Work Text:
I.
Here is a story: there is always a girl named Feyre, and there is always a boy named Rhys.
A thousand lives spin by, a kaleidoscope of worlds and ages and eras and love and loss and almosts: they grow up together, fall in love, marry, have children, live out their lives on a farm. Or they do not grow up together, and she is ordered to marry him to salvage her family’s name; she hates him, until she doesn’t. Or they don’t know each other at all: he has been pulled off the battlefield, the shrapnel wound in his chest infected beyond hope, and she is a nurse whose heart beats fast when she sees him; everyone knew he would die, she can’t explain why she is so affected by a man she never even spoke to. Or it’s her that dies, taken in the night by a plague that wipes out a quarter of the city, not a year after their wedding.
One way or another, they always find each other.
They have been married thousands of times, in thousands of ways. There have been innumerable ribbons bound around their hands, endless amounts of ceremonial wine drunk, countless vows and speeches and whispered declarations. And, of course, there are thousands of times they do not marry. Sometimes the world they are in does not call for it. Sometimes one of them is wed already, and their story can only end in tragedy. Sometimes they only brush past each other, leaving a strange ache in their absence. Sometimes they are artists, sometimes warriors, sometimes bankers and baristas and kings and queens and doctors and thieves and magicians and clerics and captains and chefs. They are often human, but not always. There is no constant but them.
One way or another, they always lose each other.
II.
There always seem to be things that know, on the edges. Just out of sight. Things that are old the way time itself is old, who see them for what they are: heavenly bodies with no choice but to orbit each other, again and again, planets caught in each others gravitational pull to play out the same cycle across millennia. The strange things with glinting eyes: bone carvers and strange old women and spirits summoned from other realms. They never say anything, never reveal what they know in any way but in the twists of their mouths.
III.
It is in the lifetime that they are High Fae that they figure it out.
It has taken them a long, long time; at least several hundred lives, by Rhys’s eventual count. But they’ve had hundreds and hundreds of years in this life to tease the threads together, heightened senses and endless resources at their disposal, a connection that allows the sharing of ephemeral thoughts that can’t be put into words. They are not always so lucky.
Do you remember…? Feyre asks, and it is not words she is sending him, but a feeling, a newness of wonder, the smell of hay in a barn, Rhys’s smirk through the fogginess of human eyesight.
Rhys does not answer, just sends her something in return: a sound, a blaring rumble, the flash of something sleek and chrome, her laugh. A different lifetime, a different memory. Each has fragments of them, of being together in them, and they pour over them, thoughts and words tumbling together too fast, half the elation of putting a puzzle together, half a terrible fear of what they are uncovering. It is too big, too much. Even for them in this life—immortal, matched beyond human comprehension, bound mind and soul, ageless and wise—it is a thing almost too strange to grasp. What are they, that they have lived so many lives?
What does it mean, that they have lived them all together?
They make a catalogue of them as best they can, piecing their memories together; they do not often recall the endings, but the beginnings are easier. He is a shopkeeper, she comes in to buy flowers. He is a slave, she is so moved by the nobility in his gaze that she buys and frees him. She is a dancer and he a prince: they run away with each other. There is a life in which they are students together and an extremely drunken Rhys introduces himself by vomiting on bystander Feyre, which she immediately seizes upon to tease him about. Mor is confused. Amren, curiously, does not seem to be.
But then, Amren is old the way time itself is old.
Rhys asks her, once. Feyre and I—do you know what we are? She does not answer, but she smiles as she always does—like she has eaten the world, and all its secrets with it.
IV.
Nothing lasts forever.
It is a thing High Fae do not discuss, except to laugh it off: except us, of course. We last forever. But that has never been the truth, and High Fae are just like humans in that regard; the truth is valuable only when it is comfortable, or useful. That they will all die one day is neither.
There is a terrible foreboding to the hundred or so years preceding it. Sometimes Rhys wishes to have less supernatural abilities in this life, that he might not feel the world turn underneath him, that he might grasp at happy ignorance of the darkness coming. They have wrought peace from blood so many times now, that the wars, the evils, blend together. Their losses do not. Rhys straps himself into fighting leathers slower than normally, and Feyre takes over for him, kissing the back of his neck.
He turns to look at her, his queen, his mate, his salvation. They have not spoken in eons of what they know: they do now know how.
This was a good one, Rhys says, his voice barely above a whisper.
Feyre smiles ruefully. Maybe in the next one, we won’t have to spend so much time fighting evil.
It’s funny, but it’s a sob that sticks in Rhys’s throat. It strikes him like a blow, how cruel this pageantry they are forced to play out is. Whatever they are, in every world, they are made for each other, they are made to find each other. And made to lose each other. When he thinks of how many times he has lost Feyre, and how many times he will again, it makes him want to dismantle the universe until there is nothing left to hurt them. He wants to hold on to this lifetime with his teeth: they are healthy, and whole, and together, and powerful enough to protect each other, and when there is peace it stretches into long decades golden like the light caught in Feyre’s hair.
But it slips from him like sand, like he knew it would, like he has felt coming for years. It is a small mercy that he goes first—he knows, knows he would not last without Feyre, that all within him would crumble. He is bleeding out in the snow—this is familiar, he thinks, and the edges of this life and the others are so blurred that he is not sure which the memory is from—and Feyre is above him, clinging to calm but with tears streaking down her face as she tries one thing and then another. Action is her balm, she closes the wound, feeds him her blood, draws on every magical power she has to keep him alive, keep him awake, keep him with her—
Feyre, darling, Rhys summons all of his strength to put a bloody hand on her cheek and she stills, finally, all the anger, all the panic consumed by fear so deep she trembles.
Rhys, She chokes, Please don’t. Don’t leave me. I’ll winnow us home, I’ll get a healer, just hang on—
I’ll find you again, Feyre. I’ll always find you. He is almost slurring, pale with cold and blood loss, the snow beneath him a bright, horrible red.
Feyre shakes her head, clutching his hand, clutching the bond between them like it will keep him in this world. I don’t want you in another life, Rhys. I want you in this one. Her voice breaks, and tears are blurring her vision, but she makes out Rhys’s smirk. Prick, she thinks, a reflex even now, as it makes her want to sob.
Rhys smiles at that, through the heaviness that is pulling at him. I love you, he says, and he sounds faraway even to himself. Feyre cries out, babbles something that sounds like a plea, but he can’t hear her.
Dying isn’t so bad. The darkness is not unlike his own.
V.
Whatever evil had wrought this is nothing, an anthill, to the pure black hurricane of darkness and fire and ice Feyre becomes, lost to an abyss of grief so deep no power in Prythian could hope to stop her. The war is over before it begins, the land itself scarred.
The severed bond, Feyre is sure, is a fate worse than death. She is half of herself, a ghost within her own mind. The connection aches like a phantom limb, and it is worse than not being there at all: she can feel so, so clearly that there is nothing on the other side of it, and there is not a single moment where that does not feel like unbridled devastation. There is no world she would not tear apart to get him back, and she tries: rearranging time, bargaining with gods, finding the afterlife itself, using the Cauldron to do arcane, terrible things. This world is so full of magic, of possibilities, surely—
But the dead are meant to stay dead. And Feyre’s anger and desperation burn themselves out, mellow into a cold, bottomless ocean of loss that Feyre knows there will be no return from, not for her. She wastes away not a year after Rhys, and weeps when she feels that obliterating darkness pull at her vision at last—it’s so like his was.
VI.
We deserve a happy ending.
It is a different life, ages before, or perhaps after, the one in which they are mates. It is dark, and there is a lump in Feyre’s throat she can’t explain, even nestled into Rhys’s form as she is. She twists to look up at him, searching for something.
Don’t we?
Rhys kisses the top of her head.
There’s no such thing, darling.
VII.
Here is a story: there is always a girl named Feyre, and there is always a boy named Rhys.
This time, the girl is a witch, as though some of her magic has clung to her from their past life. She lives in a modest hut on the edge of her village (wherever it is, whatever world this is, no one here has heard of Prythian, and there are no Fae high or otherwise to live in fear of), and sells housewives herbs and small spell-scrolls to help with fevers, with cleaning, with growing crops, with the boils on their husbands’ feet. She can make small showers of sparks rain through the air, like falling stars, and uses the ability to delight the children who cluster around her window when the weather is nice and their mothers and schoolmistress have dismissed them.
This world is gentler than their last. Less spectacular, perhaps, but softer.
One day, there are no children where Feyre expects them to be. A stray pack that dash by tell her there is a minstrel come to town, and that all the children have gone to hear him sing.
Feyre has no interest in minstrels, but she finds herself going anyway. Drawn to it like gravity.
She does not see him—there is a crowd, and a tree blocks her view. But she hears his song clear as sunlight: a sad but enchanting tune, played on fiddle as he sings, a song of lovers separated by time and space who are born again and again, always to find each other, always to lose each other.
Something seizes Feyre by the throat.
There are funny bits (a verse in which the lovers are pirates, and she rejects his clumsy advances by throwing him overboard) that the children snicker at, and tragic bits (a verse in which she is a queen, and wed—her lover is her knight, and if he cannot have her, he will die on the battlefield defending her) and Feyre can’t breathe, can’t move, feels like there is something more important than anything she’s ever done that she’s forgotten. She wants to live inside the voice she’s hearing, and she wishes she’d never heard it, and she needs to see the singer but something akin to sheer terror is telling her to run, this is bigger than you, this is bigger than anything you know—
But this Feyre is not the Feyre that could wage war across continents, not the High Lady of the Night Court who brought down empires and forged hard-won peace with armies at her back and her king by her side. This Feyre has never left her village. She is not immortal. She has never died and been reborn more. And when the song ends, this Feyre flees, as the sounds of applause chase her down the road. She feels eyes on the back of her head and does not dare turn around to meet them.
He shrugs off praise and a request for another song and follows her, of course he follows her, and she feels stupid tears prick her eyes—what is she afraid of? It’s just a man, just a man who can sing. At the edge of the woods, she convinces herself to stop, convinces herself to turn around, convinces herself she is just being silly.
She is wrong.
“Hello, Feyre Darling.”
The words sound like a prayer.
He still has the stupid fiddle in his hand. And he is human now, they both are, smaller and slower and more lopsided than their last incarnations, but he is still the most beautiful thing she has ever seen, and she is crying—meeting his eyes is the answer to a question she’s been asking all her life. She staggers under the force of it, of remembering; their figuring it out has broken some dam and every life they’ve ever lived floods back to her in broken bits and pieces: first kisses and wretched goodbyes, castles and cabins and caves and his skin on hers, his voice in her ear, the screams of the worse lives they’ve lived and the laugher of the better ones, the aching emptiness of the ones where they meet but do not stay together. It is everything she was instinctively afraid of: it is too much, it is everything, and suddenly she cannot imagine a world in which she has not looked into his eyes, she cannot imagine any world without him.
He catches her as she collapses, fiddle discarded in the dirt, and she curls into the embrace, intohim, with a muscle memory that frightens her in its ferocity, and holds him like he’s the only thing anchoring her to this world. Thinking of anything beyond the smell and the feel of him and that her tears are soaking his shirt hurts too much to even contemplate, and she fights to breathe through sobs.
“Found you,” He says thickly, and Feyre has not realized until now that he is crying too. They cling to each other, Rhys rocking her gently—if anything, it just makes her cry harder—until he draws back just enough to kiss her tears from her cheeks. She is a mess, puffy and red and trembling, and he kisses her forehead, and her eyes, and her cheeks, methodically, with aching tenderness. He does not make it to her lips before Feyre loses her patience and pulls his mouth to hers almost violently, kissing the salt-sweet of him like she can make up for all the lost time they’ve had, and will have. She kisses him for the bitter unfairness of it all, for all the things she is feeling that she will never find words for.
“Took you long enough,” She sputters, when they finally gasp for breath. He laughs at that, almost desperately.
“Careful, Feyre,” the mirth in his voice is weak, watery yet, but her heart swells to hear it. “I’ll start to think you’re in love with me,”
Fresh tears well in her eyes as she smiles. “Prick,” she manages to get out just before his lips descend to hers again.
(this fic can also be found on tumblr)