#*azriel thought exercise

oh my god what a delightful thought to rotate in my brain. admittedly it’s been a hot minute since i’ve read any nessian portions of acosf—but i do think it would’ve been different. i think it would have been a war for azriel between wanting to prove himself worthy of her by saving her from the pain of becoming something she never wanted to be, which he relates well to, and crashing out as all of his mortal wounds are exacerbated by 1) her not wanting a bond with him, even if it’s just because that would make her irrevocably faerie; 2) his family harshly criticizing his mate, who is meant to be a perfect match for him, thereby showing him what they would think of him if he was down in the trenches; and 3) how much all this means he would be at odds with those he sullies himself to be useful for and thereby kept around.

i’ll say i don’t think he would let them lock her in the house of wind if she was his mate. in canon, i think he had a dual layer of deferring to rhys and feyre’s decision as high lord and high lady/as nesta’s sister, then deferring to cassian’s as her mate. but if it’s just rhysand/feyre—azriel has shown in canon that he will disagree with rhysand and go against his wishes, which i think he’d feel entitled to do for his mate, especially one as pedestalized to him as nesta. i also think he’d never say it, but he’d think feyre too biased against nesta to make this decision for her. he’d go to bat. hell, i think he’d even invoke his own confinement. soft, cold, eyes glinting with frozen menace: i will not subject her to being kept. feyre, i think, would soften immediately to the reminder of his past, as well as flinch back from the reminder of her own—and rhys would grimace on her behalf. i think there would be a critical misstep made by one or both of them though when they tried to tell him that this would be different; this would be to help her, not to… and he would experience the jarring dissonance of—oh, they really don’t understand. which is, deep down, all he wants. no, he says. we’ll find another way to get through to her.

i ALSO think he would rather carve the wings from his own back than ever take her to illyria, ever try to get her to train. he’d want her able to defend herself, but (and this is more my own headcanon than canon i think) i love azriel who trusts in his shadows more than he trusts in his fighting style/illyrian abilities. who has the latter because it was what was expected of him—it was what made him like rhysand and cassian, who he had imprinted on as his pillars of Normalcy and How To Act Like A Person. now it’s a part of him he can’t excise. but he wouldn’t want that of a mate. i think azriel would focus on getting her to attune with her abilities from the cauldron and conceptualize them like his shadows. maybe she didn’t choose her power, maybe she ripped it from the world, but now it’s hers, and it will take care of her if she lets it. you don’t have to wield a blade to be able to defend yourself. ft. there would be some measure of—i will protect her; i will be her dagger; i will bloody my hands so she does not have to.

and honestly i think, as i always think with azriel, there’s validity in either path for a mating bond with nesta: him ultimately aligning more with the inner circle than with her because he can’t stomach the thought of being rejected by them, thus resigning them both to tense conformity—or him realizing that nesta seeing him and loving his darkness is enough understanding for him, enough that he chooses her preservation over the safe haven of his found family. i don’t think nesta would beat around the bush with azriel. even if it was with intent to push him away, if she as his mate said, they use you. they bloody your hands so theirs stay clean. they tell you to heel, and you do, even if you think it your choice. that would stick with him as hell. it would rattle him. it would strain against his cognition. but if she said it again as their relationship progressed—if she said it like a lover, like someone who cares for him—i think there’s a good chance for the latter.

what do you think the first time they had sex was like? like i imagine azriel was having a hard time going from “i will never see her or speak to her or anything” to “let’s fuck”, like i can imagine horny mate instincts took over at first but the second he slid in he was probably like “i am a horrible person”

re: this thought exercise !

oh my god yeah i have thots. because shame is so integral to azriel's personhood and especially in this scenario, i think even after she's of-age and aware of the mating bond, he feels really disgusting lusting for her. i also imagine that so long of tamping down the urges of his mating bond have only made them all the more insistent that he finally claim what is and has been preordained to be his, because i'm sure the magic can feel that something has changed in him, something has loosened a bit, made more room for the bond, some sort of acceptance of the mind that it pounces on at once. lots of unintentional intense fantasizing that gets compounded because he's feeling her on her end of the bond getting worked up about it, then he's getting worked up about it because he can feel her fantasizing about him. which makes him feel even more disgusting, like he's tainting her in some way, like he's incepting her with these thoughts and she isn't coming by them of her own free will. just so ridden with guilt. and horniness. he's internally like the straining face meme all of the time, holding so, so desperately to his control.

meanwhile i'm picturing eithne just as pent up. maybe they're barely speaking to each other in the aftermath of the reveal, but they're around each other all the time still, and the bond is taut between them. she's definitely feeling some measure of spite towards azriel for not telling her sooner, for withholding himself from her even platonically, for being the reason she was thrown into such turmoil without having any information on why. i can see her feeling really satisfied watching azriel squirm around her when she wears low-cut necklines and sheer materials, when she draws too near to him, when she absentmindedly bites her lip or bends over or stretches out like a cat after a nap and makes a soft little moaning sound. picturing a lot of slipping off to shamefully, furiously jack off for azriel, a lot of full-body shuddering orgasms for eithne that just. never quite sate this hunger in her belly.

it gets to the point where they both have a glass of wine or two with dinner to take the edge off of the agony of the bond. the whole family is like. just pretending not to notice how fraught with tension things are. azriel excuses himself to go get some air on the balcony—fresh, crisp air that does not bear her scent. but even there, her anger follows. her arousal, too. he realizes she has joined him belatedly. (her attunement with the darkness allows her to navigate his shadows as nobody else can.) one moment she is beside him, the next she is pressing into him, her arms around his neck to pull him low, her lips seeking his. his groan is strangled in his throat, and the noise she makes in answer nearly empties his brain. nearly. he pulls back, eyes wild, his grip on her waist tight, like he's warring with himself on whether to push her away or tug her in closer. she looks up at him with such round, hurt eyes—because after all this time, all this shame and longing and terribleness:

don't you want me?

it's just suuuch a sticky situation for azriel because he does not want to be in this position. his inclination is towards self-imposed exile until she's reached her age of majority to avoid this exact sort of weirdness, which means that his family (rhysand) is encouraging him to stay for ??? some reason. eventually, i think that will lead him to question rhysand and reckon with the fact that rhysand is valuing his functionality as spymaster over his comfort as a brother. but until that happens...

she is young and confused and unmoored and entirely uncertain of the expectations of this new life in a place she never new existed—much the way azriel was upon being freed of his confinement. he is the only one of the inner circle who can truly understand how she's feeling. when she stumbles socially and is offered no explanation for what she's done wrong, he feels her discomfort and shame as his own. this is how they bond at first: he's the only one able and willing to put to words the implicit social norms of velaris she's supposed to already know. he's the only one willing to answer her questions, so she feels safe in asking them. he's the only one who could understand why she uses her emerging powers to blacken her room to the cool dark of an underground city—the only one who could have known that a jar of glow worms would comfort her enough to sleep, even though it was gifted to her through the tall, golden female who she knows well the name of: morrigan. when she thanks azriel for it, he stiffens up, but he doesn't deny that it came from him.

azriel becomes a semi-safe harbor for her. she's willing to cling to any sort of stability she can hold onto—especially because she hasn't seen her family and her friends in so long, and not even azriel will tell her why. but every time she begins to feel comforted in any way, he withdraws his attentions. when she comes to read or play in the same room as him, he inevitably excuses himself, especially if he's alone. when she goes to him excited about a realization regarding the new world she's in, her eyes sparkling and joyful, he always shutters over halfway through listening, leans away from her, makes those same excuses to leave. when she starts learning to bake with elain, he refuses to eat anything she offers him, no matter how excited she is for him to—but if elain takes it from her and gives it to him, he'll try it. (she doesn't know why this bothers her so much, but it does.) per the wrinkly brain of @buffy-vanserra, when she has nightmares and the jar of glow worms doesn't help and she inevitably goes to knock at his door with tears in her eyes, he never takes her into his arms to hush and shush her back to sleep like her mama would have. he always goes to wake up elain or feyre or morrigan. sometimes he'll bring them up some tea, but he never stays long after that.

she doesn't know how, but she can just tell he doesn't want to be around her. even when he does want to be around her, even when they're having a nice conversation or he's teaching her something she didn't know before, he doesn't want to be around her. this hurts, and so much already hurts without her home and her family. so she seeks out other connections: elain, who reminds her most of her mother; cassian, who reminds her most of her older brother; nyx, who reminds her most of her younger brother—and who, most excitingly, is a child, too, and really not that far from her age at all. azriel experiencing extremely inappropriate surges of jealousy. he's most hostile towards cassian. he's absolutely furious the first time cassian takes her up with him to fly around the river estate. it's dangerous, azriel snaps, even though they both know it wasn't, even though they both know part of him is just warring with the fact that he wanted to be the one to do that with her and couldn't. it reaches its worst point when nyx's childhood crush has the potential to develop into a budding romance between them in their adolescence. there are a lot of competing emotions there for azriel, foremost this is what she deserves; a male her own age, who she can learn with, who is an appropriate match for her and i am not a good enough male to sit by and allow that; why is rhysand subjecting me to this, why, why, why, why am i letting him

but the worst of it all is that their bond is fully intact. he tries to get her to reject it when she first arrives, but to do that, he'd first have to get her to acknowledge that there is a bond between them at all, which feels uniquely disgusting and perverse. beyond that, to take it from her would mean to rob her of her future choice in having a mate or not—and in the moment, it would leave her completely bereft and alone. she has no family to return to because they faked her death. if the bond is gone, ripping her from her life (even though it was the right thing to do. it was the right thing to do, wasn't it?) was done for no reason. and selfishly, terribly, in a way he cannot even admit to himself, he doesn't want it to be rejected. so the bond remains, and her emotions drop down it like a pebble in a well—especially once she begins maturing and experiencing attraction and wanting to act on it. once she starts developing fantasies and thinking about them and dreaming about them, and it's sickening when they're about him, but it's even worse when they're about other fae. add to this that his shadows truly do not understand why he is around his mate but not pursuing her in any way, so they hover near her always, without his permission, and feed constant information back to him about her and what she's doing. increasingly more inappropriate information because their singer is being incredibly foolish.

If Eris were to get married would Azriel dislike or be jealous of this wife (in name) or would he be okay with it knowing Eris is just his.

How would he treat any of Eris's kids 🙀

i think azriel understands exactly why eris has to do this and further understands that the bond they have forged between themselves is, at this point, unbreakable—but that doesn’t mean he handles it well at all. they play around with thirds sometimes, but the intimacy is always between them. the sex is always only between them, even when someone else is involved. a wife, though... that's permanent. so is a baby.

at first, i think it raises a lot of insecurities about the things azriel just can't give to eris. he's a black cloud at the wedding ceremony, to the point where he probably has to leave before the reception. he has no interest in watching them consummate their marriage that night, but you bet his shadows are in that room, seething, furious. this male belongs to their singer, and their singer is distressed; why is he doing this? why is their singer not stopping him? just like. lots and lots of reassurance being needed. and for eris, even though he doesn't want to be doing it, it feels like cheating; even though he thinks of azriel when he's inside his wife, it feels like cheating. but then nothing really changes between them. they're the same as they always were. even when she becomes pregnant and emotions heighten and things get a bit fraught between them, it doesn't shake their bond. they see her around and she's just—so sad. azriel can't ultimately hate her or be jealous of her. there's only pity.

you could literally never annoy me this is like my favorite form of enrichment and you being interested in my rambling is so very kind<3

alright — rhysand figured it out! i think his first course of action is to assess how he wants to deal with azriel. he like, at once, completely understands how his brother feels about this and why he has dipped out without explaining anything. everything slots right into place for him mentally. rhysand doesn't blame or condemn azriel the way azriel fears, but like. he gets it. lived it a little himself. shit's weird. best to fuck off until it isn't anymore. i think rhysand winds up putting a pin in finding azriel to deal with hc!girl and to keep from upsetting azriel any further with the fact that he now knows — and how he knows.

now this is tricky because ... does the ic ... do they fuckin raise hc!girl? i imagine she's probably mid-teens, but it still makes it crunchy because even if rhysand somehow manages not to tell anyone, not even feyre, his involvement alone will now shape her life. and one thing about rhysand is he is not going to be uninvolved. it's not in his nature. (that's why azriel had to force himself into exile — it's not in his nature to be uninvolved either.) worse yet, rhysand almost definitely does tell feyre. probably cassian, too, because cassian wouldn't just let azriel's absence go; he would get angry that rhysand wasn't doing more to find their brother and demand explanation. at that point the whole ic is probably telephone-style informed until they're all pulling an i know something ... do you know something? friends moment. but like either way, i fear that hc!girl is kept pretty close to the ic.