Work Text:
If anyone were to ask, Lucien wasn’t entirely sure what he was doing in Velaris.
Hell.
Scratch that.
He knew exactly what he was doing in Velaris.
He knew what day it was, and he knew why the melancholy pull in his chest that woke him this morning—the familiar pull he had steadfastly dedicated himself to ignoring for well over a year—had drawn him from the southernmost slip of the mortals’ land to the northern coast of Prythian.
The girl on the other end had no business being so pathetically sad today. The wrongness of it raked against every facet of his being, not at all dissimilar to the dreadful sensation of the claws of cruel daemati power scoring welts into his mind.
And now that he was standing on the willow-lined street across from Feyre’s shiny new mansion after winnowing through the courts like a damned fool, he was all too aware he had no business investigating that feeling. Regardless of the pain it caused him, the fact that he was privy to it at all would likely be regarded as some crass violation of a boundary he didn’t know existed. He would spend an hour inside in tense, uncomfortable silence, and then he would leave, having sunken even lower in everyone’s opinion—assuming, of course, that he hadn’t already hit rock bottom.
But sticking his nose where it didn’t belong was something of a specialty of Lucien’s now, and, really, the panging sadness in his chest had only increased in urgency in the twelve hours since breakfast. It was tight and hot and terrifying, pressing in around him and transforming his ribcage into Amarantha’s spiked, burning grate, finally coming to claim its victim.
The sunlight that shattered off of the endless panes of stained glass in the windows was blinding as Lucien tried to figure out how to play this before stepping through the thick, glittering cobweb of wards tangled in the air surrounding the picturesque estate. By the slightly dull look of them, the High Lord wasn’t in residence, nor were Feyre or the babe the entire court guarded so zealously.
So, with his usual excuse for being anywhere near the Night Court up in flames, Lucien pushed out a hard breath through his nose as his throat tightened around a suppressed sob that wasn’t his own.
Help her, soothe her, save her, the feral, cornered beast that first reared its head when she came spilling out of the Cauldron, exposed and shivering, chanted. Despite his best efforts, it sometimes consumed all rational thought, eating him alive until he inevitably stepped in shit by offering her his jacket or some enchanted gloves or, Mother forbid, jewelry. Your mate, your mate, your mate needs you.
“Damn it all,” Lucien hissed to nobody—truly nobody, since the shadows swaying beneath the willows were simply shadows today, imbued with none of the dark, expectant power that his enchanted eye usually picked up around Rhysand’s shadowsinger.
And where was the shadowsinger when he was needed?
With that distasteful thought at the forefront of his mind, Lucien crossed the street before he could decide otherwise and stepped through the wards. They pulled and pulsed, but let him through the high gate and into the manicured garden.
The lawn was empty, save for a few toys scattered across the grass. The endless, rolling rainbow of flowers and shrubbery curving through the space could have given the Spring Court’s prized gardens a run for their money as they swayed gently in the breeze off of the river. It whispered through the leaves, through the strands of his hair that had been ripped from the braid down his back during his journey through the folds of the world, but he couldn’t make out what it was trying to say. He didn’t linger long enough to try, cutting a path to the wide door with such clipped, brisk steps that he was almost surprised he didn’t leave a small wildfire in his wake.
Lucien strode through the house without welcome and without looking, following the pull of his mating bond through hallways of smooth marble and bright white walls, past Feyre’s endless row of paintings and ancient, priceless vases bursting with color. The soft sweetness of sugar and jasmine and vanilla and honey drew him in like a siren song as he rounded the excessively long formal dining table and slipped past the more intimate breakfast room, pushing through the swinging door that led into the kitchen—
And there she was, perched on a stool at the workbench, gilded by a hazy shaft of sunlight streaming in through the high windows. Clad in serviceable cotton in shades of buttery yellow and moonbeam white, Elain Archeron looked like a star that had fallen from heaven and crashed onto the mundane ground below, fading fast.
But it was the cake that caught Lucien’s eye. It was small. Humble. But even if he hadn’t known the significance of today, the delicate, meticulously sculpted icing flowers that covered every inch of it told him that this particular cake was not a secret, guilty pleasure whipped up to indulge a sweet tooth. It was not a treat meant to soothe the fresh sting of today’s wounds. The unlit candles bordering that buttercream garden, all twenty-four of them, ignited a flash of sympathy in his chest.
Without even turning to look at him, Elain let out a miserable sigh.
“If you say a single word, I will throw this cake at your head.”
So Lucien didn’t say a single word. He said twelve:
“Am I really so offensive to you that bodily injury is necessary?”
Golden curls shifted as Elain lifted her head just enough to cut him a withering glare before dropping her chin back onto her folded fists.
It was a look so caustic that he was caught off guard for a split second—before he realized he shouldn’t be. He knew that. The threat of physical violence was all Feyre; the bite in her words and acid in her eyes all Nesta. For better or worse, his mate was an Archeron through and through.
Elain snorted when he didn’t say anything else, and Lucien lifted a brow.
His own upbringing was decidedly bloodier, but in all his centuries, he had never met anyone with siblings, not even a female as lovely and gentle as the one in front of him, who had escaped without building up an arsenal of razor-sharp words and slippery, mirrored armor to cover all of the softest parts of their heart.
Like the desperate sadness still squeezing his insides.
So Lucien stepped into the room, ignoring the way Elain’s back stiffened—just like Eris when he was in a sullen mood—and waved a hand at the pillowy bags of icing lined up on the bench.
“Perhaps you might try suffocating me with the buttercream instead.”
Though she made no move to look at him again, he could practically hear her eyes roll.
“Too messy.”
“It’s a more permanent solution than a brief concussion,” he goaded. He had rather different ideas for what could be done with an ornery female and some sweets, ideas that had never before failed him, but at least this female was talking to him. Finally. “Assuming, of course, that you manage to hit your target.”
Elain muttered something under her breath that ended with certainly big enough. A shock of laughter caught in Lucien’s throat, and he swallowed it down as she lifted a forlorn shoulder.
“I’d rather just poison the cake and watch you eat it,” she said tartly when he stepped further into the room, swiping a finger through a pink rosette.
“Vicious of you.” Lucien clicked his tongue. “I’ll keep that in mind the next time Feyre begs me to stop in for tea.”
“Begs,” Elain scoffed, flicking the rosette onto a crumpled dish towel. “Be sure that you do.”
A too-familiar awkward silence fell over them, and he curled his hands into fists as he crossed his arms, suddenly aware of how many invitations he had rejected over the past months. How many times he’d seen Feyre’s letters and decided that he was better off irritating one meddling High Lady instead of invading her sister’s life.
He sighed. “She never used to like tea parties so much. Too busy running about in forests making a menace of herself to stop for little cakes.”
“With you, maybe.” A bit of fond tenderness filtered down the cord binding their souls together before Elain’s shoulders curved inward and the pain returned, its blade honed to a razor edge. “She used to love having tea parties with me. When we were little, I…”
She trailed off, and the panging sadness returned.
Dammit.
“Is that so? I was under the impression that she can’t get enough of me.” Lucien stepped further into the kitchen, the tile beneath his boots turning into a tightrope. “She packs my inbox with parchment like it’s a sport.”
He didn’t know what he was thinking. Clearly, his brain had melted while he stood out in the sun in front of the house. It was risky enough to goad one sister using another, and he never could resist a friendly jab at Feyre… But to say such a thing to a mate who already had one foot out the door?
He changed the subject quickly. “Where is everyone?”
“Shouldn’t you know, emissary?” Elain’s gaze sliced to him—through him.
“It’s been my experience that the Night Court likes to keep mum about that sort of thing,” he told her with a what-can-you-do shrug.
Sorrow softened the anger in her expression. Elain averted her eyes, and Lucien watched as they landed on the cake once more with a prickle of sadness that was wholly his own. “Then why are you here?”
Her voice was quiet again, subdued, and Lucien sighed as he watched the fight go out of her like water trickling through his fingers. He was left only with his own anger, the slow burn that wondered what the hell his mate’s family could possibly be doing at dinnertime on her birthday.
He unclenched his fists and swallowed the fear of the tightrope beneath him, giving up on the illusion of space—on the flimsy pretext that he was in Velaris to see anyone but her—as he sat on the stool beside hers.
With a flick of his fingers, he summoned a small flame.
“I thought you might need a light.”
Elain’s eyes went wide, and Lucien suppressed a chuckle at the sight as he held it to the first candle.
His mate, still a human at heart and so easily impressed by parlor tricks.
It was cute.
The wick caught quickly enough, and then he couldn’t resist showing off a bit, making the flame hop from candle to candle until the entire cake was lit up like a garden party at twilight. A delighted swath of pink colored Elain’s cheeks before she could lift her hands to cover them from view, so he had no choice but to hum a few bars of the birthday song as well, making the tiny licks of fire dance to the tune until the final strains of loneliness seeping down the bond gave way to simple, childlike wonder.
Elain stared and stared as the candles burned down. Lucien committed the barely-there curve to her lips to memory before nudging the leg of her stool with the tip of a boot.
“Well?”
When her head whipped to him, her eyes were guarded again, her expression wary. “What?”
Lucien tipped his chin at the cake. “Are you going to make a wish, or is melted wax some new cake decorating trend I haven’t heard about yet?”
The color on Elain’s cheeks deepened, her lips pursing. He saw her form a retort, her brow wrinkling and her eyes narrowing, before she tossed it aside with an unsubtle shake of her head.
Instead, she glanced at him once more, as if to make sure he was being serious, and then took a deep breath that did sinful things to the soft, supple swell of the breasts peeking over the sweetheart neckline of her dress.
Not, of course, that he was looking.
He didn’t look even harder as Elain bent forward over the cake, her face flushed, her lips pursed, her bodice gaping. He lifted his eyes just in time to see hers flicker to his again, the brown warm as molten cocoa before a fire and damp, welcoming earth on a too-sunny spring day for the very first time.
And then she went still as stone, those doe-eyes going unfocused, the color draining to a sheen more bronze than brown.
Lucien’s heart kicked into a gallop.
But before another racing heartbeat could pass, before Lucien could linger on bitter memories— A seer… The Cauldron made you a seer— Elain’s lashes kissed the tops of her cheeks. She blew out the candles with her eyes closed in one quick, decisive breath that felt like the winds of change.
And then her eyes blinked open, brown once more, and she dropped back onto her stool with a quiet “Oof.”
Seconds dripped past, slow as the sweet smoke wafting into the high rafters, and Lucien was well aware that he was staring—and that Elain was staring back, the strange look on her face growing more perturbed the longer he stared. She opened her mouth, her nose wrinkling…
“Right,” Lucien said quickly, brusquely. His palms—when had they become damp?—slid over his trousers, brushing imaginary crumbs off of his thighs. He stood with a stiff nod, patting absently at his breast pocket. “Best of wishes on your birthday. I will see myself—”
“Wait!”
That single word held more power than every magically enforced order handed down to Lucien from Beron, Tamlin, and Rhysand combined. He froze so quickly that he still had a foot in the air, mid-step.
But as he stumbled and then righted himself, he noticed that Elain was fumbling too, patting a hand blindly over the bench beside her until she landed on the blade of a cake knife. Lucien winced, but Elain didn’t seem to notice as she stood too, whirling toward the knife so quickly that the silken ends of her hair took flight, feathering teasing tendrils over his cheeks, his throat, his lips…
She pulled the cake to the edge of the workbench and nudged it toward him. Her eyes were wide, her entire attention fixed on the treat. Her body was angled entirely toward him, leaning closer and closer as her perfect mouth formed the words, “Would you like—”
His eye whirred as the cake lit up with magic, and the string tied to his rib twisted around in his chest.
And Lucien’s stomach leapt into his throat, battering his vocal cords into silence, as he took an hurried step back. The deafening clatter of his stool hitting the ground reverberated through the kitchen, through his mind, until he could hear nothing but the slow rock of wood on terracotta as it shuddered to stillness.
Both of Elain’s hands were over her mouth, the knife still clutched in one white-knuckled fist, and Lucien was forced to watch as her earlier blush dripped downward from her cheeks, staining the elegant column of her throat and into the bodice of her dress the same pink as the buttercream rosette now smeared on her sleeve.
His mouth watered, his tongue absently tracing the sharp line of his teeth, and a ravenous craving for something that wasn’t cake yawned to life in the overheated pit of his belly.
“I meant you can… You can stay, if you’d like,” the words squeaked out of his mortified mate as she, too, took a step away from the cake as if it truly were poisoned.
The diamond-bright glow infusing the damn thing faded, and it took every second of centuries spent smoothing ruffled feathers and charming reticent courtiers for Lucien to tuck away the sick cocktail of disappointment and horror and a bit of sly, selfish scheming that would have made the Autumn Court proud until Lucien the Mate was once again locked away and only Lucien the Emissary remained.
“You Archerons,” he tutted, lifting the knife from her hands. He ignored the stunned look on her face, but the brush of his fingers against her palm seared into him, marking him, “seem incredibly fixated on my death. I have to make sure you won’t stab me if I stay.”
“Oh!” A slender hand swatted him, and Lucien gladly took the hit. Something like fury filtered down the bond, its pathways unguarded once more, but it was tempered with gentle amusement.
“I know, that would be messier than death by buttercream,” he kept up the inane chatter, cutting two neat wedges out of Elain’s sugar garden. “More painful, too. You know, I have a source who can get you some mature oleander. It flowers pink, I think, so it would be perfect beside your roses.”
Wide brown eyes shot to his.
“You could mix it into my tea the next time Feyre decides to meddle in your affairs.”
And please, feel free to pour it directly into my mouth.
Lucien winked, pretending not to hear the way Elain’s breath hitched in response, and slid a slice onto the plate she poked toward him with her pointer finger, as if offering him a bit of Rhysand’s mother’s fine china might also trigger their bond. He was too amused to be offended.
All the while, he was all too aware of their proximity, of the whisper of skirts against his boots and the scent of honey and jasmine clouding his judgment.
And then the plush press of her breasts against his arm as she rose up on her toes wiped it all away. He almost missed the barely-there kiss she busked across his cheek, but she lingered for a moment, that singular touch warmer and more essential to the core of his being than any fire in any hearth in the Forest House.
She had the gall to step away from him again, her expression innocent and her hands clasped delicately in front of her apron.
He cleared his throat, plating her slice of cake, and asked as evenly as he could manage, “What was that for?”
“For attending my birthday party.”
“Well.” Lucien took a deep, shaky breath. “You really shouldn’t have done that.”
Elain startled, skittish as a fawn. “What? Why?”
Lucien didn’t bother answering her with words. He licked the frosting from his fingers, watching the gratifying way her eyes darkened as he sucked the tip of one into his mouth, and then lifted the slim box he’d brought along on a mean whim out of his breast pocket.
Elain took the box, turning it over, and then she held it to her ear and shook it—as if she truly expected to hear seeds rattling inside. She didn’t make a move to open it, though, as she narrowed her eyes at him. “What’s this?”
“A necklace.”
He gestured vaguely to the sparkling pink teardrops that adorned her ears—not pearls. Never pearls. After watching her work her way through the Night Court’s crown jewels for the past year, Lucien was starting to suspect that was a purposeful sartorial choice on her part.
He grinned. “To match your earrings.”
“Oh, you ass.”