth. "I have watched her disappear for seven days. Seven days, Rhys. I have sat in that chair memorizing her heartbeat because I was terrified it would stop while I blinked. I am not letting you walk in there and treat her like a lock to pick just because you're impatient for an answer."

"I am not impatient, I am trying to save her life—"

"Then find another way." Azriel's voice had gone hard and contemptuous, nothing brotherly left in it at all.

"I don't care what title you carry, Rhysand. If you take one more step toward her mind while she's this frightened, I will put you through that wall myself." His wings snapped open behind him, filling the doorway, a solid wall of shadow and membrane between you and the rest of the room. "You wait until she says yes. However long that takes."

Something flickered across Rhys's face, not fear, exactly, but a kind of startled recalibration, as if some part of him hadn't quite believed Azriel would actually turn on him until this exact moment.

He didn't back down. But he didn't push forward either, and for a long, taut second neither of them moved at all.

The room had gone dangerously still, the kind of stillness that came right before something broke.

"I'm trying to help her—"

"Then help her by staying the hell out of her head until she isn't terrified of every shadow in the room!" It came out as close to a roar as Azriel had ever let himself get inside these walls, shadows snapping out across the floor hard enough to douse the nearest lamp.

Cassian, silent until now, stepped fully into the room and put a hand flat against Azriel's chest, not shoving, just steady, an anchor. "Az. Breathe."

Azriel didn't breathe. He turned instead, and the fury in his face dissolved the second his eyes found you again, huddled and shaking and staring at all three of them like they were strangers, because to you, right now, they were.

"I'm sorry," he said, to you this time, voice cracking entirely. "I'm sorry. No one is going to touch you. No one is going to do anything you don't want, not while I'm standing here." He didn't move from between you and the others, shoulders squared like he'd plant himself there for a hundred years if that's what it took. "I don't care what I have to do, or who I have to keep out of this room. You are safe. I swear it to you on my life. Nothing will happen to you ever again."

Something in his voice cracked again on the last of it, fierce and unbearably gentle all at once, like the two things had never once been separate in him where you were concerned.

Rhys held his gaze a long moment, something not quite anger and not quite hurt passing over his face. He didn't argue further. He simply stepped back and turned for the door, his shoulder brushing hard past Azriel's on the way, deliberate, not quite forgiving.

Cassian lingered half a second longer, glancing between the two of them, then followed his brother out. The door clicked shut, and the silence that came after it was not the same silence as before. It had teeth in it now, something unspoken sitting between two males who had never once, in five hundred years, drawn a line like that between them.

Only once the footsteps had faded down the hall did the shadows around Azriel finally begin to settle. Slow. Reluctant. Like a storm choosing, grudgingly, to pass.

His wings folded back against his shoulders. The height and fury that had filled the doorway a moment ago folded down with them, and he lowered himself, slowly, deliberately, back onto his knees at your bedside, the same careful, unthreatening shape he'd held before Rhys and Cassian had ever burst through that door.

It should have frightened you more than it did, watching a male who'd just threatened to put his own brother through a wall settle so easily back into something gentle. Instead, something in you simply filed it away: whatever he was to you, he fought like that for you.

He didn't ask if you were all right. He didn't ask what you remembered, or what you'd overheard, or whether any of it had changed how afraid of him you were. He just knelt there, quiet, careful, giving you back every inch of space he'd taken up a moment ago, as if the only thing left he knew how to offer you was room to breathe and the promise not to take it.

You didn't know him. Not really, not the way the two who'd just left clearly did. But you'd heard them say his name enough times now, Az, Azriel, thrown back and forth between them like something familiar, something worn smooth from years of use, and some part of you had already started holding onto it without permission.

Something in you resisted the space he left anyway. A certainty that had nothing to do with memory at all. Some small, stubborn part of you, utterly unconvinced by your own fear, already wanted him to close that distance again.

---

a/n : 🤭 is all I have to say lmaooo

Azriel x reader Hurt/comfort - Angst

masterlist serie

When you go missing behind Hybern's lines, Azriel doesn't need the word to know what you are to him. The shadowsinger goes full rage mode to bring home what belongs to him.

Azriel hadn't slept in two days.

He wouldn't have called it sleep even if he'd tried. Not with your scent going cold on a jacket he refused to let anyone move from the war table. Not with the shadows themselves seeming restless, curling and snapping at his heels like they, too, couldn't settle.

Somewhere behind Hybern's lines, in a camp his spies had barely confirmed and couldn't yet locate, you were his one unbearable thought, over and over, a wound that wouldn't close because he didn't know how deep it went.

"You need to eat something," Cassian said, for the third time that hour, sliding a plate toward him that Azriel didn't look at.

"I need a location."

"We're getting one," Rhys said, calm in the way that meant he was working very hard to sound calm. "Az. Look at me."

Azriel didn't. He couldn't. If he looked up he thought something in him might come apart in front of both of them, and he didn't have that to give right now, not when every piece of him needed to stay sharp enough to be useful.

"You're no use to her half-mad," Rhys said, quieter now. "You know that better than anyone. Going in blind gets people killed. Gets her killed."

"Don't you think I know that." Azriel's hands curled into fists on the table, knuckles white. "You think I don't feel every second she's out there? It's not just worry, Rhys, it's wrong, something in me is wrong, like a piece of me is missing and I can't—"

He cut himself off, jaw clenched, but it was too late. Rhys and Cassian exchanged a look over his bowed head, quick and wordless, the kind neither of them would have bothered hiding a year ago.

Neither of them said anything else about it. The silence stretched a beat too long, taut with everything unsaid, until Azriel couldn't stand to sit inside it any longer.

"Then find her!" The words tore out of him, sharp enough that Cassian actually flinched, his fist coming down on the table hard enough to crack the wood beneath it. For a moment fury was the only thing holding him upright, black and consuming, aimed at everything and nothing, at Hybern, at the map, at his own uselessness standing here instead of out there.

Then it broke, just as fast as it had risen, and what was left underneath was worse. "I can't. I can't sit here and do nothing while she—" His voice cracked clean through, low and raw, nothing like him at all, and he didn't finish it. He didn't have to. No one in that room could remember Azriel unraveling out loud about anything, and yet here he was, hands braced on the splintered table, shaking too hard to hide it, saying more with his silence than he ever had with his voice.

Cassian's hand landed on his shoulder, heavy and steadying, and said nothing more. There was nothing left to say.

Azriel didn't answer that. Couldn't. He'd never said the word out loud, not once, not even alone in the dark where no one could hear him say it, and it was clawing its way up his throat now regardless of whether he wanted it to.

He barely registered the next hour. Fragments only: Mor's voice near the door, the map dissolving into hurried coordinates, his own shadows dragging themselves back to him at last, reeking of stone and rust and the copper tang of your blood. They whispered a place to him, finally, a name scratched into the corner of Hybern's territory, and it was enough. It had to be enough.

Rhys caught his arm before he could vanish into the dark, and for once there was nothing calm left in his face at all.

"Bring her home, Az." Rhys said it quiet and fierce, every year of their friendship packed into three words.

Azriel didn't answer. He didn't need to. He was already gone.

The camp reeked of tallow smoke and wet stone, Hybern's banners hanging limp somewhere above the earthworks. Azriel came down out of the dark like something the night itself had been dreading, and for one suspended second he simply stood in the doorway of the holding tent and looked at you, and something in his chest didn't break so much as stop.

You were slumped against a post, wrists bound above your head, one eye swollen shut, your shirt torn and dark with more blood than a person should lose and still be breathing. Your skin had gone pale under the bruising, lips cracked, head hanging like it cost too much to hold up.

But your chest still rose. Still fell. He fixed on that, on the rise and fall of it, because it was the only thing keeping him upright himself.

He hadn't even crossed the threshold when he heard boots approaching from the path behind him, unhurried, almost bored. A soldier shouldered past him into the tent without so much as a glance, chain looped over one fist, already reaching for something laid out on the table, a blade, a brand, it didn't matter what. He was already reaching for the next thing he meant to do to you.

Something in Azriel simply gave way.

He didn't remember crossing the tent. He remembered the man's skull under his bare hands, one on either side, and the sheer animal need to make it stop, make it end, wringing every ounce of restraint he'd ever built right out of him.

Shadow poured off him faster and darker than he had ever let it move, lashing around the soldier's throat and wrists and ankles, dragging him down and pinning him there. Then it was just his hands. No blade. No weapon. Nothing between him and the reason you were bleeding but his own strength and his own fury.

It was over in seconds. It felt like it took an hour and no time at all. When he came back to himself the man was dead on the ground, skull broken beneath his palms, blood slicking his fingers and dripping steady onto the dirt, and his hands were shaking again, for an entirely different reason.

You hadn't made a sound the whole time. Not one.

He was in front of you before his pulse had slowed at all, and everything about him changed the instant he reached for you, the same hands that had just broken bone going impossibly gentle, like you were something that might come apart if he moved too fast.

Blood still clung to his knuckles, drying tacky between his fingers, and some distant part of him hated that it was the last thing to touch you before he could get you clean. He cut the bindings with Truth-Teller, angling the blade away from your skin with a precision that had nothing to do with skill and everything to do with fear of hurting you further.

When the ropes fell away he didn't pull you to him. He gathered you instead, one hand cradling the back of your head, the other sliding beneath your knees. He lifted you like you weighed nothing at all. Like you were the most fragile thing he'd ever held in his long, long life.

"I've got you," he murmured, easing you against his chest by degrees, watching your face the entire time for any flinch, any wince, adjusting his hold instantly at the smallest change in your breathing. He smoothed the hair back from your bruised temple with two fingers, barely a touch, reverent in a way no one alive had ever witnessed from him, not Rhys, not Cassian, not even Mor in four centuries of friendship. "Slowly. I'm going slowly. I won't hurt you, I promise, I've got you."

The male who moved through the world like a blade himself was holding you like porcelain, like something sacred, every motion measured down to the smallest fraction he could manage.

The second he had you settled fully against him, safe, held — you broke.

Not loudly. You didn't have the strength left for loud. Just silent tears, spilling fast and endless down a face too bruised to show much else, your whole body shaking with the effort of holding them in even now, even safe, like some part of you still didn't believe it was allowed to stop being strong.

"I'm here," he said, voice wrecked, pressing his mouth to your hair, to your temple, anywhere he could reach that wasn't hurt. "I'm here. I got you. I'm not letting go."

You turned your face into his throat instead of answering, and he felt every silent sob against his skin like a blow.

"I didn't tell them anything, Az," you finally whispered, so faint he had to lean in to catch it. Your fingers found the front of his jacket, closing around the fabric with what little strength you had left. "I didn't break."

He pulled back only far enough to look at you, at the pride flickering somehow through the wreckage of your face, like that was the one thing you needed him to know before anything else, more than the pain, more than the fear still shaking through you.

"Oh, sweetheart." The words came out rough, worn thin, entirely too soft for a male whose hands were still slick with what he'd just done. "I know. I know you didn't. You never would have."

"I wasn't scared," you breathed, though the tremor in your voice said otherwise, said everything.

"My brave girl," he murmured, voice splintering on the words, and pressed his forehead to yours, shadows curling tight and close around you both like they could shield you from the memory of the last hours if they just held on hard enough.

You just held on, fingers still fisted in his jacket, forehead still pressed to his, as he rose in one smooth motion, already scanning the tent flap, already listening for boots that weren't his.

He didn't have long, Hybern's camp would notice the silence soon enough, and he moved fast even as he held you like glass, shadows sweeping ahead of them to smother torchlight, to muffle sound, clearing a path out of the dark before either of you had to think about it.

Twice he froze mid-stride, shadows flattening against the earthworks as a patrol passed close enough to hear breathing, and both times he angled his body between you and the open air without seeming to decide to at all, like it wasn't a choice so much as instinct. By the time the wards of the camp fell away behind them and he finally broke into open sky, his heart was still hammering, though nothing in the world could have made him admit that out loud.

"I'm taking you home, love," Azriel murmured against your hair, voice rough with everything he wasn't letting himself say outright. "Wherever I am, that's where you belong now." The words came out low, unguarded, more than he meant to give away, and neither of you was steady enough yet to call him on it.

Somewhere over the tree line, your grip on his jacket went slack, and he knew, without needing to check, that you were gone under.

The townhouse door didn't open. It exploded inward, torn off one hinge as Azriel didn't so much land as crash through the threshold, wings still half-spread, shadows boiling off him in every direction and swallowing every lamp in the front hall at once. A vase shattered against the wall. Wood splintered underfoot. He was already moving, already shouting, before the door had even finished swinging on its ruined hinge behind him.

"MADJA!" His voice tore through the quiet halls, raw and cracking, nothing like the male who moved through this house on silent feet, who never raised his voice for anything. "MADJA, NOW! I need her now!"

He didn't wait for the echo to die before he was shouting again, a second time when no answer came fast enough, a third when he still didn't hear footsteps, some ragged, unraveling part of him convinced that if he stopped shouting for even a second, it would mean he'd given up.

Rhys and Cassian came down the stairs at a dead run, half-dressed, Cassian's shirt still hanging open, and neither of them slowed at the sight of Azriel with you in his arms, they just moved faster. Cassian was shouting orders before he'd even reached the bottom step, barking for hot water, for linens, for someone to send word to Madja now.

Rhys crossed the hall in three strides, gripping his shoulder hard, steadying him, though nothing about the moment felt steady at all. Mor was already gone, winnowed out to fetch the healer herself.

The rest of the house erupted right behind them. A door slammed open somewhere above, more feet pounding down the stairs two and three at a time. Nuala came flying out of the kitchen with a lit candle still in hand, wax spattering the floor behind her. Somewhere a glass shattered. Someone was shouting for towels, someone else for water, voices overlapping and tripping over each other in the dark, the whole household jolted awake and moving at once.

"Someone get her, NOW," Azriel snarled, to no one, to everyone, shouldering his way into the nearest bedroom without waiting for an answer, still cradling you, limp and unmoving, your head lolling against his chest with none of the strength left to hold itself up, like you might shatter against his own urgency, the whole house in motion around him, doors banging, feet pounding, his family scrambling to keep pace with a fear that had no shape yet, only speed.

He laid you down on the bed like it cost him something, like every inch of distance between his hands and your skin was a small betrayal, and even once your head was settled against the pillows his hands wouldn't stay still, hovering over you, touching your jaw, your throat, your wrist, as if he couldn't decide which part of you needed him most and so tried to hold all of it at once.

"Stay with me," he said, low, urgent, voice fraying at the edges. "Stay with me, sweetheart, come on, look at me, come on—"

You didn't answer. You hadn't answered in longer than he wanted to think about, your face slack and pale against the pillow, your breathing shallow but steady, at least, steady enough that he clung to that single fact like a lifeline, repeating it to himself under his breath, steady, she's steady, she's still breathing, like it might stop being true the moment he stopped saying it.

Madja swept in with Mor close behind her, already rolling her sleeves, already assessing the damage with the practiced eye of someone who'd seen far worse than this and survived worse still. "Azriel. I need room to work."

He didn't move.

"Azriel." Sharper now. "I can't help her with you hovering over every inch of her like a wall."

"I'm not in your way."

"You are exactly in my way." Madja's eyes flicked, not unkindly, to where his hand was still fused to your jaw. "Let me see her ribs. Let me see what they did to her wrists. I promise you, I am not going to hurt her worse than she already is."

His jaw worked. For a moment it looked like he might actually argue with a healer three centuries his senior, might plant himself at your side like a second spine and refuse to be moved by anything short of a direct order.

That order came in the form of two sets of hands.

"Az." Cassian's voice, low, careful, right before he and Rhys took an arm each and hauled him bodily back from the bed. Azriel fought it, snarling, shadows lashing out toward both of them before some last shred of reason clamped down and stopped him from actually hurting either of his brothers.

"Let her work. Let her work, you're going to break her ribs worse holding on like that."

"Get off me," he snarled, teeth bared, shadows spiking off him in every direction, nothing left in his voice but raw animal warning.

"Listen to me." Rhys's grip didn't loosen, arm locked hard across Azriel's chest, voice low and even despite the effort it clearly cost him to hold on. "I know you're not thinking straight right now. I know. But you have to let Madja touch her, Az. You have to let her work. You can hate us for it after."

Azriel strained against them for one more heartbeat, every muscle in him screaming to get back to your side, and then, all at once, the fight went out of him. He sagged between his brothers like something had been cut, chest heaving, eyes never once leaving your face even from three feet away.

When he finally spoke his voice had gone somewhere Rhys and Cassian had never heard it go before, cracked open, stripped of every wall he'd ever built, nothing left to hide behind. "I can't lose her. I didn't have time with her." It came out small, almost childlike, nothing like a warrior who'd just crushed a man's skull with his own hands. "Not enough time. I needed more time."

Something wet caught in his throat, and he pressed the heel of his hand hard against his eyes, furious with himself for it, unable to stop it either.

Rhys and Cassian exchanged a look over his bowed head and eased their grip, though neither of them stepped far.

Madja, wisely, didn't waste the opening. She worked fast, probing your ribs with careful hands, checking your pulse, lifting one eyelid and then the other with a frown that deepened by the second, while Azriel stood frozen between his brothers, hands opening and closing at his sides, aching to be back at your side and not trusting himself yet to go there gently.

"Two ribs broken, maybe a third," Madja murmured, moving to your wrists next, tsking softly at the raw, rope-burned skin beneath the deeper marks scored into it. "That, I can fix. That, time and salve will handle." She straightened, wiping her hands on her apron, her expression giving nothing away yet. "Let her rest. Sleep is the best thing for her right now."

"Why isn't she waking up?"

"She's been through a great deal, Azriel. Give it time." Madja glanced past him to where Rhys, Cassian, and Mor still hovered in the doorway, none of them having moved an inch since they'd first crowded in behind him. "The rest of you, out. She needs quiet." Her eyes flicked to Azriel, still hovering close, and something in her expression softened, understanding written into it in a way she didn't bother explaining to the others. "He stays."

Rhys didn't argue. He gripped Azriel's shoulder once, wordless, and steered Cassian out ahead of him before he could protest. Mor lingered a moment longer in the doorway, something soft and worried in her face, before she too slipped out and pulled the door most of the way shut behind her, leaving it cracked just enough that none of them would be far.

Then it was just the two of you.

Azriel didn't move from that spot at your bedside, not once, not even as the hours bled past and your breathing stayed shallow and even and your eyes stayed closed. He just sat there in the low lamplight, watching you breathe, memorizing the rhythm of it like he was terrified it might stop the second he looked away.

"I'm here, love," he said quietly, to a room that couldn't hear him. "I'm staying. Just, please, come back."

The hours passed like that, in silence, in lamplight, in the small, endless proof of your breathing. Somewhere past midnight Nuala came and went with fresh bandages and a look she didn't voice. Somewhere after that the candle guttered low, and Azriel didn't move to relight it, content to sit in the dark with your hand in his.

Sleep never came for him. He didn't want it to.

Azriel simply watched the night bleed slowly toward morning, waiting for a sign that didn't come.

---

Part 1 - Part 2

Azriel x Reader

Azriel finally has a chance, and he won't let it go. No more fake injuries. No more excuses. Just one night at the River House, the people who already know him best watching closer than usual, and a male finally done pretending he doesn't want this.

You had been getting ready for the better part of two hours, which was, by any reasonable measure, absurd.

You'd started with the green dress, decided it was too much, changed into something simpler, decided that was somehow worse, and were now standing in front of your mirror in the green dress again, having circled back to your first instinct after exhausting every other option in your wardrobe. Your hair had been up, then down, then half up in a manner you'd immediately undone out of pure indecision. You'd redone the same strand of hair behind your ear four separate times.

It was dinner. You had stood at that table more times than you could count, usually with someone's blood still drying under your fingernails, but you had never once sat at it. You did not need two hours to decide what to wear to dinner.

Except tonight wasn't a house call, and you knew it, and your reflection clearly knew it too, judging by how long you'd spent frowning at it.

You gave yourself one last look, smoothed a hand down the front of the dress you'd apparently decided on an hour and forty-five minutes ago and simply refused to admit to, and told yourself, firmly, that you were only nervous because you'd skipped lunch.

You did not believe yourself. You went anyway.

You raised your hand to knock, your foot barely settled on the top step, and the door opened before your knuckles ever touched wood.

You sucked in a breath. "How—"

"I just know," Azriel said, before you could finish, a smile tugging at his mouth like he'd been waiting behind that door for the exact sound of your footsteps on the stairs. He opened his mouth like he might actually explain it, the shadows, the listening, something, then visibly thought better of it and let the mystery stand instead, ears going faintly warm at his own nerve.

You felt suddenly, uncharacteristically shy under the weight of him actually looking at you, and reached up without quite meaning to, tucking a loose piece of hair behind your ear. It didn't go unnoticed. His gaze followed the movement, then dropped, slow, tracking the line of the deep green dress, down to where the hem brushed your ankles and back up again, in a way that made the hallway feel considerably warmer than it had a moment ago.

He caught his bottom lip between his teeth, like he was choosing his next words carefully, or like he simply couldn't help himself.

"You look beautiful," he said, voice low, rougher than usual, and he didn't stop there. He stepped closer, one hand coming up to rest against the doorframe beside your head, boxing you in without ever quite touching you, close enough now that you could feel the warmth radiating off him in the cool night air. His other hand found your cheek instead, light at first, testing, like he half expected you to step back, and when you didn't, his fingers curved in slightly firmer, thumb tracing an absent line along your cheekbone.

"Azriel." It came out quieter than you meant it to, more breath than voice, something caught halfway between a warning and a plea you weren't ready to name.

"Mm." He wasn't really listening. His gaze had dropped to your mouth and stayed there, slow and unblinking, the same way it always did right before he made you forget every clever thing you'd meant to say. He leaned in, slow enough that you felt every inch of it, his breath warm against your cheek, close enough that his nose brushed yours, close enough that the whole hallway seemed to narrow down to the small, charged space left between his mouth and yours, every nerve in your body lit up and waiting for something you didn't have a name for yet.

"Thank you for coming," he murmured, the words landing right against your jaw instead of your ear, low and rough enough that you felt them more than heard them, a current running straight down your spine before he'd even finished speaking.

Neither of you moved for one long, suspended second, the hush before something good stretched out until it ached. You looked up at him and he looked down at you, both of you breathing harder than the moment should have warranted, like the air between you had gotten thinner somehow.

Then Cassian's voice cracked straight through it like a thrown rock.

Azriel pulled back, slow and clearly reluctant about it, like every inch of distance cost him something, his hand lingering against your cheek a beat longer than the retreat really allowed for.

"Oh, hi, sunshine!" Cassian appeared in the doorway behind him, grinning wide enough to split his own face. "I'm relieved to find you both still wearing clothes, we weren't sure you could stay off each oth—"

"Cassian." Azriel cut him off flat, voice low and edged, the particular tone that made grown Illyrian warriors reconsider their life choices. "Finish that sentence and see what happens."

Cassian, wisely, did not finish the sentence. "Anyway. You just made me lose that bet, so, credit where it's due, congratulations on your restraint." He clapped Azriel on the shoulder, entirely too pleased with himself. "Truly heartbreaking work."

Azriel had gone thoroughly red by the time he turned back to you, jaw tight, the particular expression of a male recalculating every choice that had led him to this exact family.

"Excuse my dysfunctional family," he muttered.

You laughed, unable to help it, and some of your own nerves finally eased loose in the process.

"Are you two coming in," Cassian added, already retreating back inside, "or is this the part where I give you privacy and pretend I didn't see any of that?"

Azriel shot him a look sharp enough to have Cassian raising both hands in mock surrender, still grinning the whole way as he disappeared further inside. Then he turned back to you, all that edge melting straight back into softness, and reached for your hand instead, lacing his fingers through yours, easy and certain, guiding you through the door like he had absolutely no intention of letting go anytime soon.

The dining room was already loud by the time you stepped in, warm gold light and the smell of something good simmering, and every familiar face turned toward the two of you at once like they'd been waiting for this exact entrance.

"There he is," Mor said, not even bothering to look up from the wine she was pouring, "the male who spent the entire afternoon pacing the front hall instead of doing anything useful."

"I was not pacing," Azriel said, crossing his arms in a way that did nothing to help his case.

"You wore a groove into the floorboards. Rhys nearly had you reassigned to sentry duty just to give the rest of us some peace." Feyre didn't even try to hide her grin. "You opened that door before she'd even reached the top step. We were placing bets on how long you'd actually last."

"That's an invasion of privacy."

"It's a shared house, Azriel. You chose to have your crisis in the front hall."

"To be clear," Cassian announced, dropping into his seat and raising his glass before anyone had so much as picked up a fork, "I would like it on record that I called this months ago. I said, and I quote myself directly, 'that man is going to fake an injury to see her one of these days,' and everyone laughed at me. No one believed me. It was very hurtful, actually, and I don't think I've fully recovered."

"Aww, poor big baby," Mor cooed, patting Cassian's cheek without looking up from her wine. "Being right is not your forté."

"I resent that," Cassian said, swatting her hand away, undeterred. "I have excellent instincts. I just don't always get the details right."

"You once diagnosed yourself with a punctured lung because you sneezed wrong, or possibly too loud," you said, before you could stop yourself, and the whole table erupted, Cassian included, delighted that you'd had the receipts ready and waiting.

Azriel, beside you, had pressed his lips together, fighting a losing battle against his own smile, valiantly hiding it behind his wine glass.

"She's laughing! At my expense! In my own home!" Cassian pointed his fork at Azriel. "This is what you've done. You've turned my own healer against me."

"She's not your healer tonight," Rhys said mildly. "Tonight she's our guest."

The table quieted for half a beat, the kind of quiet that had weight to it. You'd stood at this exact table more times than you could count, elbows deep in someone's wound, running through casualty counts while blood dried on your hands, but you had never once sat at it. Never eaten a meal here. Never been handed a glass of wine instead of a roll of bandages. You'd been a fixture of this house for years without ever once being a guest in it.

Azriel's hand found yours under the table, brief, grounding, thumb moving once over your knuckles like he'd felt the shift too.

"You okay?" you murmured.

"Better than okay." He glanced at you sideways, some of the earlier nerves still lingering at the corners of his mouth, though there was nothing sheepish left in the way he was looking at you now. "I've watched you stand at this table more times than I can count, stitching one of us back together. I don't think I've ever gotten to just sit across from you at it before."

"You're allowed to just say you're glad I came," you said, looking at him over the rim of your glass, eyebrow raised, thoroughly enjoying making him work for it.

"I'm glad you came," he said, plain and unguarded, glancing around at Cassian mid-reenactment of some story only half the table was still listening to, Mor cackling, Rhys topping off everyone's wine with the satisfaction of a man who'd engineered the whole evening on purpose. "This room's never once felt small to me before. Not until you were sitting in it like this."

You didn't have anything clever to say to that. You just looked at him instead, something soft and open slipping loose in your own expression before you could think to stop it, the kind of look that had nothing left of banter in it at all. He noticed. Of course he noticed. His hand found yours again under the table and simply stayed there.

One by one, they drifted off. Feyre first, tugging a still-protesting Rhys away under some thin excuse neither of you believed for a second. Mor not long after, blowing you a kiss on her way out the door and promising, with real menace, that she'd be seeing you again soon. Cassian lingered longest, naturally, until Azriel gave him a look that finally, mercifully, sent him off toward his own wing of the house with a parting comment about thin walls that made you choke on your wine.

And then it was just the two of you, the dining room gone quiet and gold around you, candles burned low, the whole house settling into the particular hush that came after everyone else had gone.

Azriel led you through to the sitting room without a word, one hand light at the small of your back.

You drifted instead toward the hearth, where a fire had been banked low and steady for hours, throwing soft amber light across the room, your wine glass still cradled loosely in one hand as you watched the flames for a moment, the noise and warmth of the whole evening still humming pleasantly through you.

"That was a really nice dinner," you said quietly, mostly to the fire. "I mean that. All of it. Even Cassian." You turned the glass slowly by the stem, watching the firelight catch in it. "I could get used to it."

Something shifted in Azriel's chest at that. He crossed the space between you without a word, took the glass from your hand and set it on the mantel, fingers brushing yours a beat longer than necessary on the way. His hand found your waist, then slid slow up along your side to rest at the curve of your neck, before he turned you gently to face him fully, the fire warm at your back and Azriel warmer still in front of you.

He wasn't smiling. Not exactly. There was something far more open than that sitting behind his eyes, dark and steady and entirely undisguised, the look of a male who had run out of banter and games and careful distances and had nothing left standing between the two of you at all.

"Say that again," he said, low, thumb stroking slow along your cheek.

"Which part."

"That you could get used to it." His hand settled at your waist, fingers spread firm and warm through the fabric, like he needed something to anchor them while he said the rest. "Because I intend to make sure you do. Every version of it. This house, that table, all of it, for as long as you'll let me. I keep waiting for the part where this stops feeling like too much to hope for."

Your chest went tight, warm and aching all at once. "Azriel."

"I mean it." His gaze didn't waver from yours. "I have spent months inventing reasons to be near you. And tonight, watching you sit at that table like you belonged there, because you do, I don't have a single excuse left. I don't want one."

"You don't need one," you said, barely a whisper. "You never did."

"I know that now."

He reached up and brushed a strand of hair back from your face, slow and careful, nothing at all standing between the two of you except the small, charged inch of space he was closing.

He opened his mouth, then stopped, jaw working, the same unguarded flicker from the doorstep crossing his face again before he let it stay this time instead of retreating behind a smirk.

He exhaled, long and slow, like he was letting go of something he'd been holding onto for months.

"I am in love with you, y/n," he said, quiet and certain, like it was the simplest fact he'd ever stated, like he'd been carrying it so long that saying it out loud was almost a relief. "I think I've been in love with you since the first time you pulled an arrow out of my arm and didn't so much as flinch, just scolded me for waiting too long to come to you. I just didn't let myself call it that until now."

Your eyes stung, unexpected and sudden, and you didn't bother trying to hide it. "I love you too. I was so scared, every time you showed up, that I'd find you in pieces one of these days. Even when you weren't. Especially then."

Something in him broke open at that, gentle and complete. He didn't move right away, just looked at you, that same dark, unguarded intensity from before pinning you in place, like he was memorizing the moment before he let himself have it.

"Can I?" he asked, low, though you both already knew what he meant.

"Yes," you breathed, before he'd even finished asking.

He closed the last of the distance like a man finally allowed to stop holding himself back, one hand sliding into your hair, the other splayed firm against the small of your back, pulling you flush against him like months of restraint had simply run out all at once. The moment his mouth met yours, something deep in your chest gave way, sudden and searing, a thread you'd felt before but never let yourself name, pulling taut between the two of you like it had always been there, simply waiting for permission to snap into place. Azriel went rigid for half a heartbeat, breath catching hard against your lips, like he'd felt it too.

"Did you feel that?" he murmured against your mouth, barely a whisper, more breath than words.

"Yes," you managed, dazed, chest still humming with it.

He kissed you again before either of you could say anything more, like he'd rather feel the answer than talk about it, and you let him, both of you too far gone to want to stop and examine something that already felt this certain. It was not careful this time. It was searching, deep, a slow-building ache finally let loose, his mouth moving against yours with a hunger that had clearly been banked far longer than either of you had let on, and you answered it just as fiercely, fingers curling into his shirt and dragging him closer, chasing the feeling of finally, finally having this.

He groaned low against your mouth, the sound vibrating through you, and his hand at your back pressed you in tighter still, like there wasn't a single inch of space left he was willing to allow between you anymore. There was something almost helpless in the way he kissed you now, control fraying at the edges, like whatever had just snapped into place between you had loosened something he'd spent centuries keeping leashed.

His mouth grew more insistent, less careful, chasing you deeper into the kiss every time you tried to catch your breath, like the taste of you had become something he physically could not get enough of. You felt it in the way his hands trembled faintly where they gripped you, in the low, wrecked sound he made every time you pressed closer instead of pulling away.

You lost track, for a while, of the fire, the room, the rest of the house, aware of nothing except the drag of his mouth and the desperate, relieved way his hands kept moving over you, your jaw, your waist, the curve of your spine, as though he needed to memorize every part of you now that he was finally allowed to, now that some ancient, wordless part of him had decided you were his and had no intention of being reasonable about it.

When he finally broke away, both of you gasping, he didn't go far, forehead dropping to rest against yours, his hands still tangled in your hair like he couldn't quite bring himself to let go yet.

"This," he murmured against your hair, voice still rough, "went considerably better than I let myself expect."

You laughed softly, burying your smile against his shoulder as he wrapped both arms around you properly, tucking you into him like he intended to keep you there for a very long time.

"You were nervous about tonight?"

"Terrified. I've faced down enemy encampments with less dread than I felt on your doorstep this afternoon." He pressed a kiss to the top of your head. "Worth every second of it."

He didn't let go after that. He simply held you there instead, arms wrapped fully around you, chin settling into your hair, content in a way you'd never once seen from him, not even in all the quiet moments you'd shared before tonight. You let yourself sink into it, into him, in no hurry at all to be anywhere else.

The fire burned low and steady beside you, and somewhere upstairs, very faintly, you were fairly sure you heard Mor's triumphant whisper of finally drift down through the floorboards.

---

a/n: Sooo this is the end, thank you for reading, it was so fun to explore this side of Az 💙

Azriel x reader Fluff / banter / slow burn

part 1

Azriel's out of excuses, which leaves him with the one thing he's never actually tried: showing up with no reason at all

Cassian told the story exactly once before Rhys made him repeat it three more times, purely for his own entertainment.

"So he flies in," Cassian said, wheezing, one hand braced against the war table like he needed it to stay upright, "looking like death itself, ribs supposedly cracked, the whole tragic I might not make it routine—"

"I don't sound like that," Azriel said flatly, from the window, arms crossed, wings mantled tight in the universal posture of a male deeply regretting every choice that had led him to this exact conversation.

"You absolutely sound like that. And then." Cassian held up a finger, savoring it. "Nothing. Not a scratch. She checks him twice. Twice, Rhys. Nothing there at all. Turns out our terrifying, unreadable Shadowsinger flew across half the territory and lied to a healer's face because he wanted an excuse to see a pretty girl."

"Shut up, Cassian."

"I have never respected you more in my entire life."

"Shut up, Cassian."

Rhys, to his credit, did not laugh outright. He had the grace to press his knuckles briefly to his mouth, shoulders shaking with the effort of it, before settling into something almost dignified. Almost.

"That's remarkably poor tactics," he said, "for a spymaster."

"I'm aware."

"You could have just told her."

"I'm aware, Rhys."

"I'm only saying. There are easier ways to get a woman's attention than inventing structural damage to your own skeleton."

"If you'd like a real reason to fly to a healer," Cassian offered, entirely too pleased with himself, already rolling up one sleeve, "I would be happy to provide one. Free of charge. Consider it a gift."

Azriel did not dignify that with a response.

"I mean it. One good hit. You'd barely feel it, you're very durable, everyone says so—"

"You should invite her here," Rhys said, cutting neatly through whatever Cassian had been building toward, the picture of reasonable, unbothered helpfulness. "Dinner. Properly, this time. No fabricated injuries required."

Azriel's jaw ticked, the closest thing to hesitation he ever let show in front of either of them. "No."

"Why not."

"Because Cassian would be there."

"I would be delightful," Cassian said, deeply wounded. "I would be on my absolute best behavior."

"You brought up the rockfall four times in the last ten minutes."

"That's different. That's just good material. I can't be expected to sit on good material, it isn't natural." Cassian spread his hands, entirely sincere now, some of the teasing dropping out of his voice. "Come on. You know I love the girl. In the platonic, deeply respectful way one loves someone who single-handedly caught you in the most embarrassing lie of your very long life. I'll behave."

"You will not."

"I will try."

Rhys, watching the two of them with the particular fondness of a male who had, several centuries ago, given up trying to referee this exact friendship, took a slow sip of his wine.

"For what it's worth," he said, "I think she'd say yes. To dinner. Even with him there."

Azriel didn't answer right away. He looked back out the window instead, toward the lights of Velaris scattered gold below, toward the general direction of a small candlelit room that smelled like chamomile and clean linen, where a cat that liked him more than she liked her own owner was probably curled by the hearth right now.

"I'll think about it," he said, which both of them correctly understood to mean yes, and I've already thought about nothing else for days.

Cassian grinned like he'd won something. "I'll bring wine."

"You will not be invited."

"I'll bring wine anyway."

You were still sorting your vials when a hesitant knock came at your door. At this hour, you weren't expecting any patient. Odd, you thought.

As you opened the door, you heard a slow exhale, then—

"Azriel?" The surprise was written all over your face. For once, he wasn't wearing his armor. He simply stood there, dressed all in black, siphons gone. It was such an odd sight, compared to every other situation you'd seen the male in.

There was an awkward silence for a few seconds. He looked nervous. His scarred hand went through his hair, then dropped, then found its way back up again like it hadn't quite settled on a decision. Then your eyes drifted to his other hand, knuckles white, holding a small bouquet of flowers. His grip on the stems was so tight you half expected them to snap.

"Hi," he said, his gaze burning into yours.

"Hi," you answered, smiling. "So… You did come without any injuries this time," you teased.

The corner of his mouth shyly lifted, and something warm crept up the column of his throat before it settled high on his cheekbones, faint but unmistakable against his tan. "I did," he answered. "I—uh." He started, then stopped, jaw working, the hand not currently strangling the flowers dragging through his hair again. "These are for you," and he handed you the flowers, crushed at the stems, to be honest. It made your heart clench a little harder, thinking about how nervous he was.

"Sorry… rough flight." His mouth flattened, and that made you smile even more.

"Why are you bringing me flowers in the middle of the afternoon, Azriel?" you asked, almost mischievous. The sight was too delightful, and you were not going to pretend otherwise. You crossed your arms and let yourself simply enjoy watching the unshakeable Shadowsinger shift his weight from one foot to the other like a boy called up in front of a class.

"Right, I—uh." You couldn't believe the spymaster of the Night Court was actually nervous enough that he couldn't find his words. He cleared his throat, once, then again when the first attempt clearly hadn't done the job, and asked, "I'd like to invite you to dinner. At the River House." He almost spoke too fast, the words tripping slightly over each other on their way out.

"Rhys is hosting a small gathering tonight, and we, I mean— I would love to have you with us," he said sheepishly, one hand rubbing the back of his neck now, the other still hovering awkwardly at his side, unsure what to do with itself now that it no longer had stems to occupy it.

"Tonight?" you asked again, checking the clock behind you; it was already mid-afternoon.

"Yes, tonight." He seemed to realize the invitation came a little late. "I know it's short notice. I should have asked days ago. I've been meaning to. I just—" He stopped, jaw tightening, visibly annoyed with himself for fumbling something he'd clearly rehearsed better in his head, shoulders drawing up toward his ears like he could physically shrink away from his own awkwardness if he just tried hard enough.

"You've been meaning to for days," you repeated, watching him with the same delighted, narrow-eyed attention you usually reserved for catching him mid-lie.

"Cassian accelerated the timeline. Threatened to ask you himself if I didn't." He looked, for one unguarded second, like a little boy holding himself up straighter than he actually felt, chin lifted, shoulders squared, entirely undone by the whole effort of it. "So, here I am."

"That does sound like something he'd threaten to do, indeed."

"So. Dinner. Tonight, if you can." He exhaled, long and slow, and something in his shoulders eased slightly now that the worst of it was out, though his hands still hadn't quite settled on where to rest. "If you can't, I'll find an excuse to ask you again tomorrow, though I'm told I'm no longer permitted to invent injuries for that purpose."

"You're not," you agreed. "Precedent's been set."

"Cruelly."

You looked down at the flowers in your hands, crushed and a little wilted and somehow more convincing than anything smooth he could have said instead, and then back up at him, still watching you with that same careful stillness, hands now empty and clearly unsure what to do with themselves now that they no longer had stems to hold onto.

"Yes," you said. "I'll come tonight."

Something in him loosened all at once, the whole careful architecture easing, like he'd been holding his breath since he'd landed on your doorstep. His hands finally stilled.

"Yes," he repeated, like he needed to hear it a second time to trust it.

"Obviously yes. You flew here in the middle of the day, out of armor, holding flowers you clearly fought a hedge for. I wasn't going to say no."

"I did not fight a hedge."

"Azriel. There are leaves in your hair."

He reached up to find it, patting blindly at the wrong side of his head entirely, and you huffed out a laugh and reached up yourself before you could think better of it, fingers brushing through the dark strands until you found the offending leaf and plucked it free. He went very still under your hand, breath catching audibly, and you were close enough now to feel the warmth coming off him, close enough to watch his throat work around a swallow he clearly hadn't planned on.

You didn't step back right away. Neither did he.

"There," you said, quieter than you meant to, the leaf forgotten between your fingers. "Fought bravely."

His eyes had gone dark and unhurried, tracking the shift from your fingers still tangled faintly at his temple down to your mouth and back up again, slow enough that you felt it everywhere. The tips of his ears had gone faintly red, you noted, delighted, filing it away for future use.

"I'm aware," he said, biting the inside of his cheek, gaze dropping briefly to the ground before dragging back up to yours like he couldn't quite help himself.

Your cat chose that moment to appear, winding around his ankles with her usual traitorous enthusiasm, and he looked down at her, then back up at you, making no effort at all to hide how pleased he was with how this had gone, even with his hands still faintly restless at his sides.

"So, I'll see you tonight then?"

"You will," he agreed, and the way he said it made it sound like the furthest thing from simple he'd ever attempted.

He lingered a moment longer on your threshold, the way he always did, like leaving still cost him something even now that he had an actual reason to come back.

"For what it's worth," he said, "that was considerably harder than flying into an ambush."

"Oh, I believe you." You laughed it off, and reached out on impulse to smooth the collar of his shirt where it had gone slightly askew, an entirely unnecessary correction that had nothing to do with the collar at all. His hand caught yours before you'd finished, not stopping you, just holding it there against his chest a moment longer than the gesture required, warm and solid under your palm. "I'll see you tonight, Azriel."

"Yes." He pressed something that was almost a kiss to your knuckles instead, brief and deliberate, before finally letting your hand go. He held your gaze a beat too long to be casual about it, something warm and unguarded still sitting behind his eyes, before he finally stepped back off the threshold, wings shifting to catch the afternoon air.

You stood in your doorway long after he'd gone, a crushed and slightly wilted bouquet still cradled in one arm, and thought that for a male who talked his way past entire enemy encampments for a living, Azriel had never once managed to make a clean exit from your porch. You found, watching the last of him disappear over the rooftops, that you rather hoped he never learned how.

---

part 3

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a/n : I'm so sorry it took so long to update yall on part 2 guys, life has been really busy lately (and a little chaotic 💀)

Thoughts ?? part 3 ??

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.

--

Part 2

a/n : I had so much fun writing this one, I just love when Az is already gone for reader 🤭

Part 5 - Masterlist

Azriel x Reader

-

Azriel watched the confusion and the disbelief hit your face, and something in him broke.

It was his turn to fall to his knees.

Your breaths were ragged, your chest heaving, your eyes moving past him and then back and then past him again, lost somewhere inside your own head.

What did he mean the ring was for you? All this time? Then why was he with Selene? Why was she wearing the necklace?

None of it lined up. None of it made sense. You couldn't hold the pieces still long enough to make them fit.

His hands found your face.

"Hey." His voice was soft. So soft it almost broke you further. "Hey. I'm right here."

Your eyes found his, but the thoughts wouldn't come. They kept dissolving before they formed, leaving you stranded somewhere between understanding and total blankness, and he saw it — he always saw it — and something desperate moved through his face.

"Please." His forehead came down to yours, crashing into it, his hands cupping your face like he was afraid you would shatter if he held too tight and disappear if he held too loose. "Please. You have to trust me. I swear to you it's the truth."

The wind still howled around you, low and restless. The lightning had stopped.

He pulled back just enough to look at you, keeping his hands where they were, his eyes searching every inch of your face. "Say something. Anything. I'm sorry I didn't—"

"Why?" The word came out of you like something pulled from very deep down. A tear rolled down your cheek, slow and inevitable.

He waited, watching you.

"Why is she there, then?" Your voice cracked on the last word. "If it was never her — if the ring was never for her — then why is she always there? Why did you let her—"

Azriel let out a long, slow breath. "It's complicated."

A short, hollow laugh escaped you. Of course it was.

"No." He shook his head. "Listen to me." His thumbs moved against your cheekbones, steadying. "When you came back, you walked in with Dorian. A prince. Someone easy and bright and completely uncomplicated, standing next to you like he belonged there." His jaw worked. "I was so jealous I couldn't think straight. And when I saw you looking at her that way, at the necklace, I didn't care to correct what you assumed, because part of me wanted you to feel it. Even for a moment." His head dipped slightly. "I know how that sounds."

You stared at him.

"You let me think—"

"Yes," he said quietly. "I did. And I'm not proud of it."

He grabbed your hand, held it, and kept going before you could speak. "She came into my life because her father is a lord in the camps. A good one — the kind who actually wants to change things from the inside. He wants Selene to train properly, then go back and train the younger girls herself. Build something real, from within." His jaw worked. "He asked Rhys. Rhys passed it to me. I couldn't say no. You know what it costs females in those camps when no one says yes."

You did know. The weight of it sat familiar in your chest. You were glad, even now, even in the middle of this, that he had said yes.

"As the weeks went on, I knew Selene was interested in me," he continued. "She never overstepped. But she was always there, trying to impress me, looking at me, finding reasons to stay close."

"Did you like it?" you asked. Honest. Direct. Needing to know.

He didn't look away. "Yes."

The single syllable sat between you.

"I liked being wanted by someone who was actually present," he said, and the honesty in it was brutal and clearly costing him something. "I should have told her no from the beginning. I should have been clear. Instead I let it go on because it was easier than sitting alone every night with the full weight of what I'd already lost." His head dipped. "I fed her delusions when I should have ended it. That's on me."

"It still doesn't explain the necklace, Azriel."

He looked up.

"She found it a few weeks ago," he said. "In a drawer she had no business opening. I never meant for her to see it, and when she asked what it was, I—" He stopped. His jaw worked. "I told her it didn't matter anymore. That she could have it, if she wanted it."

Something in your chest cracked open quietly. Your hand pressed flat against it without you meaning to, like you could hold the feeling in.

"Why would you give it away?"

"Because I couldn't look at it." The admission came out of him like something physically painful to release. "Every time I opened that drawer I saw you standing in front of me on Solstice, pushing it back toward me with that smile that told me everything and nothing all at once, and I thought you'd made yourself very clear." His thumb brushed your cheekbone, barely, like he couldn't help it. "Giving it to her felt like setting it down. Like finally putting away something I had no right to keep waiting for."

You stared at him.

Then you pulled back.

Not far. Just enough — his hands falling from your face as you shifted away from him on the stone, putting distance between you that felt, in that moment, like the only way you could think clearly. He let you go without resistance, his hands dropping to his knees, and he watched you with the patient, wrecked attention of someone who understood he had no right to close that distance before you said he could.

You sat with the silence for a moment. With the stone beneath you and the scorched air around you and the ring still burning somewhere in your chest even now, even with his words in your ears. You needed a second to hold all of it without his hands on your face making it impossible to feel anything except him.

Then you breathed out.

"So you gave it away," you said slowly, "because you thought I refused it. Because you thought I didn't want it." You shook your head, something between a laugh and a sob catching in your throat. "And I spent all this time thinking you didn't want me. That the silence meant I had imagined everything." You looked at him. "We did this to each other."

"Yes," he said quietly. "We did."

Something fractured further in his face. He didn't look away from it.

"Do you understand—" Your voice broke before you could stop it, not in tears but in something rawer. "Do you understand what that did to me? Not just the necklace. Not just Selene." You shook your head. "Every time, Azriel. Every Solstice. Every time you looked at me like that and then — nothing. Every time I thought, this time, this will be the time he says it, and you didn't." The words were coming out faster now, not a torrent, but steady, unstoppable, like something that had been pressing against a door for a very long time and had finally found it open. "I convinced myself I had imagined it. That what I felt was one-sided and I was pathetic for still feeling it, and I left because I couldn't keep sitting in the same rooms as you loving you that much while you gave me silence." Your eyes were burning. "I built a whole life on the other side of the world trying to outrun something you could have stopped with a single sentence."

Azriel said nothing.

He sat with every word of it, took it without flinching, and what was in his eyes was not defensiveness and not the careful composure he usually kept like armor. Just the full, unguarded cost of hearing the truth of what his silence had actually done, held plainly in his face where you could see all of it.

"I know," he said. Only that. Not an excuse. Not a justification. Just the acknowledgment of it, complete and unqualified.

"And now you're telling me it was real." Your voice had dropped. The anger was still there but something else had risen through it now, something smaller and more frightened and far more honest than fury. "You're telling me the ring has been sitting in that box this whole time and you loved me and you never said it, I need to know—" You stopped, then made yourself continue. "I need to know that if I let myself believe this, if I let myself trust you with this, you won't go quiet again. The moment things get complicated, the moment I do something wrong, the moment it gets hard — I need to know you won't just retreat back into silence and leave me guessing for another decade."

The courtyard was completely still.

"Because I can't do it again," you said. Quiet now. The truest thing you'd said. "I can't love you from a distance again. I don't have it in me."

Azriel looked at you for a long moment.

Then he moved.

Not rushing. Not grabbing. He crossed the distance between you slowly, deliberately, giving you every moment to stop him, and when you didn't, he took your face in his hands again and held it the same way he had before — like something he had no intention of letting go of this time.

"I will not go quiet," he said. Each word placed with the care of someone who understands the weight they carry. "I have spent enough of my life choosing silence over you. I am done with it." His thumbs moved against your cheeks. "Ask me anything. Say anything. Be angry for as long as you need to be angry. I will still be here when you're finished, and I will say it as many times as it takes for you to believe it."

His eyes held yours.

"I love you," he said. "I have loved you for longer than I know how to account for. I loved you before you left and I loved you every day you were gone and I have never, not once, not for a single quiet hour in all the time between then and now, stopped." His voice broke on the last word. He didn't fix it. "I should have said it the night I offered you that necklace. I should have said it every morning after. I should have crossed whatever ocean you put between us and said it on your doorstep and let you decide what to do with it instead of deciding for you." His forehead dropped to yours, his breath ragged now, the careful Azriel entirely gone. "I am so sorry. I am so deeply sorry for every almost. For every time I stood at the edge of it and chose silence over you."

You stayed very still against him.

"Then why," you said. "Why didn't you."

A long breath left him. His hands tightened slightly against your face.

"Because you were going to leave," he said. "You talked about it for years. The courts you hadn't seen. The seas you hadn't crossed. The version of yourself that was waiting somewhere past everything keeping you still." Something in his voice went very quiet. "I listened to every word of it and I loved every restless, burning piece of it, and I made a decision without telling you I was making it. That wanting you to stay was something I had no right to do."

"That wasn't your decision to make."

"I know." The words cost him. "I know that now."

A silence settled between you. Not comfortable — weighted, full of things still unsaid. You looked at him, and he looked back, you could feel it there, the thing underneath the first answer, the one that went deeper than duty or consideration or any of the reasonable explanations he'd offered. The one he hadn't said yet.

"And the real reason," you said softly. "The one underneath all of that."

His jaw worked.

"I don't—" He stopped. Started again, lower now, rougher, the words coming like something pulled from a room he'd never intended to open. "I am not someone who gets to be chosen. That's what I believed. For a very long time, that was simply true to me." His eyes dropped briefly. "I know what my hands have done. I know what lives in the dark parts of me. I know that I am dangerous in ways that don't wash off, and you—" His throat moved. "You were so bright. So full of something clean and alive. And some part of me was always waiting for the moment you looked at me clearly, really clearly, and understood what I actually was, and decided I wasn't worth the cost of staying."

The courtyard was utterly silent.

"So I made it easier for you to leave," he said. "Before you could decide to."

You looked at him for a long moment.

At the burns on his hands, cradling your face. At the shadows at his shoulders, still for once, not hiding anything. At the male who had spent longer than you'd known him believing he was something too dark to deserve the thing he wanted most.

"You are an idiot," you said.

Something fractured at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. The ghost of one, fragile and disbelieving.

"I know," he said.

"I have never once looked at you and seen something I didn't want." Your voice was steady now, steadier than it had been in days. "Not once. Not for a single moment. Whatever lives in the dark parts of you — I have been standing next to it for centuries and I am still here." Your hand pressed flat against his chest. "I came back, Azriel. I came back for you."

Your throat was so tight you couldn't speak for a long moment. You pressed your hand flat against his chest, feeling the thunder of his heart beneath it, and understood, fully, finally, that it had been beating like that for a very long time.

"I never stopped loving you either," you said. Quiet. True. "I tried. Gods, I tried. I went as far as I could go and I tried to leave you somewhere I couldn't find you, and it never worked." A breath that was almost a laugh and was not a laugh at all. "It was always you, Az. It was only ever you."

Something shifted in his face. The last of it, whatever had still been held back, whatever careful distance had survived everything else, simply gave way. His eyes dropped to your mouth. His hands tightened in your hair.

He kissed you before you could say anything else.

Not gentle. Not careful. His mouth found yours with the full weight of everything that had never been said, and you felt it crack through you like the lightning had, like something long-dammed finally given a place to go. His hands came up to cradle your face and he kissed you the way he did everything he had finally decided to stop being afraid of — completely, with nothing held back, with all of him present in it in a way you had never felt from anyone before and suspected you would never feel from anyone else. One hand slid into your hair, fingers curling against the back of your skull, tilting you up toward him, and you went, helplessly, entirely.

You kissed him back with everything you had.

Every Solstice. Every almost. Every night you had lain awake on the other side of the world pressing your palm flat against your chest trying to find a way to stop wanting something you'd convinced yourself you couldn't have. You gave it all back, all of it, and felt him receive it with a sound low in his throat that undid something in you completely.

When you finally broke apart, both of you were breathing hard. His forehead dropped to yours again. His hands were still in your hair, thumbs tracing slow, deliberate lines against your temples like he needed to keep touching you to confirm you were real. Like he was afraid that if he let go you would disappear again and he would be left standing in a corridor with his hand pressed to a painting of your face.

You stayed there for a long time. Foreheads together, breathing each other in, the courtyard golden and utterly still around you.

Then he pulled you fully into him.

One arm around your back, one hand cradling the back of your head, your face pressed into his neck. You felt his chest rise and fall against yours, unsteady, still recovering from everything the last hour had taken from him. His grip was tight. Not desperate, not frantic — just certain. The specific hold of someone who has been given something back they thought was gone and has no intention of being careless with it this time.

Your eyes burned.

You let them.

The tears came quietly, pressed against his collar where no one could see — except this time someone was there, and his arms only tightened when he felt them, and he said nothing, just held you closer, his lips pressing briefly against the top of your head in something too gentle to be called a kiss and too deliberate to be called anything else.

The gold light stretched long across the scorched courtyard. And somewhere in the space between you, something quiet and luminous stirred — a thread of gold, barely there, warm as the last of the afternoon sun, winding itself between two people who had been circling each other for long enough that the universe had apparently decided to stop waiting for them to figure it out. Lovely in the way that only things that have been a very long time coming can be lovely. Inevitable, perhaps, in the way those things always are.

His lips pressed against your temple, and then, quiet and certain and entirely without hesitation, he said the thing that cost him nothing and everything at once.

"You're mine," he murmured against your hair. "And I am yours. I have always been yours. Every part of me that is worth anything has always belonged to you."

---

THE END

a/n: I have been waiting six chapters to write this and it still completely destroyed me. thank you for being here for all of it. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did 💙

Part 4 - Masterlist

Azriel x Reader

-

You had a hell of a night.

After Cassian had interrupted on the balcony, you barely remembered anything clearly — only the dull ache that still sat on your chest when you woke, familiar enough by now that you almost didn't notice it. Almost.

You had time to think about what he'd said. Don't bite his head off before he's even tried.

Had he really tried? He had given you nothing besides silence and stolen glances. Which felt awfully familiar.

You sighed and closed the book on your lap. Nothing could steady your mind this morning. You leaned back on the couch, let your head rest against the cushions, and stared at the ceiling with your eyes closed.

You shot them open when you felt a cold thread of air touch your bare ankle.

You frowned. Nothing was there.

A second later, Azriel materialized through the door.

He had a stack of books under one arm, and for the first time you could remember, he hadn't sensed you before stepping into the room. He stopped when he saw you. Something moved across his face, and heat crept up the back of his neck in a way you had never seen on him before.

"Oh," he said. "Hi."

He looked strange standing there, shifting his weight slightly, his usual composure slightly misaligned. You looked at him and said nothing. You didn't trust yourself not to say something mean.

"How's the head?" he asked, setting his books down and sliding both hands into his pockets. The careful cool of the Spymaster, reassembled.

"Banging," you said. "I think Mor put a spell on that bottle."

That made him smile. Small, tentative, not quite reaching his eyes but trying.

"I thought I'd run into you at some point," he said simply. But something in his eyes said something else entirely. His hand moved to the back of his hair, a brief, betraying gesture, and the sight of it, Azriel nervous, did something complicated to your chest.

You arched a brow.

He reached into his pocket and took out a very small vial. He crossed toward you, you didn't get up from the couch as he extended it without ceremony, leaning slightly to close the distance.

Your fingers touched when you took it.

Just for a second. Just that. An electric warmth that crawled up your arm before you could name it, and by the slight stillness that moved through his face, he felt it too.

"Peppermint oil," he said. "Mixed with some herbs." The corner of his mouth lifted. "It helps with headaches."

You looked at him. Then the vial. Then back at him.

You were, for the first time in recent memory, completely speechless.

Where was the male who had stood in front of you on the balcony, barely able to finish his sentences? You had asked him to show you something, anything. Was this it?

"I — " You stopped. Started again. "Thank you," you said, and inclined your head.

He looked at you with that steady, intent quality that had always made you feel like the only thing in a room worth looking at. "Rub some on your temple three times today."

One of his shadows drifted toward you, shy and curious, reaching for your shoulder before it caught itself. Azriel sensed it and reined it back gently. He cleared his throat. "Drink some water."

He bent to pick up his books. Glanced at you once more, brief and unreadable. Then he turned and walked out, and his shadows hovered at the doorway one moment longer before following him.

The soft click of the door.

You let out a breath you hadn't known you were holding.

"What the fuck," you said aloud, into the empty room. You shook your head. "I am hallucinating."

You stood, and noticed then that he had forgotten a book on the side table. You picked it up: something about a border war three centuries ago, dry as dust. Very Azriel. He was probably writing another report for Rhys.

You held it a moment longer than necessary, pressing it lightly to your chest. You could still feel the brush of his fingertips against yours. Something sparked quietly beneath your ribs and refused to go out.

You spent the day in the library.

It was a good place to be, quiet and vast, requiring nothing of you except the turning of pages. You found, somewhere around the third hour, that you weren't really reading at all. You were thinking about a vial of peppermint oil, a hand sliding nervously through dark hair, and the particular sound his voice made on I thought I'd run into you at some point, as though he'd been hoping for it the whole time without daring to say so.

Something in you had loosened slightly since that morning. Some small, careful, dangerous hope.

Nesta passed through once. She paused at your table, looked at you for a long moment with that particular assessing quality she had, and said, "You look less like you're about to set something on fire today." It wasn't quite warmth. From Nesta, it was close enough. She didn't linger after that, and you were grateful for it too.

By late afternoon you gathered your things, tucking Azriel's forgotten book under your arm, the small hope from the morning still sitting quietly in your chest where you'd let it stay. You made your way back to your room, dropped everything on the bed, and then stood in the hallway for a moment before crossing to his door.

You knocked once, twice. "Az?"

No answer.

You turned to go back. Then his door shifted, just slightly, the latch not fully caught, the wind from his window pulling it open an inch, then two.

"Oh," you said, mostly to yourself.

You knew this room. You had been in it plenty of times before. So why did stepping inside feel like something that required permission you hadn't been given?

Because things were different now. Because that morning had cracked something open that you weren't ready to name, and walking into his space uninvited felt like trespassing on something fragile and new.

You hesitated, then decided. You only wanted to return the book. A small gesture. Something neutral. You pushed the door open and crossed to his desk, set the book gently down.

You turned to leave.

Something caught the light.

You stepped closer before you'd made the decision to, and there it was on the shelf: the necklace, coiled on itself, the stone catching the late afternoon light.

Your hand came up to cover your mouth before you could stop it. He must have asked for it back, or Selene had simply returned it herself, slipped it quietly into his hand sometime in the days since the dinner without either of you knowing. Of course she had given it back. She was exactly that kind of person, and the fact that you respected her for it made the jealousy sitting in your chest burn hotter and more shameful all at once.

Your fingers found the chain, touched it.

Something in the corner of the room moved in the darkness, and you startled. Your hand jerked, and the necklace fell from the shelf. You exhaled, pressed a hand to your chest, and bent to pick it up.

As you did, your eyes caught it.

A small velvet box, half-hidden behind a book on the lower shelf.

You should leave.

You knew, even as your hand reached toward it, that whatever was inside belonged to a part of his life you had no claim to and no right to disturb, that curiosity had never once led you anywhere good where Azriel was concerned. You told yourself this clearly, in words, the way you told yourself things you had no intention of listening to.

Your hands were already shaking when you picked it up.

The black velvet was soft against your fingers. You opened the lid, and your heart did something you hadn't known it was still capable of. It sank, slowly and completely, like your soul being pulled under. Nausea crept up your throat.

The ring was simple at first glance. A golden band, modest and sure of itself. But it was the stone that caught your breath: obsidian, dark as a night sky, with veins of white and deep violet and gold running through it like lightning caught in glass. It was extraordinary. It was the most beautiful thing you had ever seen, and it was sitting in a box in Azriel's room, and every thought in your head arrived in the same terrible order.

Selene.

He had been with Selene. Long enough to choose this. Long enough to have it sitting here, worn at the edges, as though he'd picked it up and set it down so many times the velvet had softened from the handling. He had been almost ready. Almost.

The word hit you like a blade.

You had stood on that balcony and told him you couldn't keep living in his almosts, and here was the proof that you had been right all along. That whatever he had once felt for you, it had not been enough. Not to say it. Not to stay.

And now someone else was almost wearing a ring on her finger and you had come back here and cracked yourself open on that balcony for nothing.

Your hands moved before your mind caught up with them. You closed the box, set it back exactly where it had been, careful even now, even shattered, not to leave a trace of yourself behind.

The room blurred at the edges as you crossed it.

Somehow you were in the hallway. Somehow your feet carried you down the stairs, out the front doors.

From outside, the clang of steel reached you, sharp and rhythmic, completely indifferent to the fact that your whole world had just come apart in a room two floors above it.

The sky darkened in the time it took you to descend the stairs.

You didn't summon it. You never did, with this kind.

This was not the lightning you called in battle, deliberate and precise. This was the other kind. The kind that answered something in your chest before you gave it permission, that had always known your feelings better than you did and had never once learned discretion.

The air smelled like ozone. Like something about to break. Like you were about to break, and the sky had simply decided to break with you.

You pushed the front doors open hard enough that they cracked against the stone walls, and kept walking.

The training ring came into view below, and your eyes found them immediately: Cassian, Nesta, and Azriel in the middle of it, all three turning toward you at the top of the stairs.

&The sight of you stopped them entirely. Your hair lifted around your face in a wind that had no source. Your eyes had gone bright, too bright, the white-hot color they only took when something inside you had stopped asking permission.

Cassian's sword fell from his grip. "Holy—"

Thunder rolled overhead, violent and immediate, and a bolt of lightning split the ground at the edge of the courtyard with a sound like the earth tearing itself open. The impact left the stone scorched black, smoke curling up from the crater. Nesta and Cassian stared. Azriel's wings flared wide.

"Okay," Cassian said carefully, taking Nesta's arm and stepping back several full paces. "Let's maybe not deep-fry anyone. Sweetheart—"

You were already descending, fast, your fury outpacing your feet.

Your eyes hadn't left Azriel once.

He said something low to Cassian and Nesta. They retreated, slowly, toward the House, and you heard Cassian's voice drifting back, careful, she's not playing, and then the doors closed and it was only the two of you in the courtyard with the sky pressing down overhead and sparks crawling over your knuckles that you were not trying to stop.

Azriel's siphons flared deep blue. His shadows pulled in tight. His eyes tracked you with that careful, wary attention he gave to things that had the potential to be genuinely dangerous.

You stopped three feet from him.

"Pick up a weapon," you said.

"What happened—"

"Pick. Up. A weapon."

"Tell me—"

Another bolt hit the stone at his right. Closer.

He picked up a weapon.

Not because you frightened him. That wasn't why. He picked it up the way he did everything: deliberately, choosing to meet you where you were. A training blade, nothing lethal, and he turned back to you with his empty hand loose at his side.

"Whenever you're ready," he said quietly.

You were ready.

What followed was not careful. Not controlled. Nothing like the measured, tentative exchange of two people relearning each other's language.

This was everything you had swallowed since you stepped back into this House — the terrace, the necklace, the corridor, the balcony, the small velvet box on the shelf. It came out in your arms, your footwork, the particular, vicious ferocity of someone who had run entirely out of anywhere else to put it.

Each strike was harder than the last. You weren't fighting him. You were trying to break something open, and he happened to be standing where the door was.

Azriel met every strike. He never struck back.

He absorbed everything you gave him without giving ground, adjusted without complaint, matched your pace with that infuriating focused attention he brought to everything he considered worth his time, and somewhere behind the fury you noted, distantly and with something like anguish, that he was not looking for an opening. He was simply there. Holding. Giving you something to push against, and you hated him for it, hated him for knowing without knowing anything exactly what you needed, hated that even now, even furious, even shattered, your body still knew the shape of his and moved against it like it had never learned how to do anything else.

From the balcony above, Cassian and Rhys watched in silence.

Cassian's hand was braced white-knuckled on the railing, his usual commentary nowhere to be found. Rhys's expression had gone carefully unreadable in the way it only did when he was watching something he understood was not his to interrupt.

The clouds had gone almost black. Lightning crawled visibly along the undersides of them now, threading through like veins. Small sparks crawled over your knuckles and up your forearms, and you were not stopping them. You did not want to stop them.

Azriel caught your wrist on the fourth exchange.

Not to restrain. Just held. His hand around your wrist, firm and warm, and the contact stilled something in you without asking permission. The sparks scattered. The lightning building in your chest dissolved, like pressure finally finding the one crack wide enough to get through.

Both of you were breathing hard.

He looked at you the way he always looked at you.

His thumb rested against your pulse point. He could feel how fast your heart was going.

"Talk to me," he said. Low. Not a demand. A door, held open.

You looked at him. At the question in his eyes. At the patience in it, that particular Azriel patience, the one that had always been its own kind of tenderness and also the most infuriating thing about him simultaneously.

Above you, the clouds began, slowly, to break. A thin line of late afternoon light fell across the scorched stone.

"I was in your room," you said.

Something shifted in his face immediately.

His grip on your wrist didn't falter. But his expression moved through several things at once, swift and unguarded, and what settled in his eyes was the specific look of a male who had just understood exactly what you'd found.

"Why," he said.

"Why?" The anger rose again, swift and hot, the lightning with it. "I was returning your book." Your voice cracked on the last word, and you hated it, hated that your eyes were stinging now, hated that after everything you had said on that balcony you were still capable of being broken further by a box on a shelf. "And I saw it, Azriel." Your voice rose. "I fucking saw it."

Something terrible moved through his face.

"How could you?" You trembled in his grip, something shaking loose in your chest that had never shaken before. "How could you do this to me?" The words came out ragged, scraped raw, not elegant or controlled or anything you had planned. "I have been waiting. I have been waiting all this time for you to love me, for you to love me the way I am so deeply, so completely in love with you—"

Your voice broke.

Lightning split the ground behind him, cracking the stone open.

"And you were going to marry her?" The words tasted like ash. "Her?"

He looked wrecked.

That was the only word for it: utterly, completely wrecked, like something had reached inside him and torn loose everything he'd spent years holding in place. His face had stopped being careful. There was no mask left, no composure, nothing managed at all. Just a male standing in the wreckage of every silence he had ever kept, watching you fall apart because of one of them.

"I—" He stopped. His jaw worked, the muscle jumping. His shadows clung to him like they were trying to hold him together. His wings twitched once, sharply, before going rigid and still. "It's not—"

"Can you finish a sentence?" you snapped. "For once in your fucking life, can you just—"

"It wasn't for her."

His voice cracked clean through the middle of the sentence. Barely above a whisper, and it stopped you completely.

His eyes lifted to yours. Silver-lined, wet at the edges in a way you had never once seen on him, not in all the centuries you had known him. His brows were drawn together with something that looked almost like physical pain. He looked like a male who had just watched the worst thing he could imagine happen in front of him and had no defense left to offer, nothing to manage it with, nothing standing between him and the full weight of what his silence had cost.

"The ring," he said, and his voice was barely his own anymore, stripped down to something raw and unrecognizable. "It was never for her." He shook his head, once, like he was trying to physically dislodge the words. "It was always for you."

The training blade slipped from his hand as he said it, like his grip had simply forgotten how to function the moment the words left him.

It hit the cold stone with a flat, ringing clatter that seemed unbearably loud in the silence that followed, and Azriel didn't move to retrieve it. He simply stood there, weaponless, his empty hands shaking at his sides, looking at you like a male who had just said the one thing he had spent years convinced he would never survive saying.

You had never once, in all the years you had known him, seen Azriel's hands shake.

Your knees gave out.

"I was waiting," Azriel said, his voice barely holding together, "for the right moment."

He looked down at his own empty hands like he didn't recognize them. Like the right moment had just walked itself past him for the last time, and there was nothing left to do but stand in the wreckage of it.

"I was waiting," he said, "for you to come home."

---

Part 3 - Masterlist

Azriel x Reader Angst / Slow Burn

A few days had passed, and nothing had changed.

If anything, it had gotten worse.

Dorian had left yesterday, kingdom business his Hand's letter said, and you understood, you did, but his absence had left a particular kind of quiet in its wake that you hadn't been prepared for. He had been your buffer. Your excuse. The reason you could sit at a dinner table and direct your attention somewhere safe, the reason you could laugh without it meaning anything, the reason you could be in a room with Azriel and not feel the full, unmediated weight of him pressing against every careful wall you'd spent the better part of a century building.

Without Dorian, there was nothing between you and the thing you were not ready to face.

You had filled the space the only way you knew how: with company, with movement, with the deliberate occupation of every hour that might otherwise have gone quiet enough to think.

Feyre had been generous with her time, and Nesta more so than you would have expected, and if you were being honest with yourself, genuinely honest in the way that only happened late at night when there was no one left to perform for, you had loved every moment of it. Loved being back in these rooms, this House, this city that still knew your footsteps better than any place you'd been in all the years of moving through the world.

Home, it turned out, had not forgotten you either.

The only slight complication was a certain shadowsinger.

He was always there, somewhere at the edges of things: at the far end of the dinner table, in the library when you arrived and gone by the time you'd settled, a presence felt in hallways a beat before or after you passed through them. Close enough that the awareness of him was constant, distant enough that nothing was required of either of you.

He had not come to find you.

That was the thing you kept returning to, in the small hours when the room was dark and there was nothing left to do except think. After the corridor — after everything you had said and not said, after his voice cracking on please and the way he'd stood there after you left, rooted to the stone like something had knocked the direction out of him — you had expected something. Not a resolution. Not a declaration. You weren't ready for that and you knew it and some part of you was grateful for the distance. But something. A look held a beat too long at breakfast. A shadow brushing your wrist in passing. Some small, unmistakable sign that the corridor had mattered, that he was carrying it the same way you were.

Instead, nothing.

The far end of the table. The library vacated. Hallways that rearranged themselves so you never quite arrived at the same moment.

He was avoiding you.

That was the conclusion you had reached by the second day, and once you'd reached it you found it remarkably difficult to put down.

It was almost funny.

The rational part of you understood, in the abstract, that he might simply be giving you space. That after you had said I'm going to bed and walked away, he might have decided that pursuing you further would be unwelcome, that the merciful thing was to let you breathe. That his distance was consideration rather than indifference.

You understood that in the abstract. You did not believe it.

Because you had spent years watching Azriel give you space. Years of him stepping back, stepping aside, managing his own feelings into such careful silence that you had eventually concluded there was nothing to manage. You knew what his consideration looked like from the outside. You knew exactly how indistinguishable it was from simply not caring enough to cross the distance.

And you were not, you told yourself firmly, going to be the one to cross it first.

Not this time.

Not again.

Something about that conversation in the dark had shifted something loose inside you that you couldn't press back into place regardless. The words kept surfacing without permission — I would have come, the second you asked — catching you at odd moments, in the middle of conversations, in the thin grey light before sleep. You replayed them and felt the warmth of them and then felt the anger underneath the warmth, because words were easy. Words in a dark hallway at three in the morning with no one watching cost nothing. It was everything else that had always been the problem.

You wondered, more often than you wanted to, whether he was thinking about it too.

You were fairly certain he was. You were absolutely not going to ask.

You were thinking about this, staring at the middle distance with the unfocused attention of someone whose mind had wandered somewhere they hadn't meant to send it, when Rhys's voice cut through the quiet of the study.

"Are you even listening?"

You blinked. He had set down his pen at some point without you noticing, and was watching you from behind the desk with the expression of a male who had said something twice already and was choosing, with great deliberateness, not to say it a third time. Cassian, sprawled in the chair across from you, was watching you with significantly less restraint.

"What?" you said.

Rhys's mouth curved. "I said, get ready for dinner."

"What dinner?"

"We're having a few people over." He leaned back in his chair, perfectly composed, giving absolutely nothing away. "We wanted to bring the people we care about closer. Post-wedding. Keep the warmth going a little longer."

Something turned over in your stomach.

You rose from your chair and crossed your arms. "Fine," you said, with a smile that matched his in precisely the ways that mattered. "I suppose I can survive one small gathering."

Cassian was on his feet before you'd finished the sentence, materialized at your back with both hands on your shoulders, steering you toward the door with the irresistible momentum of someone twice your size who had decided this was happening. "That's the spirit," he said cheerfully, ruffling your hair as he pushed you both through the doorway. The door clicked shut behind him.

His steps fell into rhythm with yours.

For a moment he said nothing, which from Cassian meant he was thinking, which was always slightly alarming.

"You know what you should do," he said eventually.

"Do I even want to hear it?"

"Wear that dress," he said, as though it were the most reasonable thing in the world.

"What dress?" you asked, knowing exactly what he meant.

"Come on. Don't play stupid with me."

"That dress," Cassian said, almost reverently. "The one that nearly killed Az at Solstice."

You kept walking. Eyes forward. The dress was in the back of your wardrobe. It was going to stay there.

"Do you want me to make him suffer?" you asked. "Because I don't."

"Sure you don't." The grin was audible. But you knew it was a lie.

You stopped and turned to face him. He was already grinning, wide and entirely without shame, the grin of a male who had been watching something develop for a very long time and was deeply enjoying the view.

"You really think I bought the act with Dorian?" he said, before you could speak. "The little perfect prince?" He clicked his tongue. "Sweetheart. Give me some credit."

Your mouth opened.

"Yes," Cassian said, reading your expression with obnoxious accuracy. "Exactly." He laughed, warm and entirely without mercy. "You were never into pretty boys anyway. I know your type. You like them dark and brooding and absolutely insufferable." He winked. "Sound familiar?"

You shoved him sideways into the wall.

He went, laughing, caught himself against the stone with one hand, completely unbothered. "Shut up before I rip your tongue out," you hissed.

"Oh," he said, utterly unintimidated, a slow grin spreading. "Nesta gets very... upset when something of hers gets damaged." He let that sit a beat. "Very upset."

"I'll take my chances," you said, and turned back toward the staircase before he could see your face do anything you'd regret.

Behind you, Cassian's laughter followed you all the way up, loud and cheerful and utterly devoid of shame, and you kept walking with your chin up and your expression fixed firmly forward, and absolutely refused to think about a dress hanging in the back of your wardrobe that you had, in fact, packed entirely on purpose.

You descended the stairs with Mor's arm linked through yours, and felt the room shift before you'd reached the bottom step.

She had appeared at your door an hour earlier with the best bottle she'd found in Rhys's wine cave and a look that made very clear she had opinions about how the evening was going to go. You had let her. Mor with a purpose was not easily redirected, and somewhere beneath your carefully maintained indifference you had wanted to. She'd lined your eyes with dark kohl and pressed red onto your lips and stepped back when she was finished with the satisfied expression of someone regarding completed work.

She'd opened the wine and you'd drunk more of it than was strictly sensible. The dress had been hanging on the back of the wardrobe door the whole time — deep blue, the color of the sky in the hour before a storm commits to itself — and neither of you had mentioned it, and you had put it on anyway, and when Mor's expression shifted into something between impressed and slightly alarmed you had simply finished your glass and told yourself this was going to be fine.

It was just a dress.

Fine.

Let him see.

You felt it the way you always felt it — in the back of your teeth, somewhere beneath the sternum, the specific frequency of his attention finding you the way it always had, like it had never learned not to. Several heads turned as you descended, and Mor leaned in close, her voice low and deeply amused against your ear.

"Well. I knew you'd turn heads." A pause. "But more than me?"

Not the whole room. One specific corner of it.

You didn't look. You didn't need to. You kept your eyes forward. Rhys and Helion were already deep in conversation near the far window — and Helion saw you before you'd reached the bottom step.

"Well well well." He stepped away from Rhys with the ease of a male who moved through every room as though it had been built for him specifically. He looked you over without apology, then turned back to Rhys with an expression of exaggerated reproach. "You could have told me your most gorgeous Night Court member would be joining us tonight."

He took your hand, pressed his lips to your knuckles. "Hello, Sunshine."

You laughed, short and genuine. "High Lord." You inclined your head.

He pulled you in, one hand at your elbow, close enough that it was familiar rather than polite. "Come now. We are very past that."

You smiled at him with real warmth. Helion was easy to love — uncomplicated, generous, the kind of male who had never cost you anything. You had known him for decades, fought beside him in wars that left marks you didn't discuss. He flirted with you the way he flirted with everything beautiful, reflexively and without expectation, and you had long ago learned to receive it as the affection it actually was.

"I came back for Rhys and Feyre's wedding," you said. Your attention moved, briefly, to the other side of the room.

The shadows at the ceiling had grown darker.

Good.

"So you're staying a few days?" Helion asked, something bright in his eyes.

"More or less." You didn't know how long you would stay. How long you could bear it.

"Come visit me in the Day Court before you leave." His smile said everything his words didn't.

From somewhere behind you, something cracked — glass, or something close to it, sharp and quickly swallowed by the noise of the room. You did not turn around. You kept your eyes on Helion, let the sound settle in your chest, and told yourself you felt nothing about it.

Helion glanced past your shoulder, briefly, and something moved in his expression: amusement, calculation, the look of someone who had understood the game being played and found it deeply entertaining. He leaned in slightly, said something low about the eastern trade negotiations that made you laugh louder than it warranted, and you were aware, with complete clarity, of exactly what he was doing and loved him for it.

When you finally turned, it was on your own terms.

Azriel was looking at you.

He had not stopped looking at you. That much was clear from the specific quality of stillness he was wearing — his glass gripped too tightly, shadows coiling restlessly at the ceiling above him. Selene stood at his side, her hand on his arm, speaking to him quietly. The voice of someone trying to reach a person who had gone somewhere unreachable.

He did not look at her.

Then Selene followed his gaze.

Her eyes found you, and what was in them, the pain, yes, but beneath it something almost like recognition, a thing finally seen clearly, made guilt move through you fast and unwelcome. She didn't deserve this. Whatever anger you carried, it belonged to him, not her.

She looked at Azriel one last time.

He still did not look back.

Something in her face settled quietly into a decision. She removed her hand from his arm. Turned. Walked away with even, unhurried steps, and did not look back, and the dignity of it cost her something visible and private that you looked away from because watching it felt like an intrusion.

The evening closed back around you.

You found Mor, found conversation, found another glass of wine that disappeared faster than you'd planned. The anger in your chest did not go anywhere — it had years of practice at staying exactly where it was put — but the wine softened its edges slightly, turned it from something sharp into something that merely ached. You laughed when something was funny. You held your own in an argument with Amren that went three rounds and ended, as arguments with Amren always did, in a draw neither of you admitted to.

You were fine.

You were doing completely fine, until Helion said something that made the table laugh. You laughed too. And then your eyes moved across the room without your permission and found Azriel standing apart from all of it, watching you with that expression. The laugh died somewhere in your chest before it finished leaving your mouth.

You felt it at your fingertips first. The faintest pull of electricity, thin and restless, crawling over your knuckles before you'd even registered the feeling behind it. You pressed your hand flat against your thigh and held it there until it passed.

You needed air.

The balcony was empty when you slipped through the doors, and that was the point.

You needed the specific quality of Velaris at night, the city spread below in its impossible beauty, the stars doing what they did here and nowhere else — making themselves close enough to touch. You placed both hands on the railing and breathed out slowly and told yourself you were not hiding. You were simply taking a moment. There was a difference.

You had been there approximately two minutes when you felt the shadows.

They came before he did, skimming low across the marble, and then his presence at your back — close, closer than necessary, the warmth of him reaching you before any point of contact. His breath against the back of your neck, shallow, like he'd followed you out here without entirely deciding to.

"Why are you wearing that dress?"

Low. Rough at the edges. Not smooth. Not controlled.

You kept your eyes on the city. "What dress."

Something that was almost a groan left him. "Don't do that." He was closer now, his breath grazing your ear. "You know exactly what dress. You know exactly what you're doing."

You turned around.

Had to step back to do it, your back meeting the railing, nowhere left to go. You looked up at his face properly. And his face —

He looked wrecked.

Not composed, not guarded, not the careful nothing he showed the world when something inside him had moved too violently to be trusted in public. His eyes were burning, shadows coiling restlessly at his shoulders, and he was looking at you the way you had spent so long convincing yourself you'd imagined, like the sight of you was something he didn't know how to survive and had stopped trying to.

It made you angrier.

That he could look at you like that now, tonight, after days of nothing. After hallways vacated and tables kept carefully between you, days of distance that had felt, from where you stood, exactly like every other silence he'd ever given you.

His jaw tightened. His gaze dropped once, to the dress, to the way the fabric fell, to the slit at your thigh, and came back up dark. His shadows surged at his shoulders, a brief, violent thing he didn't bother reining in.

"What would your princeling think of this?" he said. Rough. Proprietary. Spat out before he'd thought it through.

"Don't." Something flared in your chest. "Don't you dare use Dorian."

He exhaled hard through his nose. A muscle jumped in his jaw. "You brought him here." Low. Controlled. Barely. "You knew what you were doing." His eyes found yours, dark and direct. "And it worked."

"Good." The word came out cold. Deliberate. "Then maybe now you know what it feels like." Her eyes didn't leave his. "Is that why you disappeared for almost a week? You couldn't stand the sight of it?"

Something moved across his face. "I thought you needed distance from me."

"You thought." You stared at him. "You said nothing and I left, and here we are again, and you're still—" Your voice cracked slightly and you hated it, hated that he could hear it, hated that the anger and the hurt were so tangled up they kept bleeding into each other. You huffed, trying to collect yourself. "Where is your—" you let the word sit "—girlfriend anyway?"

"She's not—"

"Is this what you tell yourself to feel better?" You cut across him. "She left. I watched her leave. Do you want to know what her face looked like when she realized you spent the entire evening not once looking at her?" You shook your head. "She didn't deserve that."

"No," he said quietly. "She didn't."

"And I didn't deserve five days of you treating me like something fragile from a safe distance."

He flinched. A small, involuntary thing. And something about seeing it, the evidence that it had landed, that he felt it, made your eyes sting in a way you absolutely refused to permit.

He looked at you for a long moment. Something shifting behind his eyes, frustration rising through the hurt. "What do you want from me?" His voice came out rough. Not angry. Genuinely lost. "You're angry when I'm there. You're angry when I'm not. Tell me what you want and I'll do it."

He took a step toward you.

"Don't—"

"Then tell me." His eyes were dark, fixed on yours. "What do you want?"

The question sat between you.

You looked at him, at the burning in his eyes, at the restless half-reach of his hand at his side, at the shadows gone completely still around him as though even they were waiting, and felt the answer rise in your chest like something you had been holding underwater for a very long time.

"I want you to know what you want," you said.

You exhaled. Something in your chest caving slightly under the weight of it, the anger still there but softer now, fraying at the edges into something that hurt more than fury ever could.

"I needed you to choose me, Az." Your voice came out quiet. "To fight for me." You looked at him, really looked, and let him see all of it for once, the exhaustion, the longing, the years of it. "But all you ever gave me was an almost."

The word landed between you like something dropped from a height.

Almost.

The necklace. The almost-kiss on Solstice night, his forehead nearly against yours, his hand half-raised, and then nothing. The specific nothing of a male who had pulled back at the last possible moment and left you standing there with something you had no name for and no way to put down. All the almosts, stacked up across years, each one a door he had walked to the threshold of and chosen not to open.

Something fractured in his eyes.

Not surprise. He'd known, some part of him had always known, and that was perhaps the worst part of all. What was there instead was the expression of a male looking directly at the cost of something he could not take back.

"I'm sorry, I —"

The balcony door opened.

"There you are." Cassian's voice arrived before the rest of him, loud and cheerful and entirely oblivious. He stepped through with a glass in each hand. "Mor said you'd snuck out here. Rhys is getting sentimental, he's about to cry into the good wine, you need to come—" He stopped.

Looked at you.

Looked at Azriel.

Took in the distance between you, the electric stillness of the air, the particular charge that gathered before a storm broke, the fact that neither of you had moved since he'd appeared.

"Ah," he said.

Something moved across his face, not quite regret, not quite satisfaction, something more complicated than either.

"I can—" He gestured vaguely back toward the door.

"Cass." You moved before he could finish, lifted the glass from his hand, no room for argument. "Perfect timing." You did not look at Azriel. "I was just coming inside."

Cassian opened his mouth.

Closed it.

Cast one look over your shoulder at Azriel, the look of a male communicating an entire conversation in a single glance, and fell into step beside you as you pushed through the door and back into the warmth and noise of the party.

The door fell shut behind you.

You did not look back.

But you felt it, the stillness on the other side of the glass, the weight of his attention following you through it, patient and unresolved and entirely unwilling to be left behind by a closed door.

You took a long sip of wine.

Cassian, beside you, said nothing for a long moment. Then his hand came down on your shoulder, warm and steady. "He'll come around," he said quietly. "But you have to let him in at some point." A beat. "Don't bite his head off before he's even tried."

You kept your eyes forward.

Even though your heart was looking back.

---