When the Shadowsinger Stayed
Collection of moments masterlist
Azriel x Reader
fluff / pre-relationship / mutual pining / drunk reader / protective Azriel
(Before the mating bond)
After one too many drinks at Rita's, getting you to bed becomes far more difficult than Azriel expected. Between your complete lack of self-preservation and a dangerous tendency to seek him out, the Shadowsinger finds himself fighting a battle he is no longer certain
-> Can be read as a standalone. Takes place after "When the Shadowsinger looked away first."
Azriel was starting to lose his mind.
Not because of you, never because of you, but because exhaustion had begun to creep beneath his skin in slow, relentless threads, and because the House of Wind had become a maze of marble, shadows, and your laughter, and because when he had winnowed you home from Rita’s with your arm looped through his and your cheek flushed from wine and dancing, he had naïvely believed that getting you into bed would be the easiest part of the night.
He should have known better.
You had spent the last fifteen minutes running through the sitting room as though sleep were an enemy you had personally sworn to defeat, slipping behind columns, spinning barefoot across the carpets, singing fragments of whatever song had been playing downstairs at Rita’s with no concern whatsoever for the fact that half the Inner Circle might still be awake.
The storm outside had softened Velaris into a blur of rain-streaked gold beyond the windows, the fire was burning low in the hearth, and the House itself seemed to have taken your side entirely, dimming the lights into something warmer and dreamier than was remotely helpful while Azriel stood in the middle of the room trying to convince himself that the tightness in his chest was only concern.
“Come on,” he said at last, dragging a hand down his face as you circled one of the columns with a delighted little laugh. “Let’s get you to bed.”
“Noooo,” you called back, the word stretching dramatically through the room as you disappeared behind the marble again.
Azriel lowered his hand slowly and fixed his gaze on the column, his shadows already beginning to curl outward in anticipation. “Y/N.”
The warning in his voice should have been enough. It would have been enough for most people. Spies had paled at that tone. Soldiers had straightened beneath it. Entire rooms had gone quiet when he spoke with that low, dark command threaded through the words.
You only peeked around the column, eyes bright, mouth curved in a wicked little smile that made the last of his patience tremble.
“You go to bed, Az. I told you I’m not tired.”
His eyes moved over you slowly, taking in the flushed warmth still clinging to your cheeks, the way your hair had loosened around your face, the faint sway you were clearly pretending was intentional. “Yes,” he said, dry enough that your smile widened, “I can see that.”
You laughed and darted away again before he could reach you, your bare feet nearly silent against the floor, though his shadows followed immediately, sweeping after you like dark ribbons in the firelight. You tried to outrun them, turning sharply across the carpet with a triumphant sound that lasted only until the hem of your dress caught beneath your foot.
The world seemed to tilt out from under you.
Azriel was there before you could fall.
His arms closed around your waist, firm and unthinking, pulling you back against his chest before you could slam face-first into the marble. For one breath, all he felt was the violent punch of fear through his ribs, sharp enough to make his shadows flare. For another, all he felt was you, warm and laughing in his arms as though you had not nearly given him a heart attack.
“And this,” he said, tightening his hold around your waist while he forced his voice to remain even, “is exactly why you should not be trusted.”
You tipped your head back to look at him, your face lit with amusement at the severity of his expression. “I can stand.”
His gaze dipped into yours, and despite himself, despite the storm and the exhaustion and the fact that you were making a complete menace of yourself, the corner of his mouth lifted. “Sure.”
You noticed it immediately.
He saw the thought form behind your eyes before you moved, saw the shift in your body as you prepared to twist out of his arms and flee again, but his shadows were faster this time. They curled around your ankles with careful restraint, not trapping so much as reminding, while his hand tightened at your waist and drew you back before you could take more than a single step.
“No, no, no,” he murmured, the words low enough that the laughter in your throat faltered. He leaned closer, not enough to threaten, but enough that you had to tilt your head back to keep looking at him. “Where do you think you’re going now, sweetheart?”
Something changed in your face.
It was small. A softening around your mouth, a faint hitch in your breath, a stillness where all that reckless movement had been moments before. Azriel felt it like a blade sliding between his ribs, because he had not meant the word to sound like that, had not meant for his voice to drop that way, had not meant to notice how your eyes went wider and warmer beneath his.
“You are going to be a good girl,” he continued, quieter now, though his grip remained steady when you swayed, “and you are going to do as I say, alright?”
The seriousness in his tone should have irritated you.
The teasing beneath it should have made you fight back. Instead, it sent a slow, traitorous heat through your stomach, because whenever Azriel looked at you like this, whenever his voice settled into that low command that seemed to wrap itself around every fragile part of your attention, it became dangerously easy to forget that you had ever wanted to resist him at all.
You opened your mouth, likely to say something clever, or infuriating, or both, but his fingers caught your chin before the words came. Not harshly. Just enough to steady you when your focus drifted, enough to bring your eyes back to his.
“Upstairs,” he commanded.
You stared at him for a moment, your lips parted, your heart suddenly far louder than the rain against the windows. Then you sighed as though granting him a tremendous mercy and slid both arms around his neck. “Fine,” you said, your voice softer now, though the spark in your eyes remained. “Carry me then.”
A shiver ran down his spine.
Azriel should have refused, and he knew it with the same brutal clarity with which he knew the weight of Truth-Teller in his hand. He should have told you that you could walk, that the stairs were not so far, that he was not about to reward your chaos by carrying you to your bedroom like some indulged little queen. He should have done any number of sensible things.
Instead, one arm slid beneath your knees while the other settled around your back, and a moment later your feet left the ground.
Your smile turned victorious at once, unbearably pleased, but it softened almost immediately when you tucked yourself closer against him, cheek brushing his shoulder as though this were where you had intended to end up all along.
The laughter that had filled the room only minutes before quieted into something drowsier, more intimate, and Azriel found that he preferred your chaos to your silence if only because silence made him aware of every detail he was trying not to feel: the weight of you in his arms, the warmth of your body through the layers between you, the loose curl of your fingers at the back of his neck, the way your breath skimmed the skin just beneath his jaw whenever you sighed.
The House seemed impossibly still as he carried you toward the stairs.
As though the walls themselves were listening.
“You like carrying me,” you mumbled against him halfway up the first flight.
Azriel kept his gaze fixed ahead. “You’re very light.”
“That wasn’t what I said.”
“No,” he replied, carefully adjusting his hold when you shifted in his arms, “it wasn’t.”
Your quiet laugh brushed his neck, and something in his chest tightened so sharply he nearly stopped walking. He had carried you before, had caught you before, had touched you in all the ways friendship and danger allowed, but this felt different in the hush after midnight, with your arms around his neck and your body pliant from wine and exhaustion, trusting him so completely that it made something old and lonely inside him ache.
The stairs seemed endless, and not nearly long enough.
By the time he reached the corridor leading to your room, your eyes had grown heavier, though he could tell you were still awake from the tiny smile playing at your mouth. The faelights glowed low along the walls, catching on the rainwater still clinging to the ends of his hair, and the storm beyond the windows filled the silence with a steady, silver sound. Your bedroom door opened before he reached it, the House once again far too eager to assist.
Azriel glanced down at you. “Did you?”
He gave a long-suffering sigh as he stepped into your room. “An impressive victory.”
He lowered you onto the edge of the bed with deliberate care, keeping one hand near your shoulder until he was certain you would not immediately tip sideways, but the moment he began to draw back, you caught his wrist. Your fingers wrapped loosely around him, warm and unsteady, and for a second he looked at that touch as though it had physically pinned him in place.
“You have to turn around,” you said.
For half a second, exhaustion dulled his understanding.
Then he saw your hand reaching for the fastening at the back of your dress.
Azriel turned so quickly his wings nearly clipped the bedpost.
Behind him, your soft laugh filled the room, not as wild as it had been downstairs, but warmer, lower, threaded with a sleepy amusement that somehow made the back of his neck heat.
He fixed his attention on the opposite wall with the focus of a male attempting to survive an interrogation, taking in the uneven stack of books on the small table beside the chair, the curtains shifting faintly with the storm-cooled air, the pale reflection of rain moving over the dark glass of the window.
He tried not to listen to the whisper of fabric behind him. Tried not to imagine the dress sliding from your shoulders, tried not to think of all the ways this room was yours, and therefore more dangerous than any enemy stronghold he had ever entered.
Your room carried traces of you everywhere.
A ribbon abandoned on the chair. A book left open facedown beside your bed. A bracelet near the washbasin. The blanket you always claimed was unnecessary and always dragged over yourself by dawn.
Little pieces of an ordinary life he had no right to want so badly. He had been inside this room before, but always briefly, always with purpose, always with enough distance to pretend the intimacy of it did not touch him. Tonight, standing with his back turned while you changed only a few feet away, that pretense failed him entirely.
Because he wanted to belong here.
The thought arrived without mercy.
Not as a dramatic revelation, not with the force of lightning or the clarity of prophecy, but quietly, almost gently, as though it had been living in him for far longer than he had allowed himself to know.
He wanted to know this room in the dark. Wanted to recognize which floorboard creaked near the bed, wanted to know which side you slept on, whether you woke slowly or all at once, whether you pushed the blankets away when the room grew too warm.
He wanted the sort of familiarity that could not be stolen in glances.
His shadows gathered near his feet as though sensing the direction of his thoughts.
“You can look now,” you said.
He drew one controlled breath before turning.
You were already on the bed, not tucked beneath the covers as he had expected, but sitting near the center of the mattress in an oversized sleep shirt that slipped loosely over one shoulder, your legs folded beneath you and your hair falling around your face in soft, tangled waves.
The bright defiance from downstairs had dimmed into something far more dangerous, something quiet and heavy-lidded and unguarded. The stormlight silvered the edges of you, while the faelights cast a muted gold over the rest, and for a moment Azriel could only stand at the foot of the bed, caught between the instinct to leave and the ache of being asked, wordlessly, to stay.
No triumphant grin. No clever remark. No accusation that he was afraid, even though you would have been right. You only watched him, your gaze resting on his face with a stillness that felt nothing like the wine-driven chaos from before. He could have handled another joke. He could have argued with you. He could have deflected, tucked the blankets around you, made some dry comment about how miserable you would be in the morning. But your silence left him nowhere to go.
Then, slowly, as though the movement required more concentration than it should have, you lifted one finger and crooked it toward yourself.
The gesture was not seductive, not really. Not polished enough for that, not deliberate in the way it might have been had you been fully sober and fully aware of the devastation you were leaving in your wake. It was softer than that. Sleepier. Almost innocent, and somehow worse for it.
“No,” he said, though the word came out quieter than he intended.
Your brows pulled together, not hurt, only confused, and after a moment you did it again. The same small curl of your finger. The same silent command. The same impossible invitation.
His name, spoken like that, nearly brought him to his knees.
He should have left. He knew that. He knew it with brutal certainty as the rain blurred the windows behind him and his shadows pressed close to his wings, as though even they were bracing for the mistake he was about to make. He should have said goodnight and closed the door. He should have spared you whatever this room was becoming.
Instead, he crossed to you.
Not quickly. Not eagerly.
Slowly enough that he could still pretend he was making a rational choice, that he was only coming closer because you were tired and might try to climb out of bed again if he refused.
Slowly enough that every step felt like another line crossed in the dark. When he lowered himself onto the edge of the mattress, he left space between you, one hand resting on the blanket, his wings held carefully behind him.
“I came over,” he said softly, trying to make his voice lighter than the room felt. “Now sleep.”
It was astonishing, he thought distantly, how much more powerful your quiet could be than your laughter. Downstairs, you had filled every corner of the House with movement and sound, but here, with your eyes fixed on him and your hands resting uselessly in your lap, you seemed to pull the whole room inward until there was no world beyond the bed, the rain, the careful distance he had placed between your bodies.
He tried once more to break it before it deepened past the point of return.
“Cassian will be unbearable tomorrow when he hears about the singing,” he murmured. “If he mentions the dancing, I’ll deny seeing anything.”
A faint curve touched your mouth, but it was not the one he had been aiming for. It faded almost immediately.
Azriel’s hand stilled against the blanket. “Do what?”
“Make everything softer when I ask for something real.”
The question moved through him slowly, finding places his armor did not cover. For a moment, he almost pretended he did not understand. It would have been easy. You were tired. You had been drinking. He could have smiled and told you that you were not making sense, then tucked you beneath the blankets and left before the words between you became something neither of you could set aside in the morning. But you were looking at him with such open, aching clarity that the lie felt cruel before it even reached his tongue.
Not defensive. Not dismissive.
You moved closer before he could respond, slowly, carefully, as though the room had become water and you were pushing your way through it. Your knees brushed his thigh, and his breath went still in his chest. Your hand came to his shoulder first, then slid to the back of his neck with a gentleness that felt far more intimate than boldness would have.
He could have stopped you at any moment. He should have. But every instinct to protect you warred violently against the fact that you were reaching for him, and he had spent so long not being reached for with any softness that, for one terrible second, he simply let himself have the weight of your hand against his skin.
Then you climbed into his lap.
Awkwardly, because you were tired and unsteady, and because the blankets twisted beneath your knees, but the effect was devastating all the same. Azriel’s hands lifted instinctively, hovering at your sides, uncertain whether holding you would be the greater sin or letting you fall. When you swayed, the decision made itself. His arms wrapped around your waist and drew you securely against him, careful and firm, nothing more than necessary.
At least, that was what he told himself.
You sighed the moment he held you.
The sound went through him like a wound.
Your knees rested on either side of his hips, your hands warm at the back of his neck, your body fitted against his with a trust that made his restraint feel suddenly fragile. He had imagined wanting before, had hated himself for it, had turned away from the thought of you in countless quiet moments when his mind wandered where it should not. But imagination had been nothing compared to the reality of you settling into his lap with your eyes heavy and your face bare of every defense you usually carried.
Your forehead touched his.
Azriel stopped pretending he was unaffected.
He did not move, did not speak, did not so much as breathe deeply enough to shift you against him, but every part of him became aware. The warmth of your thighs bracketing his. The slight tremble in your fingers where they touched his neck. The softness of your breath against his mouth. The tiny space between your lips and his, no distance at all and yet somehow the only thing keeping him from becoming the sort of male who took what he wanted simply because it was offered in the dark.
His body knew before his mind allowed the thought to form. He felt the change in you, the quiet decision, the vulnerable courage wine had given you and morning might steal away. You moved slowly, uncertainly, your mouth nearing his with a softness that nearly ended him.
The truth was so sharp it almost hurt.
He wanted with a force that hollowed out every sensible thought, wanted in a way that had nothing clean or controlled about it. He wanted to close that final inch and feel whether you sighed into his mouth the way you had sighed into his arms. Wanted to know if your hands would tighten at his neck. Wanted to stop being careful for once in his long, miserable life and let himself have the thing he had been quietly, foolishly starving for.
His hand slid to the back of your neck.
Your lips remained close enough that one more breath might have ruined him.
Your eyes opened slowly, confused and soft and far too trusting.
Azriel closed his own for a heartbeat because looking at you made refusal feel like violence. When he opened them again, he kept his hand at the back of your neck, thumb resting lightly beneath your ear, grounding both of you as much as stopping you.
“You’re drunk,” he said, his voice rougher than he wanted it to be. “Not like this.”
The words entered the room and changed it.
Not shattering anything. Not truly.
But settling over you both with the heavy quiet of something almost lost before it could begin.
For one painful second, your face shifted, and Azriel thought he had hurt you. Your mouth softened, your eyes lowering not in shame but in disappointment so tired and vulnerable that his arms tightened before he could stop them.
He wanted to apologize. Wanted to tell you that every selfish part of him was screaming. Wanted you to understand that refusing you was not rejection, that it was the only honorable thing left in him.
The admission was so small that it nearly broke him.
His thumb moved once against the back of your neck.
“Tomorrow,” he said, though he did not know if he was promising you or begging himself. “If you still want this tomorrow, when the wine is gone and you can look at me and know exactly what you’re asking for, then I’ll listen.”
You searched his face for a long moment, and in the pale glow of the storm, Azriel saw too much pass through your eyes. Sleep. Want. Fear. A sadness he hated because he recognized, with sudden clarity, that it had been there long before tonight.
“Will you run?” you asked.
The question was barely more than a breath.
Azriel felt it land in the center of his chest.
There was no drunkenness in it now. No teasing, no reckless edge, no playful challenge for him to deflect. It was not about the kiss. Not really. It was about every time he had stepped away when your hand brushed his. Every time he had looked at your mouth and then turned his face toward the window. Every time your laughter softened into something quieter and he answered with silence because silence was safer than hope. You were asking about all of it. About months of almosts and not-quites, about the distance he kept rebuilding each time you came close enough to touch the part of him that still believed tenderness always came with a blade hidden somewhere inside it.
He wanted to tell you that running had never felt like running when he did it.
It had felt like protecting you.
It had felt like protecting himself.
It had felt like standing very still while the world offered him something he had no idea how to hold without breaking.
But you were waiting, and your fingers had curled weakly into the collar of his shirt, and for once Azriel could not bear to give you another careful answer.
Your eyes remained on his.
There was no accusation in your voice.
Azriel looked at you for a long time. He thought of telling you that you were wrong, but the lie would have been too cruel when both of you knew the truth. He had run. Not dramatically, not visibly, but in every way that mattered. He had fled into duty, into silence, into shadows, into the safety of being needed but never claimed. He had run because wanting you had become one of the few things in his life that frightened him more than loss.
His hand tightened slightly at your waist.
He knew it was not enough.
But it was all he could give you while you sat in his lap with wine still in your blood and sleep pulling at your eyes, all he could offer without turning this moment into something you might regret or something he would never forgive himself for wanting too badly.
For a while, you only looked at him. Then the tension seemed to leave you all at once, your body surrendering with heartbreaking suddenness to the exhaustion it had been fighting since you left Rita’s. You lowered your head, not toward his mouth this time, but into the hollow between his neck and shoulder, and Azriel held you as your breathing slowly began to even out against his skin.
He told himself he would lay you down in a moment.
When he finally shifted, intending to ease you beneath the blankets properly, your arms tightened around him and a small sound of protest left you.
“I’m just putting you to bed,” he murmured.
The word was soft with sleep, but it held him more completely than any command ever had.
Azriel looked toward the rain-streaked windows, toward the blurred lights of Velaris beyond them, toward the storm that had wrapped the city and this room in a hush that felt almost unreal. Every sensible part of him gathered its arguments.
Morning would come. You might remember too much, or not enough. He would wake beside you with his restraint frayed to nothing and have to pretend that lying in your bed had not changed him.
Staying was dangerous. Leaving was wise.
Then you shifted closer, your cheek pressing into his shoulder, your hand still curled loosely in his shirt as though even in half-sleep you needed proof he was there.
The arguments died quietly.
“All right,” he murmured.
It took longer than it should have to get you beneath the blankets, mostly because you refused to release him entirely and partly because Azriel’s hands were not as steady as he wished when he brushed the hair back from your face.
He tucked the blanket around your shoulders, adjusted the pillow beneath your head, and told himself that this was enough, that he had done what you asked, that he could sit in the chair until you slept and leave before dawn.
But when he tried to draw away, your fingers found his again.
Not strong enough to hold him.
Azriel stood there for a moment in silence, looking down at your hand around his, and then he removed his boots, unfastened the weapons that made lying down impossible, and settled carefully on top of the blankets beside you. He left space at first, a careful, respectful distance that might have survived had you been any more awake.
You turned toward him immediately.
Half-asleep, entirely trusting, you tucked yourself beneath his arm and rested your head against his chest as though his restraint had been nothing more than an inconvenience to be ignored. Azriel stared at the ceiling while the House dimmed the faelights to a soft, forgiving glow, his entire body held in that impossible space between torment and peace.
For a long while, he did not move.
Then, slowly, when your breathing had deepened and your hand had gone slack against his shirt, he let his arm settle around you.
Then with more certainty when you sighed in your sleep and pressed closer.
His shadows returned after that, tentative and quiet, drifting over the blankets in thin ribbons of darkness. One brushed a strand of hair from your cheek. Another curled near your hand as though guarding it. Azriel did not stop them.
The storm continued beyond the windows, soft and steady, turning the world outside to silver. The city below glittered faintly through the rain. Your room smelled of lavender and parchment and the faint trace of wine still lingering in your hair, and Azriel lay awake inside the life he had no right to imagine for himself, listening to you breathe.
Instead, he remained exactly where he was, one arm around you, your hand still curled loosely in the fabric of his shirt as though some part of you feared waking to find him gone.
Perhaps that was what lingered most.
Not the warmth of you against him.
Not even the unbearable knowledge that if you had been sober, if this had been any other night, he did not know whether he would have found the strength to stop you.
The words had settled somewhere deep inside him and refused to leave.
Because you had not been asking about tonight.
You had been asking about every other time.
Every moment he had stepped back.
Every feeling he had buried.
Every door he had quietly closed before either of you could walk through it.
Azriel lowered his head slightly, his gaze settling on the crown of your hair.
The promise felt terrifying in a way battlefields never had.
Tomorrow, you would wake up.
Tomorrow, you would remember.
Tomorrow, he would no longer have wine or exhaustion or midnight shadows to hide behind.
And yet, for the first time in a very long while, the thought did not make him retreat.
His hand moved once through your hair.
As though touching something precious.
"Tomorrow," he murmured into the darkness.
Then, sometime before dawn, exhaustion finally claimed him too, his cheek resting lightly against your hair while your hand remained curled in his shirt, neither of you letting go.
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