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A Finite Eternity
The thud of wood impacting flesh and the shatter of splintering bone haunt her.
Her own scream howls through her dreams in a rising crescendo until it reaches a pitch that finally wakes her and casts her into the cool, welcoming blackness of Azriel’s bedchamber where she’s taken up residence as he heals and the slow, steady rhythm of his deep breathing soothes her the way the quiet, softly sung lullabies used to when she was a child.
But tonight it doesn’t come. The familiar planes of Azriel’s sick room don’t wrap around her as she jerks awake. She doesn’t wake at all. Instead she drowns in darkness; forsaken and alone as the symphony of her screams engulf her and pin her down, the weight of the world’s agony crushing her chest and making it impossible to rise, to breathe, to save him.
The pain that lances through her is his pain; the physical agony of the wound cleaving her chest in two, bursting through her heart like vicious forked lightning separating two halves of the world, like the spirits shooting across the sky on Starfall, taking him from her, his soul now among them, nothing but a faint glimmer against an ocean of night.
She screams again. Screams for someone, anyone, to hear, to save her, to save him. Screams until it’s the only sound left in the world. Screams until there’s no blood Screams until her throat is raw and her lungs are burning as though they’ve poured oil into them and set her alight.
But no-one comes to her in that darkness and she burns, burns like the blood that splatters her skin, the blood that pours from his broken chest, the blood that oozes between her fingers as she fails to stop it.
And in the dark there’s nothing but the scent of blood and death and ruin.
So she burns. Burns until there’s nothing and no-one left in that darkness; burns until she’s destroyed the world for grief and spite; burns until there’s only her and the realisation that she’ll be ash and dust and emptiness soon, unable to feel, to hate, to hurt anymore.
But a hand reaches for her. A hand that closes around her wrist and pulls her back from the brink, reels her in and calms her and brings her back to that quiet, shadowed bed chamber. His touch is cold, as it always is, cooling her burning rage, his skin always contrasting the feverish heat that sears through her flesh; the only one of them who could ever truly handle her at her worst.
Her chest is heaving, she can’t get enough air into her lungs, doesn’t think there’s enough air left in the room, in the world to let her breathe properly. Icy sweat coats her body like a second skin that she longs to claw off. Bile stings the back of her throat and the nightmares still shreds at her nerves, urging her to run and run and run and not stop until she’s in a place they’ve never heard of Hybern or ash or poison or horror.
But the look in his eyes – awake and alert and fixed on her soothes her as nothing else possibly could and she lets herself sink in to them. They contain that same, anchoring calm she’s always found in them as they pierce her now, tethering to her him, willing her back to herself, back to him, back to this reality, grounding her and settling her and pulling her back in, containing that untameable power that howls for release.
“Azriel,” she whispers, her voice a hoarse rasp as tears sting her eyes and she slides out of her chair and onto the bed beside him, close enough to feel those steady, reassuring breaths she prays never falter again.
His hand is still wrapped around her wrist, a tether to him, to what’s real, his thumb softly strokes her arm and he says, his voice as flat and calm as she mountain lakes they used to visit together, “It was a dream, Mor,” the tenderness in his voice as he says her name makes her move in a little closer to him, seeking more of that, seeking to reassure herself completely that she hasn’t lost it yet, that the world hasn’t lost the coarse softness that is his alone, “It was a dream. It wasn’t real.”
Slowly, hands shaking slightly, she covers his hand with her own, “Except it was real, Az,” she says, struggling not to let her voice break on his name but it does anyway.
Her other hand hovers over the still healing wound in his chest and the tears she had sworn she was done shedding for him fall silently from her eyes once more. A rough hand reaches up and wipes them away with heartbreaking tenderness. Her fingers clench and unclench on his chest like a heartbeat and fresh tears wet his scar-mottled skin.
“It was real,” she can feel it, the ragged wound, the new scar it will leave on his already violence stained body.
It will be a constant reminder of that fear. That fear she thought she had long since left behind her that had reared up like a vicious serpent and coiled itself around her chest again at the thought of losing him; at the thought of watching herself lose him and doing nothing about it. Helpless as she’d been at seventeen; something she swore she’d never be again, never. But there, watching him bleed out, that arrow in him, so dangerously close to his heart, spreading poison through him...She would have done anything. She would have torn apart the fabric of the world with her bare hands and drained the marrow from its bones without a flicker of thought if that had been what it took to save him.
Azriel gently loops his fingers around her wrist and coaxes it a little to the left of the injury then presses her palm flat against his chest and holds it there until she can feel his heartbeat thrumming beneath her touch; speeding up and seeming to pound harder in response to her presence, as though his heart longs to break free of his ribs and hurl itself into her waiting hand.
Azriel’s eyes linger on her until her tumultuous body settles somewhat, her breathing less ragged, her own heartbeat more stable, less frantic and erratic. When he senses that calming in her he cups her face in his rough, scarred hand again and she leans into the touch, the cool, familiar comfort of it and closes her eyes as his voice wraps around her, a little hoarser than before, rougher too, the sound of steel scraping leather when a sword is drawn from its sheath.
“Were you hurt?” he asks, the words uncharacteristically clipped and brittle.
She shakes her head, “No,” she assures him quickly, opening her eyes again, knowing he’ll want to look into them to find that truth there, “No, I’m fine.”
He swallows and a shadow that will never whisper secrets nor sing to him the way the others do passes across his face, hollowing his eyes into a dark abyss she herself has lingered in too long, “You were screaming,” he rasps to her, “That’s why I woke up.”
That at least explained that mystery that she’d been wrestling with. The healer had told her that he would be asleep for days yet after the injuries that he’d sustained, that he would need time to recover. But Azriel had always had a stubborn almost reckless will of his own, especially if his family were threatened.
“I heard you screaming,” screaming for him, “I thought you were in pain,” he closes his eyes, breaking off and turning away.
His fingers convulse uncontrollably where they still linger on her cheek. She covers them with her own, squeezing gently, soothing him, his fears.
“I was,” she breathes and his eyes snap up to hers with a sharpness that cuts, “I was watching that ash bolt pierce your chest,” she admits to him in a faint whisper, swallowing hard before she says, “I felt it. I felt it tear through your body. I felt the poison course through your veins. I felt you die,” her voice shudders and breaks and his thumb tenderly brushes away the fresh wave of tears that fall in response to the memory. “I felt you die, Az,” she repeats, shaking uncontrollably, “And I have never known pain like that before.”
His hand slips from her cheek to her shoulder and then slides slowly and smoothly down her arm, like honey gliding down a marble statue, hugging every inch, until his fingers catch on hers and he holds them tightly, “I didn’t die,” he murmurs quietly to her.
Every word, every second, every breath is such proof of that she wants to spend the next decade at his side, listening to him speak and breathe and sing to his shadows and then maybe, she might truly be able to believe him and banish that fear that still grips her heart with the cold hands of silence.
“I’m here, Mor,” she knows he uses her name as an anchor, know she’s drifting, knows she’s nearing that brink he’s pulled her back from when no-one else could so many times, “I’m here,” here and all right, breathing and healing and looking at her with those hazel eyes she knows so well, still full of that quiet, calm intensity that means life still pulses and shifts beneath them.
They hold on to each other for a long time, clinging, while Mor savours the feel of his skin, rough and smooth in odd, unpredictable patterns, like a restless ocean, the peaks and dips of the waves, the steady rhythm of his breathing while he just holds her, still and unmoving, his arms wrapped around her, offering her comfort with his presence and the stability she craves from him.
It’s Azriel who finally breaks the silence between them “Cassian?” is all he says, all he needs to say for her to understand what he needs.
“Alive,” she says, feeling him stiffen.
“His wings?”
A deep sadness fills her, “Broken,” she breathes quietly, “The healers are still tending to him. They say it’s too early to tell if he’ll lose them or not.”
Azriel shudders and covers his face with a scarred hand that shakes slightly- something that would be a shocking lack of control on his part if he were with anyone other than her but she understands him, understands his grief over his brother’s loss; understands it in a way that she never can. And she understands his guilt too. Semi-conscious or not, she knows he’s aware of that fact that Cassian’s wings were shredded while shielding them and it’s something he’ll never be able to forget or recover from fully if he loses them. Even if Cassian himself finds a way to do so, Azriel will always be haunted by that sacrifice.
He coughs, convulsing and she lays a worried, protective arm on his shoulder but he says in a low voice, “And Feyre?”
She hesitates, noting how the colour has leeched from his tanned skin, how the shadows that dance around him seem to flicker slightly, the distress on his usually still, impassive face. She doesn’t want to add to what he’s dealing with but-
“Mor,” he says, a faint growl tingeing his words.
Sighing and resigning herself to the inevitable she explains quickly and concisely what happened to Feyre and what’s going to happen now and his face tightens as she speaks but otherwise he lets nothing of his feelings on the matter show.
“Feyre can look after herself,” Mor says firmly when she’s finished telling him the basic details, correctly reading his desire for action in his restless shifting, the set of his jaw and the glitter in his hazel eyes. She places a hand on his chest, “You need to rest and recover,” she tells him firmly.
Predictably, he snorts at that, “There’s too much to do,” he says brusquely, shaking his head and pushing back the blankets she spent days compulsively smoothing and tucking in around him.
“No,” she hisses, inflecting that word with a flicker of her power, turning it into a command, but Azriel barely even looks at her, let alone pausing or flinching – the least anyone else would have done.
He merely flicks his eyes to hers and they hold each other’s gazes – her daring him to make another move to leave that bed while at the same time he just as silently dares her to try and stop him. They act simultaneously, Azriel swinging his long, muscled legs from the bed at the same moment Mor lays a hand on his shoulder, intending to push him back down against his pillows.
Azriel’s wings sweep out instinctively, balancing him as he staggers, his ruined, ravaged body struggling to keep him upright and he looses a small grunt of pain. That’s all it takes to pull Mor to her feet, a hand under his arm, half-supporting him, half trying to urge him back to bed.
“Azriel,” she snarls, the word rippling with a power she can never truly keep leashed to her.
He looks down at her, his hazel eyes infuriatingly steady as he grazes her waist with the tips of his fingers, trying to gently nudge her away but she refuses to budge an inch.
“You can barely stand,” she snaps at him, “There’s no way you can fly in this condition, let alone fight if you’re attacked, you won’t make it a mile, you need to stay and rest and heal.”
She sees the look in his eyes at her words, feels his restless shifting in her arms and she hates this, hates the thought that she’s caging him, clipping those beautiful wings and forcing him to remain here when every inch of his soul belongs to the wind and the sky and the freedom that was denied him for so long. But he’s in no state to do any of the things she knows, can see in his eyes, that he longs to do right now.
The sound of the arrow piercing his chest echoes through her so sharply that for a moment she can feel it punching into her own body. She can still see the blood pooling around him, no matter how hard she tries to block it out, to replace it with the sight of his skin and muscle and self knitting together again under her healers hands.
“You need to rest,” she says again, knowing in her heart he won’t; can’t, “You need time to heal, Az, you nearly died, you don’t just get up and walk away from that three days later.”
His eyes never leave hers, even as they burn with her anger and fear and the strength of her emotion, they never flicker or falter or hesitate, solid, unyielding, calm as ever. Usually it’s something that anchors her, gives her strength and solace but now...Now she wants to shake him and scream and make him understand the way she feels, even though she knows he understands – because she understands him and knows that he understands her in turn.
But she can’t stop the next words from coming, “Please,” she begins and he closes his eyes, as though he’s in pain, as though she’s struck him.
“Don’t,” he whispers, his quiet voice shaking – barely, but enough, enough for her, who knows him so well, to hear the tremor in it that shouldn’t be there. He shakes his head, for the first time not looking at her, his eyes on the ground between his feet.
“I can’t,” he murmurs, trying to explain, “I can’t stay here. I can’t stay in this room, I can’t stay in this bed, I can’t just sleep and wait and heal. I can’t,” the way his voice cracks on that last word makes something in her chest splinter. He raises his head and his hazel eyes find hers again and hold her, “But if you ask me to...” his gaze pierces her, begging her to listen, to understand as he rasps, “I will,” he swallows, “And it will drive me mad.”
“I know,” she murmurs, heart hardening and softening all at once, hardening against her own pain and fear and softening in the face of his.
“I have to go,” he says, “I have to do something.”
“I know,” she says again, hating how he’s made her admit to it, hating that she knows it’s true, hating the empathy that flares inside her because she would hate it too and that was without wings, without being made of howling winds and untameable potential, made to soar among the heavens, carried by the wind and the will and the whim of something that could never fully be controlled; just like him.
“Don’t ask me stay,” she looks at him, looks into those eyes, usually so carefully guarded that someone who didn’t know better might think he was so cold and deadened to the world around him, now look at her with so much raw emotion that it envelopes her in him, in his mind, in his soul.
She closes her lips and says nothing. She can’t; won’t, keep him prisoner here with her words and her will even though every fibre of her roars at her to protect him, to keep him safe, to keep him by her side where he was meant; made to be.
He dips his head in acknowledgement of her decision and his gratitude hits her like a physical touch, gentle and warm. But as he steps past her, her hand shoots out and closes around the top of his muscular arm. He turns back, instantly meeting her gaze again through some instinct honed by centuries spent fighting and living and loving together.
“You’re bleeding, Az,” she says, mouth going dty at the memory of the blood he had lost before she’ finally had access to her power again and been able to stop it and save him, nodding to his chest, bare save for the dark tattoo that snakes across it and the white bandages wrapped around it now spotted with red – crimson rose petals in fresh snow.
“Let me at least heal you before you leave.”
Compromise – not asking him to stay, only to remain with her. Just a little longer.
He settles himself on the bed again with a warrior’s grace and dignity and she moves to him, pulling up the chair she’s barely left for days, having kept her silent watch over him, and plops herself down into it with significantly less composure and elegance than Azriel had displayed.
A casual flick of her hand summons warm water, cloths, and bandages. Leaning forwards she picks apart the fabric bound over his wound and unwinds it slowly, watching him for any reaction, but as ever he’s stone, implacable and unyielding, barely flinching even when she has to tug the last parts away, the part that, once removed, reveals the injury to her fully.
Days later it still makes her heart contract painfully tight, like a fist clenched so tight the biting nails draw blood from the palm.
He survived. He’s healed. She reminds herself of those things over and over again, he’s here, he’s here, he’s here – repeating the words he had said to her to soothe her –Here, here now, but only for another few moments, only while she tends to him. Then he’ll leave her alone in this quiet darkness, the way she was in that nightmare where she’d watched him die and done nothing – the one he’d pulled her from, waking at the sound of her tortured screams to save her from herself, bringing her back to herself, coming for her when she had needed him most, the way he’d always done.
She can’t stop herself from reaching out and brushing the ragged edges of the wound with the tips of her trembling fingers. They come away bloody. The sight is enough to make her feel sick again. Azriel, who had sat so still while she touched him, reaches for her. He takes her chin lightly between his thumb and forefinger and tilts her face to his.
In those hazel eyes, gentle for all the brutality they’ve seen and suffered, calm for all the violence and rage they’ve beheld, tender and loving for all they try to hide it, she reads his words again: I’m here. Right here with you.
Where you belong, she sends back to him, resolute and defiant, Where I want you. Where I need you.
Where I’ll always be.
No-one else could have calmed that storm that had been brewing beneath her skin just then, soothed the furious swell in her lungs, quieted the roaring thundering of her heart, the hammer pounding furious against her aching, caging ribs, demanding to be set free – no-one but him.
She closes her eyes, clenching and unclenching her fist until she has her focus back. Then she picks up her cloth and dips it into the bowl of hot water she had summoned. Neither of them speak when she wrings it out, both watching the drops fall once more back into the bowl. Neither of them makes mention of the fact that she could have used magic to clean the wound in a few heartbeats.
They’re immortals - wasted seconds don’t matter, not now, not when she needs the heat of his skin against her fingers, not when she needs to feel every breath and heartbeat she can before she can let him go; not when she needs to study the Illyrian tattoo on his chest, trace it with the tips of sensitive, trembling fingers as though she’s been bidden to memorise every curve and edge and this might be the last time she ever sees it; not when she needs to be here with him, her rock, her anchor, to tether her just a little longer before she’s ready for him to leave her again. And not when he knows she needs those things.
“If you come back to me in pieces, Azriel,” she breathes, her words clipped and brittle, “I’ll hunt you through every hell imaginable. And all that ones that aren’t too until I find you and make you pay for it.”
The ghost of a smile dares to tug at his lips in response to her fierceness but it dies when he says, so quietly not even his shadows could hear to sing to him about it, “You won’t be going to hell, Mor.”
“No,” she snorts , brushing off the gentle certainty in his voice, “And nor will you,” she says, trying to sound casual and matter-of-fact but giving herself away with her trembling hands, “You’ll be coming home. Here. To me.”
She looks away, dunking her cloth into the water bowl, so hard it nearly topples over to shatter on the floor and wrings it out again with a ferocity that suggests that it specifically is the reason Azriel has to leave her again. He doesn’t speak when he reaches out and covers the hand gripping the sodden rag in his own, halting her, making her stop her distraction.
His fingers squeeze gently until his eyes meet hers, rich, molten brown and fire-hardened steady hazel and in them she hears the words he doesn’t need to say aloud to mean, an oath more binding than life and death, I promise.
She squeezes his hand back a lump rising in her throat, “I can’t lose you,” she murmurs quietly, taking the silent oath he’s just made her and locking it up in her heart where it burns like a smouldering coal, a warm ember to drive out the cold dark that’s haunted her dreams in the days since Hybern. “Any of you,” she goes on then looks into his eyes and repeats with a fierce growl snapping at the heels of her words, “I can’t lose you, Az.”
She sees the flicker that shifts in his eyes and understands it. But he might see himself as little more than a base-born Illyrian, worthy of spying for them, torturing for them, blackening his soul with the darker things they’ve needed to do, things he wouldn’t want them involved in; happy to volunteer for the dangerous tasks, to put himself at risk to spare them but to her...To her he is friend and family and partner and she needs him to understand, to stop looking at her with incredulity and something close to surprise.
Landless, nameless, little more than a shadow himself, he sees himself as nobody, as nothing, and might never be able to grasp the idea that to her, to her he’s everything.
“I can’t,” she whispers to him, shaking her head and lowering it, closing her eyes.
Again he takes her chin between his scarred fingers and tilts her face up to his, holding her gaze, “You won’t,” he murmurs, that quiet calm radiating from him, gentling the tumultuous, protective rage that burns within her, just like that, with so little effort.
She could have hated him for it, for how easy it was for him to slip beneath her skin and know just what to say to get the reaction he needs if she hadn’t loved him for being able to soothe her demons in even her darkest and harshest moments.
Closing her eyes she leans in until her forehead rests against his. He closes his eyes too and in that moment they surrender to one another entirely, let every wall before them crumble, let every boundary and line between them blur until she’s as much a part of him as he is of her, their souls blending like paints running together in a rainstorm.
Taking a deep breath that shudders through them both she presses her palm against the wound in his chest – inflicted by ash and slow to heal, easy to reopen and damage again. Heat and light flare between them as she carefully heals him, knitting his flesh back together again. He shifts slightly and she flicks her eyes up to his face, finding it smooth and impassive as ever, giving nothing away and she refocuses on his battered chest.
“Thank you,” he rumbles as she finishes using the damp cloth to wipe the red stain of his blood from his skin, her fingers lightly prodding and testing her handiwork.
When at last she’s satisfied that he isn’t about to crumble to pieces in front of her eyes she withdraws. He stands a moment later and she tries to suppress her wince at the loss of the still warmth that comes from him, the loss of her anchor.
She watches as he pads around the relatively small room – all the space he’s ever desired for himself, and shrugs on a shirt and his fighting leathers. She gets to her feet too as he begins strapping steel to himself; forging himself into the warrior she’s known for centuries.
Finally, he turns to her and a last look blazes between them. He doesn’t ask her to look after Rhys or help Cassian however she can, to comfort him over the prospect of losing something she can never fully comprehend the prospect of being without on his behalf, to come for him if there’s any word from Feyre that somehow hasn’t reached his ears already, or if she needs him – or to take care of herself – he knows that she understands him well enough to know what he’d ask and that she already intends to do all of it.
He looks down at her, his eyes shadowed and guarded once more, bracing himself for whatever torments he’s about to hurl himself in to. Hesitating for a long moment he finally leans down and brushes a soft kiss against her cheek – a farewell and a promise to return all at once.
Then he steps away, wings flaring, and launches himself from the balcony out into the cold night air beyond, leaving her standing alone in his bedchamber, the scent of him still lingering in her lungs.
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