#*cassian

hello honeybun❣️oh yeah they are big high! i could see azriel avoiding starfall celebrations in the night court for a good few years after choosing eris over the inner circle. i think he gets very, very quiet for like the entire week leading up to starfall and the week after he misses celebrating it with his family, if not longer. there’s no remorse — he doesn’t regret choosing eris at all. but there is a lot of guilt, because choosing eris also meant choosing himself, and that is something he could never do when it came to his family. that was how he proved his worth to them, by hacking himself down to bits so that they didn’t have to. he still feels on some level like he has been ungrateful, like he owes them more, like he needs to bleed again to show them he is worthy. and all of this comes to a head around starfall, when he should be with his family at their happiest, making their brightest memories.

so i think what happens is that eris eventually engineers a situation where they have to go to starfall. (maybe as a cover to meet with a hewn city contact. maybe he talks it up to autumn nobility so they’re clamoring to attend it in the night court. or something. idk he is smarter than me.) he takes the choice away from azriel completely so that azriel doesn’t have to deal with the burden of it, which he knows is also weighing azriel down: the active decision not to attend starfall, the active decision to avoid his family. eris lets azriel be angry with him for this, because he knows the anger is not really at him, because it doesn’t last long before azriel is coming to bed and laying his head on eris’s chest and letting the sound of eris’s heartbeat at his ear and the feel of eris’s fingers at his scalp soothe the mounting unrest in him. eris doesn’t care for the inner circle whatsoever, but he cares for azriel, and he knows that azriel is hurting without his family. he understands what that’s like.

it’s tough! it’s stilted and strange and awkward, in a way that spears directly into azriel’s feeling of Otherness. he is very clearly on the outside of this circle he clawed his way into and then clung to desperately enough that it ripped him apart. he chose to be on the outside of it, but he is on the outside all the same. and he can still read all of them like the back of his hand. of course he can. he was one of them, once. he knows the blank pleasantry of feyre’s smile means she and rhysand are talking about him and eris across the bond. he knows that when morrigan reaches over to squeeze cassian’s forearm it is meant to be a reassurance, because cassian can hardly bear to look at azriel at all. (he takes azriel’s absence the hardest.) at that first starfall, i think probably only nesta comes over to speak to azris in any meaningful capacity. amren comes over to antagonize azriel a little and eris handles that on his behalf.