Archive of Our Own ^beta

Day 5: Scars

It was death by a thousand cuts, loving Nesta Archeron.

The sweetest kind of lingering torture that embedded itself beneath his skin and ran through him like blood from the first second he laid eyes on her. Rhys liked to talk about a theory that supposed there might be over 30 universes outside their own, but the only thing Cassian knew as he stood in that palatial home in the human lands was that every single one of them had tilted on its axis with the first exhilarating tear of her claws into his skin. Lightning bolt would be too calm a description for the force with which she slammed into him. She was a tsunami, washing away everything he was. Everything he had been. Everything he thought about what he might be. She was an earthquake, cracking stable ground out from beneath his feet - and he hadn’t even a single thought of raising his wings to fly away.

She was beautiful.

She was horrible.

She was brilliant.

She was cruel.

She was astonishing.

She was … His.

Cassian knew that Nesta belonged to him within moments of meeting her, and it hurt. Physically, intrinsically. It fucking hurt to know that she was his. To understand, with a lightning bolt of grey eyes to his chest, that mates were perhaps not so rare as they thought. Were perhaps common as dirt and a human heartbeat. It was a realization he knew not what to do with. There was no training for this, no sword he could swing at it, no level of discipline he could master, no blood rite he could win to prove himself. Azriel was the poet, Rhys the king, Cassian the soldier.

He was only a soldier, standing in the bedroom of a woman who deserved a poet, had been raised to win a king. It was dancing on a knife's edge, he knew. Begging to be cut, begging to bleed if only so the scar would be proof he had once known the touch of her skin. Cassian was burning from the inside out and ... 

Is this some faerie magic of yours? To do such things?

And she couldn't even feel it, couldn't see it. She didn't even have the word for what she was to him, what she did to him. Had no idea that he would fall to the ground in front of her so quickly his knees would pop and split and bleed if she only asked. And she would ask, he thought with a wry grin. All the bravado of a blooded warrior flooding through his veins. He was not a soldier. He was the soldier. Cassian cut though fields of men, trained legions more. It was a good thing she had no idea, this fragile little human with her arrow tipped tongue and her lion's heart. There was no need for both of them to suffer.

And suffer he did.

Cassian knew and Cassian ached in the same breath. Struggled to forget. To overcome. He threw himself into training Feyre and preparing for the war and did everything in his power not to think of this perfectly forged, stunningly sharp blade of a woman separated from him by a magical wall and the very concept of immortality. For the first time in his long life, Cassian thought a fae’s lifespan might be a curse. Because no matter what he did, it just … kept hurting. Like a knife being dragged straight down the column of his spine, creating a wound that would be left to bleed slowly out for a few pathetic decades, if he was lucky, until his heart was finally run dry. 

Nesta Archeron was a blade expertly crafted to tear his heart from his chest. Without even knowing it, without even trying. Such irony, that all the ways in which she actually did try to cut his heart out only deepened the wound. He was enchanted by every sharp remark, every stern glare, the compassionate chord running through those stormy eyes. For all the ways she tried to hide her heart, Cassian would offer up his own. No matter how many scars she left behind trying to carve it out. It would never hurt as much as the gutting pull of time itself.

The way he would silently count her heartbeats, mind constantly aware of the finite number she had left. 

And then his body was being torn apart in a throne room across the sea. It was the worst day of her life, and yet ... in the end, that still bleeding wound down his spine was stitched up by expert, cosmic hands. That was the betrayal he feared Nesta would hold against him, the betrayal that she should hold against him. Not that his feeble body twitched towards her without being able to stop the icy flaying of her mortal flesh, but that his twisted soul screamed inside his mind to stay still even if he had been able to help. 

It was the worst kind of betrayal. Horrible and selfish, but how could he truly feel guilty about it?

He wanted her. It was that simple. Three words that were the start and end of his very universe. Fuck all the others. Maybe he hadn't met her in those universes, and that was a godsdamned tragedy. Cassian’s fundamental flaw from the second he set eyes on Nesta Archeron was that he wanted her.

Ached for her. 

He wanted her when she was human and it might mean inviting the most horrific kind of pain into his life. 

He wanted her when she spilled out onto the floor of that throne room in Hybern, silver eyes brimming with murder and magic in equal measure. Even half-conscious, a bloody mess on the floor, there had been a tiny thread of pure joy that spread through Cassian’s battered body. Shimmering gold like an open wound closing over at the realization that he could have her forever.

Not that he really had her at all. He just … wanted her.

Cassian wanted Nesta so desperately that he shredded his wings, abandoned his legions in the sky and ran headfirst into what should have been his own death over and over and over again. 

Cassian tore his chest open every day and offered it to her on a silver tray even as she continued to bat it away because he knew. He knew her, he knew why she pushed him away. Every paper fresh cut was a fucking miracle. It meant she was alive, she was here. 

Cassian knew that Nesta was difficult and he knew that she was his. As one. In a single heartbeat. She was not his in spite of being a difficult, willful, scowling little witch. She was his because of it. There wasn’t a single thing about Nesta Archeron that Cassian would change save for one.

The worst cut came on what should have been the happiest day. Her cold wrist gripped in his hand, all the words spilling out wrong from his mouth as he begged. Begged her to come back to him. Everything he wanted to say caught somewhere between his tongue and his teeth and instead he pushed. He lost her. He lost himself. But he didn't know what else to do. Had no bandage for this wound.

Because it hurt, watching her shrink into herself. Not when she glared and spat and bared those lovely claws. Not when she cursed and snarled and raged. None of that hurt - Cassian bathed gleefully inside of that fire. Woke up every morning desperate to stoke it, burn himself inside of her until his skin was blistered and peeling. He wanted to brand her rage onto his very fucking soul.

No, it was when she pulled back. When her eyes went still and she retreated inside of her own mind. When she started letting herself fade into the edges of a room, desperate not to be noticed. When she wouldn’t talk to him. 

Wouldn’t look at him.

When she spoke in that quiet, timid little voice that was like watching a mountain lion force out a kitten's meow. Wrong. So horribly, horribly wrong.

It hurt every time, tearing stitches off a centuries old dagger wound that had no hope of ever healing cleanly. But where was the fun in a clean cut? In neatly stitched together skin that left no memories. Yes, Nesta Archeron had always been a blade designed to slice at Cassian’s heart and flesh and soul. But Cassian was used to scars. Cassian had forged himself out of scar tissue. 

And even now, sitting in the freezing sleet on a roof outside her door, catching just a glimpse of her shadow moving across the floor, Cassian found himself begging her to cut him again. Leave another scar. Give him a new one every single day for the rest of eternity because Mother, wasn’t that such a gift. That she was here. Alive, immortal.

Able to leave something lasting.

Illyrians believed that there was a victory behind every scar. And despite certain misgivings, Cassian was Illyrian through and through.

The thought had a smirk forming on his lips as he watched the candle in Nesta’s window go out.

He could take a few more scars.

A soldier, a General, knew the greatest victories were hard won.

And on that, Cassian had never wavered. Nesta Archeron would be his greatest victory. Scars and all.