Chapter 17 is up 🕯️🌷 - The Safety of You
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Art 1 : @ - diielliee / Art 2 : @ - mysleepyblue
Perhaps love was never meant to feel like fire for Elain.
Because gardeners know something others often forget: soft things rarely survive being forced open. Roots disturbed too early weaken. Blooms demanded before their season often die. Care has always required something quieter.
The willingness to notice when a living thing needs more warmth, more space, or simply someone who remains long enough that growth no longer feels dangerous.
And perhaps that is what Azriel has been offering her all along.
Not the kind of love that arrives already decided, asking to be accepted before trust has formed.
His love has always looked strangely ordinary instead: waiting beside her fears without rushing them, memorizing the smaller versions of her, noticing the things left unsaid, building safety so quietly she does not realize until much later that somewhere between his consistency and his impossible gentleness, she has stopped preparing for loss.
Because perhaps what frightened Elain most was never loving.
It was believing she could root herself somewhere fully and not be abandoned there.
Yet somewhere between ordinary mornings, gardens, patient hands and a male who remains even in her silences, she begins understanding something about herself too: happiness was never meant to feel like burning.
Perhaps for her, it was always meant to feel like peace.
Like warmth returning after years of winter.
Like being tended to with the same impossible care she has always offered fragile things.
Until one day, without noticing exactly when, she stops surviving beside love—and begins blooming within it.
