Work Text:
Hurricane:
“Still sulking?”
His spine stiffens. At first it’s merely at the sound of her voice, cool as the mountain winds he misses streaming through his wings, sharp as a winter storm. That voice gets his back up even before he registers the mocking tone and the sardonic words.
Then he sees her. Nesta. Lounging against the balcony door with an ease that might suggests she owns this entire house and everything in it – including him.
The sight of her, the sound of her voice, her words dripping contempt, punch through the numb walls he’s surrounded himself with since he lost his wings with such startling swiftness and brutality that that’s all it takes to get his blood boiling.
A thick, rippling growl builds in his chest, loosed in a vicious burst towards her like roiling thunder. He’s seen battle hardened warriors on blood-soaked killing fields pale and flee from him at the sound. She barely even deigns to blink coolly at him as she strides out onto the balcony. She actually has the bald nerve and gall to approach him after that snarl had made it perfectly clear he wasn’t in the mood for her company.
She still looks like her. She’s still veiled in that icy beauty that called so sweetly to the fire in his heart, threatening to tame it; daring him to challenge it. But the Cauldron has sharpened her features, hollowing her cheeks, sculpting her fine lips, refining the lines of her face making her at once more elegant and striking but somehow also more terrible, and dangerous, and wild.
It’s a face to make men pause – especially with those eyes burning with blue fire and glittering with silver steel – honed to an edge even Az would covet – a face to make men tremble if they have a scrap of sense about them. Cassian never has.
So he faces her boldly as she approaches him, contemptuous grace in every movement, a predator at her core. She’s a panther draped in silk, a huntress of a different sort than her sister but just as deadly if not more so. She’s the knife in the shadows, the poison in the chalice, the end that comes without ever being seen.
If he ever somehow forgot her face, Cassian thinks as she stalks to stand by him at the stone balcony rail, he would never forget the way she moved. Not in a thousand immortal lifetimes could he forget that.
She moves like a storm given substance, holds herself like a queen among mice, a god among peasants – as though this world and everything in it, all its history and power and potential, the things it’s contained, the miracles it’s seen made flesh are beneath her, unworthy of her notice.
Her eyes rake up and down his body with a sharpness that cuts, weighing, calculating, judging, lingering for a fraction of a second longer on his tattered wings than anywhere else.
“Mor says you haven’t left this room in three days,” she announces, tearing her piercing gaze away from him the moment she opens her mouth to speak to him, her words frosted with apparent indifference, “You haven’t eaten. Barely slept...” she trails off delicately, examining her nails.
He couldn’t sleep. Not without reliving it over and over and over again. His wings shredded into bloody ribbons by that burst of power. The agony. The heat of the blood against his skin. The tang of it against his tongue. The bile rising in his throat. The panic constricting his chest and ripping the air from his lungs. His wings. His wings. His wings. Every time he woke in a cold sweat, panting and gripping the sheets to try and anchor himself to reality. A reality that was every bit as cruel as the nightmare he’d just torn himself from and offered him no comfort or respite from his torment.
But the rare occasions when he didn’t have that nightmare were worse. On those nights he flew through the wild, unforgiving mountains he had learned to tame centuries ago. Alive with the rush of air whipping past him, the call of the wind humming in his veins, and the taste of freedom gilding his tongue as he roared his defiance at the world that had tried and failed at every turn to chain him to its will.
Then he woke sobbing and alone in the blackness of the night; that exhilaration snuffed out like a candle by a thoughtless gust, leaving him blind and staggering and empty once more. He groped in the dark for his wings and felt the broken truth at his back and his soul howled its grief and devastation that he might never fly through those peaks again; might never soar into the arms of the waiting heavens as he was made to.
But he can’t tell her that. Can’t even begin to explain it to her, what this loss feels like for him, for an Illyrian male to lose his wings, to be grounded, what it means, the weight of what he’s lost. So instead he finds an easy smirk to toss in her direction – the kind he knows from experience will infuriate every inch of her new immortal being and says with idle arrogance, “Concerned for me, Nesta?”
The look she gives him radiates such contempt that he can practically hear the disdainful word she sneers at him even though she never gives voice to it, please, before she says, picking at her nails in a show of unconcern that’s as tailored to his temper as his smirk was to hers, “Bored.” She says with a lazy shrug then cuts a glance in his direction as she adds, tone darkening like thunderheads gathering to blacken a bright blue sky, “And I thought might have something better to do with your time than brood over how hard done to you are, what with the war that’s coming.”
A harsh snarl erupts from him at her presumption, her insinuation, the knife she may as well have thrust between his ribs, plunging straight into the heart of him.
He advances a step towards her, wings barking in agony as they instinctively flare, a stark reminder of the loss he faces, the thing she’s trivialising with such brash arrogance.
Nothing without those wings. Nothing.
As before she barely shows any reaction to the fury she’s inspired in him and holds her ground with the same kind of serene indifference a deaf god might show the plight of an ant. Some part of him flickers, reluctantly impressed by her courage and resilience but it’s buried deep beneath the layers of raw, unbridled anger that fill his empty being – so long devoid of anything that centuries of hard training are as nothing to, forgotten in the face of her, in the way she reaches into him and rips at the most vulnerable parts of his self with cut-throat efficiency.
But Nesta, Cauldron damn her, just presses on cool and matter-of-fact, “I don’t really see what you’re complaining about myself.” He frowns down at her, expression dark as the corrupt hearts that plague the Court of Nightmares as she informs him evenly, “I’ve never been able to fly – it didn’t do me any great harm.”
Cassian has been interrogated by hardened, seasoned battle commanders with hours of time and centuries of experience at their disposal and not one of them even came close to getting this deeply rooted under his skin as this woman – barely old enough to be considered one, even as a human – has done in the space of a few minutes with a handful of icy, calculated sentences.
She knows just where to hit, exactly what weaknesses to exploit to bait a reaction out of him and the look in her glittering, unyielding eyes tells him she knows it. Damn her she knows.
He steps up to her, towering over her even in her new Fae body and she just leans in to him, arrogant, unflinching pride radiating from every inch of her.
“But if you could have flown,” he growls in her face, his barely controlled anger pulsing through every syllable and the way she glares at him, the way she gets right back in his face tells him she relishes every breath of it, “And then one day they took your wings from you and chained you to the ground and stripped you of every bit of freedom and independence I know you crave-“
Her face tightens into a soundless snarl at those words, that daring I know you, and he smiles so slowly, savouring the taste of her weak spot and he presses his advantage, digging his fingers into the cracks he’s made in that gloriously indifferent armour of ice and steel she’s encased herself in, prising them open wider.
“It would have done you harm then,” he breathes with all the arrogant certainty he can muster, “It would have driven you mad-“
“Don’t talk about me like you understand me,” she snaps, that fire flaring as her mask of ice shatters.
A broad, lazy grin spreads across his face. There you are some deep, instinctual part of him purrs to her – the being she truly is, that burning seething wildfire trapped in this immortal prison by the Cauldron’s cruel will.
“Oh but I do,” he murmurs to her, taking another step towards her as those feral eyes dare to him to do, “I do. You can try and hide behind your mask and your finery and your contempt all you like but I see you. I see you, Nesta Archeron,” rage has transformed those cold, sculpted features into those of a snarling hellcat, “You are a wild beast in skin that they have caged and tried to tame your entire life but all you want to do is roar,” he lets his smile widen, eyes dancing as he adds, “Like me.”
“I am nothing like you,” she hurls at him, voice surging with the same promise of violence and destruction as a roaring hurricane. But it shifts and becomes sharp and precise as a razorblade when she hisses viciously, “Wasting away up here and feeling sorry for yourself – you’re pathetic,” she snarls at him, venom dripping from every word.
He watches as those walls lock into place around her again, afraid she’d somehow gotten in too deep so now she shoves him out with every bit of her considerable strength and will no matter how ruthless she needs to be to do it.
“One little set back and you’ve given up,” she sneers.
Set back? Set back?
Nothing without those wings.
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” he rumbles, lethal warning pulsing from every word.
That smirk; that damned smirk snaps right back onto her lips beneath her flashing storm-tossed eyes because she knows she’s won. She knows that she’s managed to get his hackles up and has barely even broken a sweat in doing so. She knows that he’s on the defensive again and that’s exactly where she wants him to be.
“No?” she mocks, arching an elegant eyebrow at him. Her voice hardens once more into that line of frigid steel when she grinds out, “The way I see it shit happens and you deal with it.” She tosses a look loaded with contempt at him as she crosses her arms over her chest with a snide sneer, “Or you don’t,” she says, her eyes flickering pointedly to his ragged wings again.
“You have no idea what I’m dealing with,” he spits at her.
Nothing without those wings. Nothing without those wings. Nothing without those wings.
He doesn’t care that he’s making this easy for her. He doesn’t care that she’s somehow slipped beneath his skin and is digging deeper and deeper into him with every word. He doesn’t care about the thick, smothering tension that’s getting tauter between them with every second, pulling the air from their lungs and the sense from their selves and making it more and more likely that one of them is going to do something incredibly stupid if it isn’t eased soon.
All he cares about is the challenge in her eyes and the way his blood roars at him to rise to it.
Her eyes narrow and lightning flashes in them as she straightens her spine and stares him down with something terrible burning in her blood as her mouth twists itself into a wordless snarl. And though he stands almost a clear foot taller than her, the rage that gathers from very part of her could make him tremble like nothing he’s seen in over five centuries of war and battle and bloodshed could do – such anger – anger that could level worlds and bring deities to their knees is all directed at him as she moves in so close that in a shiver he could touch her.
“No?” she whispers, words shaking with barely controlled fury, fury she’s trying so hard to leash to herself but with little success, “I have no idea? I have no idea?” she repeats, throwing his words back at him.
Her eyes are now glowing slits in her face and he realises then, realises that this is bigger than him and the sharp words they’ve been tossing back and forth, biting and baiting and testing each other’s limits, feeling each other out again after the things that have changed.
He’s caused something much deeper and darker in her to snap and make her forget the armour of indifference she’s used to shield herself from the world for so long. Because when she snarls the next words at him he sees, sees the cracks that splinter and fissure right down to the core of her where her ice and steel give way to vulnerability.
“They didn’t take you and stuff you into that Cauldron and turn you into something else – something you despise against your will,” her voice cracks with rage and despair and something like grief – grief for what she was, what she lost, what was taken from her.
Her breathing shudders as she goes on, apparently unable to stop herself now that she’s begun and this time her words tremble, tapping into a vein of emotion in her so deep that the impact it has on her – on him – staggers him.
“And they didn’t make you watch, make you feel helpless, and powerless, and weak as they did the same thing to the person you love most while you couldn’t do a single damn thing about it,” she rages, stamping her foot in a futile bid to relieve some of the crushing, unbearable pressure that’s hammering down on her soul.
Cassian had watched, watched as they’d dragged both girls to the Cauldron and forced them under. He’d listened to Nesta’s howling screams, seen her fight like a snared beast to get to Elain, felt that desire to tear her own being into shreds and all the world too for spite and for the sake of her sister. He’d felt her terror and her pain through that promise he’d made her, that bond he’d forged between them – the oath that had killed him when he’d failed to keep it.
The agony in his wings had been too much and he had tried, Mother damn him he had tried. Tried to keep that promise, tried to protect her, tried to die fighting on her behalf as he’d sworn to her he would. It had destroyed a part of him when the pain had knocked him unconscious and stopped him going to her. He had failed. He had failed her. He had broken his vow. And that thought had haunted him since waking almost as much as the enormity of losing his wings had.
And if that was what watching had been like for him, what it had done to him, then to her...
“You chose this,” she hurls at him, her fury dragging him back to her like a leash on his soul pulling it in to hers.
Her hands clenching into fists at her sides as she fights to keep herself together; tries to stop herself from shattering entirely. And some part of him, some mad, wild part of him wants to reach out to her, to fold her into his arms and shelter her from it all. But the sane, rational part of him that remains tells him she would never allow him.
Her chest is heaving with the effort of containing the raw emotion that throws itself against her soul with the force of a relentless, furious ocean slamming itself against a steadily shattering cliff-face, emotion that he can somehow feel radiating out of her – anger and pain and grief and guilt and he understands.
With the impact of those three words he understands everything.
The difference in what they’d endured and all the fury and contempt she felt for him and his pain when she...
“You chose to shield your friend, your brother-“ as she had failed to shield her sister, “You chose to protect him this way- You chose.” Chose. As she would have. If they had given her that chance. “Was it not worth it?”
That question, the sharpness of it, catches him off-guard, the implication making his own temper flare. His brother. His wings in exchange for his brother’s life, for five hundred years of history and love and devotion to one another. He knows how Azriel would answer if she put that question to him, asked him what he felt about that sacrifice, and that only punches more defiance and certainty into his answer.
“Of course it was,” he rumbles with cold surety.
And in that moment, for the first time since he broke, he realises the true worth of that sacrifice, of what not making it would have meant for him. Of how that loss would have broken him so completely he might never have recovered from it. His wings...He could learn to live without his wings, learn to bind himself to the earth and fight on anyway. Somehow. But his brother. Without someone he’s lived his entire life with and expects to be by his side for the rest of eternity, whatever it brings, without him...
****
The silence stretches as his declaration, his truth, lingers in the air between them and she lets it. Panting as she stares at him, breathing ragged while she lets his words sink in, she lets it.
She believes him. That same intensity, that same fierce, protective spirit he had shown her in her house when he had told her he would fight and bleed and die to protect her and hers lives in those words. And just as she had then she sees the heart that burns beneath the steel and smiles. The heart of a warrior who took up arms to defend, the heart of a man who would shred his greatest joy for love, for the brother he cherishes just as she cherishes Elain.
Something softens in her when she meets his hazel eyes and asks, “Would you do it again?” He blinks down at her, studying, calculating, his ravaged wings twitching in response to some instinct she doesn’t understand, trying to figure out exactly what has caused this shift in her.
“If you knew then, as you know now, what it would have cost you...Would you still have done it? Would you do it again to save him?”
She thinks she knows the answer but she wants to hear him say it and she wants him to look into her eyes when he does.
He doesn’t disappoint her.
“Yes,” he says baldly and there isn’t a fraction of hesitation in him, not a shred of doubt.
She had come to him and she had seen – had seen what this had done to him, the loss she could never fully comprehend, what it cost him. She had felt the pain it caused him, how badly it threatened to break the battle-forged warrior she had dared to let in, even a little. And now, as he’d told her without pause that he would do it again, that he would endure this again...She believes him.
Approval and something she might even dare to call admiration flickers in her.
The sound of his voice jerks her out of her reverie, “If this,” he begins, and gestures at her, her cursed new Fae body, altered without her consent and against her will and her resolve hardens into iron at the mention of it, at the reminder of what was done, what was taken, what was forcibly given in its place, “Had been the price of sparing Elain from them; of saving her,” her throat constricts tightly at the mention of her younger sister, “Would you have paid it?”
She raises her head slowly until she meets those hazel eyes again, old and wild and blazing as they fix on her. And she knows; she knows when their gazes meet and he looks into her and she lets him in, in a way she’s never quite let anyone before, that he – like her – already knows what answer he expects her to give.
Squaring her shoulders and straightening her spine Nesta looks directly into this depthless eyes and hisses with relish, “I would have welcomed it.”
The ghost of a smile flickers across his lips, different from the ones he’s tossed out at her before all designed to bait and rile and infuriate her. This one is warmer and softer and fuller despite the fact it lingers for only a brief heartbeat before it vanishes – the most genuine she’s seen him since that day he made his oath to her and bound them together.
Now a spark of understanding bursts between them like embers tossing up a handful of their golden stars into the night and she feels something else bond them in the warring darkness of their souls. A connection dares to burn – a bridge between their drowning hearts, an anchor in the restless sea of doubts and fears.
Empathy shivers along that bond; empathy for another being that burns as they do, with a fierce, reckless, loving heat – and for the same reasons – to keep their families warm, to drive out the darkness from their worlds and shelter them until the dawn.
They are both fire. Fire that will blaze and rage and endure until it’s nothing but smoke and ash and cinders and will then breathe thank you to the waiting oblivion as long as they know it wasn’t in vain, that those they care for are safe.
She can’t explain what happens in that moment, when she feels, feels the whisper of his heart, the rich, deep pull of his emotions like an ocean current, bearing her along in his pain and fear and determination.
And for one wild, breathless heartbeat she might have been looking at the world through his hazel eyes and seeing herself with that near endless compassion that has for centuries now driven him to pick up his blade and clean the blood from it the way he can never mange with his soul and fight again and again and again.
Fight and kill and grieve and shudder through every night for those who could not; for those whose hearts and hands were not yet stained or tainted by the horrors of war as his are; for those who still prayed he would be the answer; for those who still dreamed he would be hope; for those who needed saving he would be salvation.
It’s over before she can fully grasp what’s happening. But it had felt as though...As though the raw fabric of his soul had brushed against hers and found in it something known and safe and kindred.
She doesn’t understand it, doesn’t know where it came from or what it means only that it joins them. And she does not want to pull away from it. She is not afraid.
It’s that bond urging and whispering from some place deep inside herself, unseen and unheard for years, some instinct she never knew she had that causes her to reach out to him now. Lightly, tentatively, as though afraid their shredded remains will crumble at the faintest touch she brings her fingertips up to gently brush the edge of one of his torn wings.
A shiver runs through him in response like ripples in a pool that had been impossibly still and steady before she came to it – but he allows the contact, allows her to see and feel this most vulnerable part of him and she understands, understands how hard that is for him, how hard it would have been for her. She understands the significance of this gesture, this acceptance, even though she knows little about his people and their culture she knows this.
Softly, speaking almost more to herself than to him, fingers still absently tracing along the outer curve of that wing, the membrane taut like a ship’s sails in a strong wind but also soft and warm, the comforting feel of worn leather, she admits, “They were beautiful.”
They had been. And whatever she had told him before some wild, instinctual part of her, the part that was so drawn to him and to this odd connection between them had envied those wings and the freedom they gave him.
On the nights when he had visited and she had watched him snap them open to then carry him into the waiting sky she’d had dreams of flying. She had soared through mountain passes she had never seen yet still seemed to know and when she woke there had been a dull ache in her chest at the knowledge she would never experience that anywhere but in dreams.
Her fingers are still gently caressing and exploring his wing, noting the way his eyes close and some of the tension seems to drain from him in response to her touch. Until, too intent on watching him, her wandering fingers accidentally graze a rough, raw spot on his wing and he flinches sharply away from her, shattering the spell of the soft calm moment that had been threatening to blossom between them.
She sharply withdraws her hand, clenching it into a tight fist at her side, watching as he braces himself against the balcony rail, his breathing turning ragged as his body trembles.
“It still hurts?” she asks quietly.
She had assumed his immortal blood would have healed the painful surface damage at least but maybe with injuries this extensive...He nods his head jerkily, seeming to hear and agree with that last thought even though she hadn’t put it into words. She tightens her jaw as a stab of sympathy burns through her for him, forcing her face to remain neutral, knowing he would see only pity and would curse her for it.
Crossing her arms over her chest she says, “I’m sorry.”
The words come out more clipped than she’d intended but she means it and some part of her tries to send that to him through their bond. She’s sorry for his pain, for the suffering that has come from a good act; for the lingering cost of a sacrifice he knows will be eternal.
A part of her – the part that still fights and howls her former humanity – her roaring heart- mourns that lost mortality now. Human beings may lose their loved ones, parts of themselves but death, that constant terror they spent their lives running from, could also be a comfort. The hope of finding those things again is something only mortals truly have.
For the first time thinks of herself as something truly other than human. For the first time as she looks at him and feels the weight of this pain that will be his for eternity she appreciates the true impact of her own mortality. And it makes her sorry, sorry that he has to live with this, with this loss, this gaping abyss threatening to swallow him whole, for the rest of his immortal life.
He straightens and looks out, past the city sprawled beneath them to the flickering invitation of the distant azure sky; a question she knows he longs to answer with roaring defiance; a challenge she knows his blood longs for him to rise to, drives him to conquer that impossible, unreachable horizon.
His hand clenches and unclenches convulsively at his side like a beating heart and the tension that ripples from him implies that he too is aware of exactly how high the price of his sacrifice may be; that he too is feeling the crushing weight of eternity bearing down on his broken shoulders.
She doesn’t know why she says it, why she reaches out with words the way some flickering instinct urges her to do with touch, to let him feel her compassion, the compassion he probably doesn’t think she’s even capable of but she says, half in defiance of that and half in fear of alerting him to it, “I felt you.”
He snaps his attention to her with the speed and intensity of a bolt of lightning shot through the sky but this time she doesn’t meet his gaze. Her eyes remain fixed out over the city of Velaris that unfolds around them, strange and alien to her but beautiful despite that. It’s that sight she addresses when she says, with as much composure as she can muster, “You were on the ground bleeding and scared and in pain.”
Even through the haze of her own terror and despair she had been aware of him. The scream of agony he had loosed when that blast of power had torn like a storm of blades through his wings still haunts her. However long she lives in this immortal form she doesn’t think she’ll ever forget that awful sound.
“But I felt you reach for me,” she continues, her voice shaking even as she fights to keep it steady. Her hands grip the rail of the balcony as though it’s the only anchor keeping her grounded to this world, “I felt,” she swallows, “I felt you try to fight for me – the way you promised you would-“ her voice cracks and she shifts beside him, swallowing hard and taking a deep breath, trying to find the composure she can’t ever remember losing like this before.
Still she can’t look at him. Doesn’t want to see whatever expression graces his rugged features. Doesn’t want to see the look in those burning hazel eyes. Doesn’t want to see any of it because she knows it would break her and make her unable to say the things she realises now that she needs to say to him.
But she tears her eyes from the distant sky, where a hawk wheels and dives to earth, to look down at the place where his fingers brush fleetingly against hers, daring to push the boundaries between them a little more.
The breath she drags in past her teeth shudders through her chest as she goes on, “Even when they forced me into that Cauldron and held me down while I fought and screamed. Even when that thing ripped me apart and forced to pieces of me to become something else and I lost sense of everything I felt you.”
She raises her head and looks at him at last to find his eyes already waiting to meet hers. Unflinching, unyielding, unafraid of whatever this is. And the sight of that gives her strength. His acceptance, his refusal to shy away or be afraid of whatever she dares reveal to him makes her wonder...Makes her wonder if he might be the answer to a question she never knew her soul had been asking all these years.
When he reaches out and takes her hand in his the rough calluses there scrape against her soft skin but she doesn’t pull away from him.
“I still felt you,” she says, her voice stronger now that she’s looking into his eyes as she says, “Through all of that I still felt you. How?”
He shakes his head, tearing his steady hazel eyes away from hers and a part of her feels an odd sense of loss as he does so.
“I don’t know,” he admits carefully.
His expression is carefully guarded as his gaze shifts out into the distance again, finding the hawk she had seen earlier as it rises into the sky once more, the hunter triumphant. The longing in his eyes as he watches it makes some forgotten part of her soul grieve for his.
****
He can almost feel the currents of air rippling beneath the bird’s wings as he watches it soar, banking and shifting against the deep blue sky and again that ache in his chest tightens until he can barely breathe for it. The consuming, crushing panic that’s gripped him since he awoke coils itself around his chest again like a serpent, squeezing and strangling the life from him until he barely knows who or where he is.
Nesta’s indignant, dissatisfied huff brings him sharply back to himself.
Glancing down at her he notes the irritation tingeing her expression with no small amount of trepidation, a feeling that grows as she asks her next question.
“Is it magic?” she bites out, the tone she inflects that last word with telling him exactly how she feels about it, still.
He takes his time. Considering. Oaths made by those from Prythian could easily be more binding than life or death. Another way of controlling the unruly immortals who lived too long with too much power where a grudge over a broken bond or contract could level a city.
When he had pledged himself to her that day and fought with every last shred of will that had remained to him to keep it when she had been Made something burning in his blood might well have reached out to her in those terrifying moments – the bond he’d never meant to forge so strongly between them calling to her in that stifling darkness, anchoring her to him, trying to help her the only way he could having failed to reach her, to protect her the way he’d sworn to.
And as she was taken apart and put back together that piece of him might have woven itself into the fabric of her being, might have called to her and fought by her side in those moments and might explain his strange new connection between them but...
“If it is,” he says slowly, choosing his words with care knowing how much she’ll read and weigh and calculate each one to drag every ounce of meaning from it she can, wishing for Rhys, or better Amren who might be able to understand this, to be here to explain to them both, “It’s older and deeper than this world. And beyond both our abilities to comprehend.”
A rough, vicious snarl, enhanced by the Fae now in her ripples through the air between them, signalling her displeasure with that answer, “You’re immortal,” she growls at him, as though he’d somehow forgotten, her eyes blue eyes blazing again with that unstoppable, roaring fire, “Centuries old. How can you not know?”
The kind of smile he knows will infuriate her flashes across his face at that, he can’t help it, “The longer you live and the more of this world you see the less you’ll truly understand,” he tells her in a measured tone.
Amren had told him that a few decades ago but it hadn’t been until recently with Feyre’s making and abilities, Jurian’s resurrection, and his encounter with the Cauldron that he had realised there might well be some truth in it.
Nesta, evidently, doesn’t share this view.
“What kind of useless faerie answer is that?” she demands, her eyes flashing with furious impatience.
A rough bark of laughter is drawn from him at that. As it rumbles through his chest he realises that this is the first time he’s truly laughed at anything since his wings were shredded. And when he looks down at her with a maddening air of amusement he knows will make her want to scream and rage at him he wonders if this woman, this defiant, wild creature of fire and steel and ice with the temperament of a hurricane – a being most will look at and see only cold destruction in every lethal feature – might look a lot more like hope to him.
Crossing his arms over his chest to protect himself from the oncoming storm he’s no doubt about to unleash he smirks and says, “You can curse and damn that Cauldron to whatever black hell you like, Nesta, but it hasn’t changed you that much as far as I can tell.”
The snarls that greets this pronouncement is as violent and explosive as he’d anticipated – the kind of snarl that would be more at home on a blood-drenched battlefield than a sunlit balcony and one that any of his warriors would have been proud to produce.
“So angry. So impatient,” he chides, shaking his head, his smirk becoming near feral as he concludes, “You’re still so painfully mortal and human at heart.”
“And you’re still an arrogant ass,” she barks back at him without missing a single beat in this dance of theirs and without pausing a second to consider the wisdom of bellowing insults at a highly trained Illyrian warrior. Likely because she’s correctly predicted the laugh that huffs from him instead of the warning growl.
He cocks his head slightly to one side and leans in to her, “You’re into it,” he purrs, letting his breath lightly stir her burnt gold hair, “Admit it.”
A slight shiver runs through her and travels to him in turn as she takes a step closer to him, making the little distance he’d left between them near non-existent. Heat flares between them and he stills, not daring to move, sure that if he so much as brushes against her in this moment, lets their bodies touch the way they’re screaming out to do, something will rupture and splinter into this world he won’t have a hope of controlling or containing.
She stands on her toes and arches into him, her body barely a hair’s breadth from his when she whispers, the heat of her breath on his ear as sweet and welcome as the warm gusts of summer wind that used to carry him gently on their backs, “Fuck you.”
The snarl contained within the soft delicacy of her voice sends another chuckle rippling through him. The tension between them breaks like a thunderhead finally bursting open as she shoves herself away from him, lip curling, arms folded over her chest, the very picture of disgusted contempt.
And though he can feel her seething beside him, though he knows she’s gotten under his skin just as much as he’s gotten under hers-perhaps deeper than either of them realises or intended. Though he knows he’s treading a thin, dangerous line playing with this kind of fire, the untameable kind that ripples under her skin. Though he knows that the bond between them she described, the bond he feels too and can’t make any more sense of than she can is a living thing with a will of its own – another will he can’t control or contain – a lightness spreads through Cassian’s chest, the iron bands that have encircled it since he lost his wings loosening just a little at last. He smiles as he looks out over Velaris again just to stop himself looking at her. For the first time since Hybern he feels able to breathe again.
A soft breeze sweeps over the balcony and he can’t himself from shifting his gaze to watch her as Nesta closes her eyes and lets it soothe her scorching skin. It lifts the loose tendrils of her unbound brown-gold hair, tossing them up around her face, making her look in that moment like one of the wild, infinite goddesses from the legends of old.
His eyes linger on her now pointed ears, previously covered by her long hair- something deliberate on her part he has no doubt, concealing the biggest indicator of how the Cauldron changed her, unwilling to let anyone see, still denying her altering. But he can’t help himself as reaches out and softly brushes the tapered tips with his fingers, in the same way she had touched his wings earlier, “They suit you, you know,” he informs her lightly, smirking.
She shoves his hand away with inhuman strength and swiftness that only makes his grin broaden. Another one of those low, vicious snarls he’s quickly coming to relish ripples from her chest, the sound of an angry god sending thunder sweeping over the land just to see it tremble.
“Look at that,” he croons, lounging easily against the balcony railing, “You already have that territorial Fae arrogance down to a fine art too. You’re a natural at this.”
Anger sparks in those stunning hurricane eyes of hers and that fire she seems to reserve just for him bursts into life again, roaring at him, daring him to keep pushing her.
“Prick,” she spits at him with such callous fury he almost misses the faint flicker of a smirk that flashes across her lips - the lips he can never fully drags his eyes away from or stop picturing on his.
Oh she enjoys this. She enjoys this verbal sparring with someone she knows won’t flinch or turn away or slink off, someone who can always take anything she throws at them and will give back just as good in return. She enjoys having an opponent who won’t back down or shy away, someone who doesn’t tremble when confronted with that frozen iron glare; someone she can unleash herself fully on without thought; someone who can finally handle her – a true equal.
And she he handles her. He doesn’t try and cage her or leash her or tame her but instead he challenges her, he dares her, he looks into those fathomless eyes that promise so much power and fury and potential and he dares her to loose it all upon him, to give him everything she has and more.
“Come on,” he breathes, voice low and tinged with a feral snarl he sees her body respond to. He steps in closer to her, that delicious tension pulsing between them again when she holds her ground, as he’d known she would, accepting that challenge, that invitation, and stares up into his eyes, waiting, demanding, that he go on, “You can do better than that, can’t you?” he pushes her.
The pressure between them builds like the power that swells and flows in his veins, only contained by his Siphons and he wonders. As he looks at her with daring, and raw feeling, and a flicker of something like terror – terror at what’s brewing between them and what might happen when it finally breaks - he wonders just where the limits between them are, where the lines are drawn; wonders if they even exist at all or if, in spite of all her armour and walls, a part of her has already surrendered itself to him, to this.
Without once breaking eye contact with him she growls with lethal calm, “One more step and I’ll kick you again,” he feels his face warm slightly but she doesn’t back down an inch, she only moves in closer, digging those claws deeper into him, “Or maybe,” she says, those eyes glittering with vicious triumph, her hand lightly grazing his thigh, “Maybe I’ll just cut it off.” A smirk,” If I can find anything to cut,” she amends, her lips gleaming and hungry as a blood-soaked blade.
A rich, deep, layered growls thrums from him but it only makes her smile wider.
“Try it,” he snarls at her, “Or,” he lets his voice drop down into a low purr as her body presses flush against his for the first time and he feels the shiver that trembles through her at his change in tone even as his body sings in pleasure at her nearness, at the heat of her, the softness of her slim form so at odds with her sharp tongue.
Leaning down he grazes his lips gently against her neck and places his next words onto her skin like an intimate tattoo, “I can spend a very long time telling you with my hands and my lips and my tongue and my teeth why that would be a mistake, Nesta.”
He wraps his breath around her name like a prayer, like the first word ever spoken and the last that would leave his lips with his dying gasp.
Her eyes flutter closed, her body breathless and adrift against the solid anchor of him.
Then her eyes snap open and her voice is a soft, rich caress that makes him ache for her, “Later perhaps,” she says and that steely ice replaces the lust filled fire that had burned within her only a moment before; her voice now hard and sharp once more, “When you find your balls again and might be worth my time.”
With that she peels herself from him, his body crying out in protest at the sudden loss of contact and walks away from him, cool and unfeeling as a winter breeze with an air that suggests she knows full well he’s watching every single step she takes, unable to look away from the sight of her leaving him hanging once more.
Just the lingering scent of her clinging to his clothes, to his lungs, to his being, hovering around him like a lingering haze of pipe smoke, snaring every sense and intoxicating every fibre of him, is enough to drive him wild and she knows it. Curse her she knows it.
The sound of Mor clicking her tongue behind him recalls him to his surroundings and makes him turn to face her.
“You,” she observes with grim amusement, her eyes on the door Nesta had just stalked through, leaving them alone on the balcony, “Are beyond fucked.”
And he was. Cauldron damn him he was.
****