#sncinder

     Before the Cauldron, before the endless darkness that swallowed her whole and shoved its magic down her nose and throat, through her veins...there were no dreams. Even in the deep heat of summer in the hut they called home, when Feyre would sometimes sleep on the floor because it would be too hot for all three sisters to sleep on the wrought-iron bed, there would be no dreams. No wild thrashing, no screaming terrors of silent drowning to pull her as a hook through her navel from sleep.

     She dozes, the window before her bolted shut. She knows why. She may not be as brilliantly burning as Nesta, or like Feyre, enduring as sure as the stars, but Elain’s head is not stuffed full of flowers and a simple future.

     It is not remembering, and it is not dreaming. Not quite. It is something that sucks her away into deep memory, something buried not in her mind, but in her heart, her gut. A sleepy, faraway pull inside herself that does not care for the panic she feels at the tug.

     She dozes away, and for the first time, she begins to understand the concept of a dream.

                                        — Prythian, Human Realms, 20 years ago. 

     Her new sister’s tiny fists bump up and down into the air as Elain watches with childlike fascination. This baby, hardly a month old and already sporting a headful of golden brown hair, suddenly shrieks and yanks on one of Elain’s pigtails.

     The pinch at her scalp surprises her; Elain shrieks in reply, nudging away from her baby sister, but still keeping eye contact with her. She feels outnumbered; both Nesta and Feyre have those blue-grey eyes. Elain whines about how unfair it is to Feyre’s wet nurse, who smiles indulgently and placates her with something that the child Elain doesn’t bother to listen to; she goes back to frowning at Feyre, who solemnly looks her sister in the eye and burbles quietly.

     Elain frowns again. Feyre’s even more like Nesta, her quiet and weighty stare the same in Feyre’s soft face as it is in Nesta’s.

     But Elain watching, Elain dreaming, is distantly startled by how fat and healthy her baby sister’s face looks, a disrupting image contrary to the harsh lines that had become— that will become— Feyre’s face in all the years to come. She hears the wet nurse as she says something about how every good thing comes in threes.

     She feels another tug in her gut as she is sped away.

                                        — Prythian, House of Wind.

     She hears footsteps and tenses, unable to discern their origin. For all she knows, Elain could be hearing the steps of someone floors above her, or those just outside the hallway and this is all too much, she thinks, still curled into the nook at the window. Panic, and a small prayer that whoever paces so softly avoids this room.

     She is given no such leniency, yet who slips in the doors is not a stranger.

     His name is Azriel, she recalls, and he looks... harried. He does not acknowledge her. There are tells written all over his body that there’s so much more tension he’s feeling than showing— the precise, clipped steps; the jaw loose, intentionally not clenched; the way his exhales sound more like pants through his nose— she begins to panic. This kind of person, the kind that bottles everything deep inside, is so likely to explode. Nesta has all the same tells, though Nesta is better at hiding them.

     But where is Nesta?

     Was she not sitting there, in that sun-lit spot before Elain dozed off, pretending to calmly flipping through pages?

     Elain already knew the answer, deep in her gut; no, this was not the same late afternoon she had dozed off into.

     Her curiosity is a distant feeling, detached from herself, like a child tugging on its mother’s hem. She remains coiled into her seat, yet continues to watch.

     She isn’t here, not in this moment that she is witnessing, she realizes.

     Azriel continues to pad over to her window. Through this dream-memory, she sees everything, even the shadows that crowd his face. She feels herself reaching out to him across a divide she doesn’t know how to name, wanting— wanting something, perhaps to soothe, the way she soothed the constant tensions between Nesta and Feyre lifetimes ago. Her hands seem so thin, so intangible, she starts to choke on a distinct frustrated anger, that she cannot reach out into this, her surroundings, that now she may be stronger in body yet carry shattered and twisted pieces of a soul. She feels incapable of doing anything except listening.

     Elain sees the way her hands shake as she pulls them back towards her body but does not feel the bite of her nails as she digs them into her palms.

     She looks back to Azriel, who now has an arm braced on the window panes so that he may cast an equally frustrated glare out onto the reddish mountains ringing Velaris. He does not look, he does not see, his thoughts have turned inwards, and she cannot reach him.

     Not only herself, but Elain feels that he has locked himself in, away from the world, into a coldness so deep it will never melt.

     Some days, Elain wishes for the same, so that she may have Nesta’s same fortitude against the world that seems so determined to tear her apart in ways deliberately meant for her.

     But Azriel draws Elain’s gaze again, a dark spot against the sunlight afternoon streaming in through the window they are both bracketed against.

     The contrast: a scarred, devastating shadowsinger, darkness walking, sunlight through wings flecked with scars, and— she is startled to see— mottled skin, warped with burns, wrapping around every inch of his hands, disappearing under the gauntlets holding deep blue stones.

     She imagines the picture this must make, so vividly that it’s almost vulgarly impossible against the haze that seems to constantly drag around her these days.

     There it is, her crystal-clear picture: a window, tall and airy, bracketed by heavy curtains. Tucked to one side, a hazy figure, feet tucked underneath herself as she nestles into a warm chair, almost sinking into it. Golden, almost hazy in view, like the sun itself almost forgot to line this creature in its light.

     The figure’s face is turned sideways and tipped upwards to look at another, starkly; the sun shies away from this one. All solid lines, deep and dark, and finer, whiter ones in the wings. A grounding focal point. Constantly, those shadows, his shadows, moving, curling close like the word intimacy is not enough for them. Stark, classical planes of the face, creased into pain, an agony so simple and stark that Elain— the dreaming Elain, the waking Elain, not the picture-Elain— feels a biting need to reach out. Fists simply clenched. Conflict has never sat well with her. And conflict is running her ragged fingers over him.

     What had happened, she wonders, to make his knuckles bone-white in their clenching? What did he see, what has he heard? Is he hurting for himself or for someone else?

     The poignant picture dreaming-Elain is concocting blows away like dandelion fluff when Azriel’s forehead thumps against the forearm braced on the glass and his pained gaze slides her way. For the first time, the rapid thud of Elain’s heart is not painful or panic-induced.

     It feels as if Azriel is looking at her directly. Surely he isn’t, surely he can’t see her, yet the sorrow in his eyes feels as if it reflects her own.

     Two mirrors, positioned to reflect each other, will create an infinite corridor. Or an infinite reflector. This is how their pain is echoed, though the sources of their burdens are unknown to each other.

     Elain tells herself that this is impossible, that there is no way some memory from the past can see a watcher from the future, or the in-between, or wherever this dream-vision is coming in from. The tension in Azriel’s shoulders seem to lessen as a look of hopelessness sets in.

    She knows so little about this man, this male, yet out of all three of his brothers it seems like his are the shoulders that carry the weight of the worlds, both human and fae. A hand drifts toward his shoulder, his face, him, but before she can do anything, Azriel breaks eye contact and turns his face away, face carefully blanked of any signal of pain.

     The loss feels more weighty than it should.

     Elain feels a breeze through the detached feeling clouding her mind. The window in her waking world was shut.

                                        — Prythian, House of Wind, the Present.

     Elain blinks back into the waking world, head still clouded over— yet something feels different. She feels...different.

     There’s Nesta again— when Elain looks over she only sees the tail end of Nesta’s gaze as it darts away from her and back to the book on Nesta’s lap.

     And something else...heavy shadows. Heavy like Azriel’s shadows. She doesn’t know how she knows, that these shadows are his, or that he’s even watching. Somewhere, he is healing from a bolt through his chest; this she knows; she saw the pale bolt through his chest on Hybern. Morrigan had told her when she had asked. Yet Elain has an indiscriminate, imprecise feeling that somehow, he is still watching.

     Elain’s newly-passed visions are settling dervishes, once making a scene, such a scene; now, they retreat into memory. She’s just not sure that it’s her memory. She’s not even sure that it is, in fact, memory. Everything seems either too precise, too sharp, or not being able to comprehend what precision means.

     She saw— in dreaming, these new dreams, what she calls dreams— she recalls seeing gold, and soot, and pain, and weighty secrets hiding in shadowed wings, shadowed eyes, yearning to be told. And Azriel. And such yearning. Not only of secrets longing for freedom, but for one soul to meet another, even through blind fumbling in the dark, just to truly know another.

     Elain’s wrenching ponderings are disrupted. Something stirs silently in the corner of her sight. She turns in her seat.

     Nothing, save a silent, heavy shadow.