Chapter Text
When Elain steps into her childhood home for the very first time in two years, music is already playing, and tinsel, gold and silver and all kinds of sparkly, is spilling out of at least half a dozen boxes scattered over the hallway floor.
There are four pairs of boots drying on the rack, which must mean that everyone else has already arrived to Stow-on-the-Wold.
Elain had hoped she would beat her sisters and their husbands here, have some time alone to mentally prepare for the days to follow, but despite the anxiety blooming in her chest, she can’t help but smile.
She hasn’t seen Feyre and Nesta in months, although they all live within a ten-mile radius now, and the last few times they had met, she had been in a rush, or tired, or upset with Graysen.
She still is. Tired and upset with Graysen, that is. But she’s missed them both like crazy, and at least for a few moments, it feels like that’s enough to take her mind from everything she left back in London.
When Feyre had called her, only a week ago, and asked if she were willing to come home - home home - for the holidays, she had immediately said yes, all the reasons she usually avoids Stow pushed to the back of her mind in favor of a week away from her job, her relationship, her neverending list of responsibilities.
A loud crashing sound in the back of the house stops her train of thought before she sinks into sorrow, and annoyance, and Oh God, I’m just avoiding my life away—
“Jesus fuck,” Elain thinks she can hear, and the following huffs and puffs, desynchronized and loud enough to be heard from where she stopped at the entrance, tell her Rhysand and Cassian must definitely be struggling in the living room.
“Elain! Finally!” Feyre squeals from the kitchen doorway.
Before she knows it, Elain is pulled into an uncomfortably tight hug, her sister’s lilac and pear perfume enveloping her, making her chest light up with joy. She wraps her arms around Feyre’s shoulders, trembling fingers digging into her back, and tries to blink the moisture away from her eyes.
By the time they untangle, Feyre is the one actually crying, big fat tears making her appear younger than she is. Elain gives her sister a once-over, and her breath catches when she reaches Feyre’s round stomach, barely covered by the cream jumper she is wearing, her seventh month of pregnancy obvious in every possible way.
She’s known Feyre and Rhysand are having a baby, of course. She had been there when Feyre had made the announcement, all their closest friends gathered around their giant living room; but seeing her now, like this, makes everything painfully real.
“Oh my god, you’re so pregnant,” Elain lets out on a breathy laugh, eyes wet again.
What she means to say is I’m sorry.
I’m sorry I’ve missed so much.
I’m sorry I haven’t been there to see this happening.
She doesn’t know how to, though, and before she has time to form a coherent sentence, Nesta’s voice sings, beautiful and sharp as ever, from the kitchen, “If you both start crying, I’m boycotting decorating.”
Feyre sobs harder, arms thrown up in desperation. “It’s these damn hormones! All I do these days is cry and pee. I need him out, and I need to murder Rhys.”
“Finally, some rational decision-making,” Nesta quips as she steps out of the kitchen, lips curled into a smirk.
Elain’s glance comes to rest on her older sister, and her chest, impossibly, fills up even more. If Feyre looks different, her face and body soft and warm, Nesta is the same, blue eyes intense with focus, the long line of her throat and elegant set of her shoulders an immediate giveaway that she spends most of every day dancing.
Nesta’s arm slides around Elain’s shoulders, and as Nesta presses a kiss to her cheek, Elain feels something in her chest give, a knot she’s been tightening and tightening for the past months, years, a leash she had thought necessary to keep herself in check.
Here, in their home, height marks on the door frame, milky December light filtering through the curtains, carols - their mother’s carol collection, she realizes - humming softly from the living room, all the ways in which her and her sister’s relationship has been complicated seems to matter less.
When she turns to look at Nesta, her gaze is open and warm in a way that’s so unlike her, a way that’s always been reserved for Elain and Elain alone.
Elain thinks about the last time she saw it, about how easy it is to drift away and not even realize it.
Everything I love is something I stand to lose, she used to tell herself when she was young, a child hurt again and again by the cruel haphazardness of life.
In hindsight, it feels she might have been wrong. Like she’s lost more things to fear than she ever did love.
She laces her fingers through Nesta’s, reaches her other hand to Feyre, gives another wet laugh. Tries to figure out if this is what home is supposed to feel like.
Nesta is the one to break the silence, smiling and tucking a loose strand of hair into her braided bun. “This is going to be interesting. I’m placing bets on who cries most.”
With that, she drops Elain’s hand and strolls into the living room, stopping to look back when she reaches the door. “Come along if you want to see the guys still struggling to put up that damn tree. I’m also placing bets on who gives up first.”
By the time Elain has brought in her suitcase from the car, placed a canvas on it to protect it from the falling snow, and put her boots on the warming rack, the music has become slightly louder and the sounds from the living room raunchier, a mix of laughter and more huffs.
Cassian and Rhys both hug her warmly, then return to their task, the three-meter tree still leaning, lopsided, against a wall.
The fire in the hearth is lit, and tinsel, as well as paper snowflakes, are decorating the windows, the mantel, the shelves.
Feyre is sprawled on the couch, supported by pillows on every side, a mug balancing on her giant stomach. In a much more dignified position, Nesta sips her red wine from the couch arm next to her, gaze meeting Cassian’s hungrily every few minutes.
Elain can see why the task at hand has been taking so long, Rhys’s eyes more focused on his wife than the slipping tree stand.
Elain watches them from the doorway, a bittersweet ache flooding her chest.
They’ve always been at odds, Feyre and Nesta, and there was a time, after their father had died, when Elain had thought they’ll never feel like a family again, not with everything standing between them.
But now, it seems like the only one watching from the sidelines, unsure of how she fits into the bright new constellation of her sisters’ lives, is Elain.
Elain, with a boyfriend who only says I love you when she reminds him to, with a career she stumbled upon and which only brings her headaches these days.
Elain, with all this fear, festering in the pit of her stomach.
She breathes in deeply, trying to shake this feeling that’s been threatening to swallow her up for the entire car ride. Reminds herself that she is happy for her sisters, because she is. She is so happy, and she loves them so much that it sometimes feels like she could die from it.
Still, that doesn’t change the fact that, somewhere along the path the three of them had started on together, Elain had gotten lost.
The living room feels like the inside of a snow globe, all merry and bright, and Elain’s too afraid to take a step inside, ruin the whole picture.
But she came all the way here, and she knows there’s a reason for that. She knows it by the fact that the fearful beast in her stomach hates it. So she breathes in again. Shakes her head.
Her sisters have always made space for her. It’s she who’s been running, and she doesn’t know how to stop, but maybe she can learn. Maybe the first step is a night in on the couch, watching two tall dudes tying up her mother’s old glass baubles to a precariously secured tree.
First, she just needs to calm down a bit.
“I’m going to go for cake,” she hears herself saying, and Nesta’s eyes snap to hers in an instant.
Concern floods her sister’s features, and she makes to get up, but Feyre stops her, hand on Nesta’s thigh. They both watch her, uncertainly.
Eventually, Feyre asks, “Do you want us to come with? We could all take a walk together,” although it’s obvious by the way she rests her swollen ankles on the couch cushion, by the unease in her movements, that a walk is the last thing she needs right now.
“No, no, don’t worry,” Elain says. “I’ll just pop by Tesco, get one of those disgusting cream-filled cakes you love so much, maybe say hello to Cerridwen on the way. I heard Nuala’s back too.”
She takes her farewell before any of them can press any further and bundles up in her old pink jacket, dusty pink scarf, and magenta boots. Elain had been a child who really loved the color pink. She frowns while looking in the mirror, but they’re the only things that are here, and dry, so they will have to do.
Walking through Stow-on-the-Wold is nostalgic in a way she hadn’t expected, and before she knows it, her trip to Tesco is abandoned in favor of strolling through the center of town, all decked out for the holidays, looking a bit like the kind of Christmas movie one would expect to be set in the Cotswolds.
Her steps take her by all the places her parents used to love, places she used to only see rarely after her mother had died and not at all after her dad did. She feels the fear roil in her stomach, the way it always does whenever she’s back here or thinking about coming back, and Elain lets it. Doesn’t try to push it down or ignore it. She just walks with it, her ache, bleeding at every street corner she once used to call home.
Elain watches the shadows grow longer, and by the time she reaches the town park, the sky is the shade of her scarf, bruised pink and lovely.
She hasn’t been sitting down for more than five minutes when her reverie is interrupted by something slamming into her leg then ricocheting into the snow.
Not something.
Someone.
A one-meter-high, freckled someone. Under the tilted hat, Elain can see a ponytail, tied up with sparkling red elastics. A little girl.
Before she can hold out a hand to help her, the child is back on her feet, smile bright on her face. She tries and fails to fix her hat, hands stuck in huge red mittens.
“Can I help you with that?” Elain asks, unable to keep the corners of her mouth from turning up.
The little girl nods and steps closer to the bench, and Elain takes off her hat first, shakes off the snow, then uses her fingers to brush the child’s hair from her forehead.
Her locks are bright red, more rusty than ginger, and it’s a shade she hasn’t encountered on anyone, not since—-
“Ember Brie Vanserra! What did we say about running away? You know the deal, honey! I—Elain?”
For a moment, time seems to stop. Birds frozen on snowy branches, wind stuck on an icy exhale. Her hands, one on the girl’s forehead, one clenching her hat. A single breath, caught high in her throat, heartbeat echoing in the silence.
It takes Elain a few seconds to breathe past the electricity crackling along her spine. Past the loud roar in her stomach, and it’s only when the little girl taps her forearm with her mittened hand that she manages to look up.
In the pastel light, Lucien looks like a statue, red hair draping over his shoulders, eyes gleaming, tattoos inky black across the skin of his neck.
He looks the same, her traitorous heart tells her, and she does her best to ignore it.
“Oh my God, Lucien! It’s been—It’s been forever,” Elain offers, as she stands up from her crouch, hat still in hand.
From up close, she can see that Lucien’s scar, right above his left eye, has faded, his jaw covered in faint stubble. From up close, the passing of the years is more obvious, and Elain’s heartbeat aches at that too.
It had felt impossible once, that they would go years without seeing each other, that their lives would lead them in such different directions, that there’d be lines on each other’s faces that they wouldn’t recognize when they meet again.
Yet here they are, back in Stow-on-the-Wold, in the park where they shared their very first kiss, a lifetime ago.
“It’s been three years,” Lucien supplies. “It’s good to see you, El.”
She doesn’t have time to process the way her old nickname feels on his lips, because she’s pulled into a hug, tight and warm and heavy with history, and when she wraps her own arms around Lucien’s shoulders, she feels more of that knot in her chest loosen, start unraveling.
He smells the same, she thinks.
“Excuse me,” a silvery voice chirps from somewhere below their line of vision, making them untangle.
Lucien laughs then, a deep, loud laugh that vibrates through his body, and places a gentle hand on the girl’s bare head.
“Excuse me,” he starts, still laughing. “Where are my manners—Ember, this is Elain Archeron. She is—an old friend.”
He stumbles over the last words, in a way that is so unlike him, always so confident and sure, and Elain feels that uncertainty burrow into the pit of her.
They are old friends, you could say. In the way that people who grew up in the same small town in the English countryside are. In the way that people who’ve known each other for longer than they haven’t are. In the way that people who’ve seen each other grow and change and fall apart are.
But they’re not those people anymore. The Elain and Lucien standing here now haven’t known each other for a few years.
She wants to answer him, but her voice is lost somewhere among memories she hasn’t revisited in a long, long time.
The girl - Ember - starts speaking instead, chin held high in a way that reminds Elain of Lucien’s mother. “My name is Ember Brie Vanserra, happy to make your acquaintance.”
She lifts her hand, and when Elain squeezes the red mitten, feels the tiny hand within squeeze back more vigorously than she’d expected from a four-year-old, she can’t help but smile again.
“Happy to make your acquaintance too, Ember. That’s a beautiful name.”
Ember beams at that, and Elain feels dizzy with how much like Lucien she looks, with her toothy grin and big brown eyes and red hair, the color made more intense around her temples from sweat.
The girl looks at Elain the way an adult would if they were ever interested in really getting to know you, with evident interest and focus, face open, like she’s preparing to absorb every word you’re about to say. That feels like Lucien too.
“You guys look like twins,” Elain says, which seems to please Ember very much, because she grabs the hand Lucien still holds on top of her hand with both mittens, gets closer to him.
“I’m daddy’s best buddy,” Ember says proudly, and both adults have to laugh at that, at how seriously proud she sounds, completely unbothered by their amusement, like she doesn’t mind because she knows something they don’t.
Maybe she does, Elain thinks.
It doesn’t take long, however, for Ember to lose her patience, bored of standing around them, so she asks permission to build a snowman in the pile a few meters away from the bench.
Lucien acquiesces with a “This time, I expect you to stay close” and crouches to fix his daughter's hat.
Elain’s heart skips a beat. So close together, the resemblance is almost uncanny, like seeing Lucien stare into a bewitched mirror. She hadn’t known him when he was this young, but she imagines he must have looked exactly like his daughter.
Their shared affection seems effortless, Ember talking fast about something she had seen in this area of the park, which was what had prompted her to run in this direction, and Lucien listening intently, like she’s saying something of the utmost importance.
When he leans forward to kiss his daughter’s forehead, Elain gets teary-eyed once more.
Jesus, I am a mess today.
But it’s hard not to be when Lucien looks—he looks like a father. Like a damn good father. Which Elain had known about him, of course, had told him the very first time she had heard he would have a baby. Witnessing it for the first time, however, makes something bittersweet settle over her bones.
Yet another thing she wasn’t there to see.
“It feels like it’s been more than three years, doesn’t it?” he asks, standing back up as Ember makes her way to the pile of snow to their left. “How are you?” And then, “Is it weird to ask that?”
Elain gives a shaky laugh. “It’s not, of course not. I’m—”
She doesn’t know how to continue, and she tries to mask the uncertainty by sitting back on the bench, inviting him to join her with a vague hand gesture. So close, his body radiates heat, and it stirs Elain’s memory once more.
Lucien doesn’t talk. Years later, he’s still the only one who doesn’t feel the need to fill her silences. He gives her time to gather her thoughts, find the right words.
“I’ve been better,” Elain finally says, the four words feeling too small for everything she’s trying to convey.
He watches her quietly, eyes unnaturally bright in the dying light. Still waiting, like time would stretch on forever for them.
“I feel a bit lost, to be quite honest. Things are—messy.” She kicks at the snow, tries to look for the right words. “If you were to look at my life, you could say I’m doing quite well for myself, what with my new research position, and the awards, and the new apartment. And Graysen.”
Lucien stiffens slightly at the mention of her boyfriend, but it passes so fast that Elain almost feels like she imagined it. After all, Graysen and Lucien don’t even know each other.
“It just doesn’t feel the way it looks, you know? Up close, it’s a bit like it’s all made of tricks. That’s not how it’s supposed to feel like,” she adds quietly.
A long look. A minute stretched out, just for them.
“You’ve always been smarter than most people,” Lucien finally says. He smiles his big, open smile, and reaches out his hand. On top of hers, his bare fingers are warm in spite of the freezing cold.
Elain tries to remember the last time he touched her. What they were doing, what they were like. Had it been after Ember had been born? Earlier? She can’t tell the memories apart anymore, not with his skin so close to hers.
“You know, when Jesminda died—for a long while, actually—everything around me felt like a joke. Not funny, of course, but like life’s really down to trick me at every point.”
When he speaks of Jesminda, Elain half-expects his composure to crumble, for the pained expression she remembers from her funeral three years ago to take over.
The last time she had touched him. It had been then.
A tight hug in Stow-on-the-Wold’s chapel, Ember’s wailing echoing loudly. Elain hadn’t known the girl's name. Lucien had been crying too.
Jesminda’s fight with cancer had been swift and brutal. Elain had never seen anyone face it with more determination, more conviction that she could make it, for her daughter, and Lucien, and herself. In the end, it had taken a little less than a year.
She had been twenty-three years old. Her daughter had been one.
I’m sorry, she thinks again.
I should have been here.
“That’s how I learned, though,” he continues, “that the best things, they feel real. Not as shiny and perfect as they’d have us believe, sure, but still, you don’t doubt it for a second. It feels real.”
Elain closes her eyes, her throat tight.
When she opens them again, Lucien is still watching her, hand tight around hers. Not too far away, Ember is talking to the balls of snow she plans to use to construct her snowman.
“Lucien Vanserra, still the wisest man I know,” Elain laughs wetly, hoping a joke can hide the pain in her voice, on her face.
She marvels at the fact that, years later, he still has the power to unlock her.
Lucien laughs, too, lips pulled back over his white teeth. “You know me, just a genius still waiting to be discovered.” He takes a bow.
“Seems like Ember takes after you,” Elain says, sees his eyes go soft around the corners at the mention of his daughter.
If love had a face, Elain thinks, this is what it would look like.
“Well, she’s the smartest child I’ve ever met, and I’m the smartest man I’ve ever met, so, you know…”
“I take it back, she definitely doesn’t take after you.”
They laugh.
“You’re so good with her,” Elain can’t help adding. Because she needs to tell him, just how much it means that he’s the father he’s always wanted to be, before he even wished for children of his own. She’s proud of him.
“I’m proud of you,” she tells him, and Lucien answers with a soft laugh.
“She’s easy to be around, always has been. I worried myself sick when Jesminda died, wondering how we’d make it on our own.”
Elain squeezes his fingers. Thinks about how once, she would have been the first one to know about Lucien’s fears. The first one to come help.
“But we made it.” He runs a hand through his red hair. “It’s mostly thanks to her that we did. I spent months trying to think about how I should talk to her about her mother’s death, but when I did, she just told me she gets it. And I think she really does, you know?”
“She’s your genius daughter, after all.”
“Well, you know what I always said about Vanserra DNA.”
Elain slaps his arm, and for a moment, they’re seventeen again, the ghosts of their old selves still laughing on this same bench, sound echoing through town.
She wants to say more, but she never knows how to talk about death. Be around it. Think about it. Right now, she wishes she had the courage of a four-year-old who’s building the world’s weirdest snowman.
“You’re a great dad,” she says instead. “Are you happy?”
The question doesn’t seem to take him by surprise, but for the first time, the way he watches her changes, like he’s now looking into her, searching. When it comes to Elain, it feels like Lucien’s always been searching.
Funny, Elain spent years thinking she doesn’t want to be found. One more thing she had been wrong about.
“I am,” he answers, brown eyes alight and fixed on her, face serious, as if happiness isn’t something to be joked about. He seems to mean it.
“Then I’m happy for you,” she whispers, turned inside out by his gaze alone. Despite the wind speeding up around them, and the growing darkness, their bench feels like it’s on fire.
Lucien untangles his fingers from hers and reaches out to tuck a piece of hair behind her ear before he speaks again. “I remember when we were eighteen, our first train ride to London, for uni. You didn’t really know what you’d do, just how it would feel. You were determined to take life by the horns. I think you have. I think you just need to remind yourself of it.”
“I was pretty damn naive.”
“You were the wisest one of us.”
“Where did that go?” Elain asks.
“Still here,” he answers. “You’re just searching.”
“What for?” Elain huffs.
“Don’t know. You’ll tell me when you find it.”
With that, Lucien stands up, blows into his palms as if he needs to warm them any further, calls for Ember.
The girl joins him eagerly, most certainly famished after the time spent outdoors. Upon closer inspection, her eyes are droopy, her steps slower than before.
Unprompted, she nears Elain, extends a mittened hand once again, says, “It was nice to meet you.”
Elain smiles, charmed beyond belief, then reaches into her purse and takes out the old book she always carries. After flipping the pages for a few moments, she extracts a pressed orange flower.
“It was nice meeting you too, Ember,” she answers, noticing Lucien’s amused expression from the corner of her eye. “This is a begonia,” she adds, extending the flower to the little girl. “People also call it Glowing Ember. Kind of like you.”
Ember beams. In a less-than-gracious movement, she uses her teeth to pull off one of her mittens. Gently, she places the begonia into her chest pocket, rests her hand atop it.
“Thank you, I’ll take care of her,” Ember says before she starts strolling, no doubt in the direction of home. Elain watches her confident gait, warmth flooding her chest.
Vanserras, all fire.
Still next to her, Lucien seems glued to the ground, eyes focused on Elain’s every move.
The invisible string that has stretched between them ever since they first met pulls taut, and Elain knows he feels it too. His gaze drops to her mouth. For a moment, it feels like they might just follow it to the middle.
They don’t.
“You’ve got this one wild and precious life, El. You know what to do,” Lucien says instead, his voice warm like a caress. “Don’t be a stranger, I want to see it happen.”
Elain needs to swallow before she asks, “What?”
“You, taking over the world.” Lucien winks and starts following Ember through the snow, red hair swept up in the wind, steps as confident as his daughter’s.
The string pulls and pulls, and then it fades, buried under the fresh snow, never forgotten.
When he’s out of view, Elain allows the first tears since she arrived in Stow to fall. She cries for all the lost time, for the happy years, for the fears that came true, and for the ones that didn’t.
She cries, and somehow, it seems to drown the beast in her stomach, at least for a few minutes.
She allows herself this moment, this unraveling under the lilac-blossom sky.
Then, she takes out her phone. The battery is dead, but she hears the words she wants to send to Graysen ring clearly in her mind.
I think it’s time to start the next chapter.