The Things We Left Unsaid
Azriel x Reader
Angst / Hurt-Comfort / Jealousy
Twenty years ago, you left Velaris with no intention of ever returning.
When Rhysand's wedding invitation arrives, you convince yourself you can endure one night beneath familiar stars. One night among old friends. One night in the same room as the male you spent centuries loving and decades trying to forget.
You were dead wrong.
Returning home had not been on your bingo card.
When you had left Velaris all those years ago, you had done so with every intention of ensuring it would be a very long, very merciful stretch of time before you ever set foot in the City of Starlight again. Not because you hated it. If anything, that had been the cruelest part. Velaris had never been the sort of place one could hate easily, not when its river caught the stars each night as though the sky itself had spilled into the Sidra, not when music drifted from open windows in the Rainbow and laughter carried through streets that had once known your footsteps better than any road in the world. Velaris had been beautiful. Velaris had been safe. Velaris had been home in a way no court, no palace, no kingdom across the sea had ever managed to become after you left.
And home, unfortunately, had teeth.
It was not the city itself that had driven you away, though for years you had allowed people to believe that because it was easier than explaining the truth. It was easier to let them imagine wanderlust, ambition, restlessness, politics—anything other than the fact that you had crossed oceans because remaining here had begun to feel like pressing your fingers into an open wound and pretending you did not bleed every time you saw him.
Even thinking his name after all this time felt like reaching toward a flame you had once mistaken for warmth.
When Rhysand’s wedding invitation had arrived several weeks ago, sealed in dark wax and marked with the crest of the Night Court, you had stared at it for nearly an hour before gathering the courage to open it. You had known, even before reading the elegant words written inside, that you would come. Rhys was your friend, one of the oldest and dearest pieces of a life you had tried so desperately to fold away, and if he had found the sort of happiness people wrote songs about and built legends around, then you would stand beneath whatever sky he chose and smile for him. You would be glad. You were glad. Truly, painfully glad.
Yet the moment your fingers had brushed the parchment, something had stirred beneath your skin.
It had gathered at your fingertips in thin, restless threads, a quiet pulse of silver-white heat crawling over your knuckles as though your power had recognized the danger before your mind had allowed itself to name it. You had closed your fist until your nails bit into your palm and forced the storm back into the hollow spaces of your bones, but even then, even months ago, some part of you had understood that returning to Velaris would not be a simple act of friendship. It would be an excavation. A reopening. A walking willingly into a room full of ghosts and pretending none of them still knew your name.
Now, standing on one of the House of Wind’s marble terraces with the wedding celebration glowing behind you and the whole city stretched beneath you in impossible beauty, you wished you had listened to whatever warning your magic had tried to give.
That was what made it unbearable.
The Sidra still shimmered below, winding through Velaris like liquid starlight. Lanterns still glowed along the streets. Music still rose from the celebration behind you, soft and warm and full of joy, mingling with the murmur of voices and the occasional burst of laughter from guests who had no idea that you were gripping the balcony railing as though it were the only thing keeping you from splitting apart. The mountains still stood dark and eternal beyond the city, cradling it in their ancient arms, and above them the stars burned with the same devastating brilliance you remembered from a hundred nights spent telling yourself you would leave soon, that you would stop waiting soon, that one day loving Azriel would become something distant and survivable.
It should have comforted you to find Velaris unchanged.
Instead, it made your chest ache with a grief so sharp it felt almost humiliating.
Because the city had remained exactly as it was while you had spent twenty years learning how to exist without it.
“Gods, you look like you’re about to throw yourself into the Sidra.”
Dorian’s voice slid into the quiet beside you, smooth and amused and far too aware, and you turned your head just enough to glare at him.
He only smiled, stepping closer until his shoulder nearly brushed yours, the moonlight catching the elegant lines of his face and the dark sweep of his hair. There had been a time, years ago, when Dorian’s smile had made you forget how much you hurt. There had even been a time when both of you had tried to believe that friendship might become something easier, something safer, something that did not involve bleeding out over a male half a world away. It had not worked, of course, because Dorian had been too clever and you had been too haunted, and eventually you had both laughed about the failure over too much wine and settled into something far rarer than romance.
Worse, he understood you.
“It is a wedding,” he reminded you, leaning his forearms against the railing as though the sight of the city was merely pleasant and not currently carving you open. “A happy event, from what I have gathered. People do occasionally smile at those.”
“You look like you’re attending a funeral.”
You rolled your eyes, though the gesture lacked any real force. “I brought you here as moral support, not as commentary.”
You glared at him, then smiled with all your teeth, "That's better."
Despite yourself, the corner of your mouth twitched.
Dorian immediately pointed.
His laughter echoed softly between you.
His shoulder bumped yours lightly, and the familiarity of it loosened something in your chest for half a breath before the pressure beneath your skin surged again. Dorian must have felt it, because his amusement faded just enough for concern to slip through. The air around the terrace had begun to shift, the warmth of the evening sharpening with the electric promise of a storm not yet visible in the sky. You hated that he noticed. You hated that anyone could notice, but your magic had always been the most honest thing about you, even when you wished it would learn the value of silence.
Storms gathered easiest when your emotions escaped your control.
Anger, fear, grief, longing—your power did not care which wound had been touched. It answered all of them the same way. Lightning in your veins. Pressure in the air. Clouds drawn over clear skies like curtains pulled across a stage. You had spent centuries mastering it, had learned how to call thunder with a flick of your wrist and split battlefields apart with a single raised hand. Men had trembled before that power. Courts had whispered about it. There were kings beyond the sea who still spoke your name like a warning.
Yet for all your strength, you had never fully mastered the curse hidden inside it.
You could hide your thoughts. You could school your face into perfect indifference. You could lie so sweetly that even ancient creatures believed you.
And tonight, the sky was listening far too closely.
Dorian’s hand found yours beneath the fall of your sleeve, his fingers warm around your cold ones, his thumb brushing slow circles over your knuckles with the steady patience of someone coaxing a frightened animal back from the edge of flight. “Breathe,” he murmured, low enough that only you could hear.
You looked away from him, toward the city, because his kindness made the ache worse. “I’m fine.”
Despite yourself, your mouth twitched, and Dorian’s smile returned faintly, though it did not reach his eyes this time. “If you want to leave, we can leave. I’ll offend someone important on our way out if you need a convincing reason.”
The offer settled between you with surprising heaviness.
For a heartbeat, the temptation was so strong you nearly turned toward the door.
You could leave before the ceremony became the reception, before the old faces found you, before Rhys pulled you into a hug and made you feel guilty for staying away, before Mor cried and Cassian shouted your name across a room, before Amren looked you over and said something dreadful and accurate. You could leave before the true danger found you.
Because while Rhysand’s wedding was the reason you had returned to Velaris, it was not the reason your hands would not stop shaking.
And if anyone from your old life looked at you closely enough tonight, they would know it too.
Your gaze drifted to the stars above the terrace, and the sight of them almost undid you. You had forgotten, somehow, how Velaris made the sky feel close enough to touch. Across the sea, there had been beautiful places, glittering courts and ancient cities and ports where the sun bled gold into the water every evening, but none of them had ever managed to make the stars feel like old friends. Here, they seemed to look back at you. Here, they remembered.
Gods, you had missed them.
That was the first betrayal of the night.
The second came when you realized that missing Velaris still felt painfully similar to missing him.
The ceremony itself was beautiful, which was almost cruel.
Rhys had never looked happier. You had known him through arrogance and grief and war, had seen him wearing power like armor and sorrow like a second skin, yet nothing in all your years of friendship had prepared you for the expression on his face when Feyre walked toward him. It softened him completely. Not weakened him, never that, but changed him. He looked like a male who had finally found a place to set down the weight of centuries, and Feyre, radiant beneath the glow of lanterns and starlight, looked at him as though she had no intention of letting him carry it alone ever again.
Yet beneath the happiness, beneath the warmth spreading through the gathered court as vows were spoken and rings were exchanged, something old shifted inside you with slow, aching cruelty. Once, a very long time ago, before pride and silence and cowardice had turned wanting into a weapon, you had imagined what it might be like to be looked at that way. Not by just anyone. You had not wanted just anyone. That had always been the problem.
By the time the celebration moved fully into the night and guests spilled across the terrace with glasses of wine and laughter bright on their tongues, your nerves had become a living thing beneath your skin. You turned toward Dorian, intending to say something sharp enough to distract yourself from the hollow place behind your ribs, and then the world stopped.
Because across the terrace, half-hidden between a cluster of guests and a spill of golden faelight, stood Azriel.
Your body recognized him before your mind could protect you.
The betrayal was immediate and total.
Your breath caught so sharply that it hurt. Your fingers tightened around your glass until the stem nearly cracked. Every sound around you dulled at once, the music and laughter and conversation falling away as though the entire celebration had been plunged beneath water, and suddenly there was only the impossible distance between you and the male you had spent twenty years trying not to love.
He looked exactly as you remembered him.
He looked like memory had been kind to you, and reality had arrived to punish you for surviving it.
Time had sharpened him, carving new edges into a face already too beautiful for mercy. A scar you did not recognize cut faintly above one dark brow, pale against the warm brown of his skin. His hair was longer than it had been when you left, falling with careless elegance over his forehead, and he was not wearing his leathers tonight, not the familiar armor that had always made him look like something forged for violence. The dark formal jacket he wore instead should have softened him.
If anything, it made the sight of him more devastating.
He still wore his siphons.
The blue stones gleamed faintly at his hands, and for one breath—one foolish, impossible breath—you thought they flared when his eyes found yours.
Azriel went utterly still.
As though every muscle in his body had forgotten its purpose.
His expression did not change at first, and perhaps that was what hurt the most, because you knew that face. You knew the mask he wore when feeling too much would be dangerous. You knew the quiet, controlled nothingness he offered the world when something inside him had moved too violently to be trusted in public. But then, beneath that restraint, something flickered. Shock first. Not surprise. Shock. A raw, unguarded fracture in the careful lines of his face. Then relief, so brief and terrible that it made your heart twist. Then something deeper, something that disappeared so quickly you almost convinced yourself it had never been there at all.
The word formed in your mind before you could stop it.
You hated yourself for it.
Hated the way your heart stumbled toward him, stupid and loyal and apparently untouched by the passing of decades. Hated the warmth that spread through your chest at the sight of him alive and whole and looking at you as though you had stepped out of some dream he had never admitted to having. Hated the small, traitorous part of you that whispered that perhaps time had been cruel to him too. That perhaps you had not been the only one who carried the ghost of what might have been.
Twenty years, and still your body reacted to him as though no time had passed at all.
That was the third betrayal.
The crowd flowed between you, laughing and brushing past with glasses of wine and bright wedding smiles, but the two of you remained caught in a silence that felt separate from the rest of the world. His gaze traveled over your face with such careful intensity that it almost felt like touch. Not polite observation. Not casual recognition. He looked at you as though he were trying to reconcile memory with reality, as though he had imagined this moment often enough to know exactly how it would ruin him and still found himself unprepared.
You wondered if he could hear your heart.
Because you could feel it everywhere.
In the restless lightning gathering beneath your skin.
A distant rumble rolled across the mountains.
Dorian, standing beside you, followed your gaze and went quiet in a way he almost never did. For once, he did not immediately make a joke. He simply studied Azriel for a long moment, then leaned closer and murmured, “I assume that is him.”
Dorian glanced at the sky as another low growl of thunder moved over the city. “Right,” he said softly, and though there was still a trace of humor in his voice, it had gentled around the edges. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
You should have looked away.
Across the terrace, Azriel finally moved.
Not rushed enough to betray eagerness, not hesitant enough to suggest doubt. He crossed the space between you with the same controlled grace you remembered from battlefields and council rooms and quiet hallways long after midnight, but the closer he came, the more you saw the truth beneath the calm. His shadows had gone unnervingly still around him. Not absent. Not quite. They hovered at his shoulders and wrists like creatures holding their breath.
You had imagined seeing him again more times than you cared to admit. In some versions, you were cold. In others, cruel. Sometimes you said everything you had swallowed twenty years ago. Sometimes he apologized. Sometimes he did not. Sometimes you left before he could speak at all.
Not one of those imagined conversations survived the sight of him walking toward you.
Beside you, Dorian shifted, his hand still loosely holding yours. “If you need me to fake an illness, I can collapse beautifully.”
The absurdity of it should not have made you laugh.
Only briefly. Only softly. But the sound escaped before you could catch it, and unfortunately, Azriel arrived close enough to hear.
His gaze snapped to your mouth.
To the fading curve of your smile.
Something darkened in his eyes.
Something older and uglier and far more possessive than he had any right to feel.
The silence that followed stretched until even Dorian seemed to sense that joking now would be unwise.
Up close, the years became both kinder and crueler. You could see the faint lines at the corners of Azriel’s eyes, the new scars, the subtle silver threading near his temples, the way the shadows curled tighter against him as though they knew something their master refused to say. He was older. Harder, perhaps. More tired in ways only someone who had once known him well would notice.
And still, devastatingly, Azriel.
Your chest ached so fiercely that for a moment you feared your magic would answer it.
His eyes did not leave your face.
As though he were afraid that if he looked away, even for a heartbeat, you would disappear again.
So simple it should not have undone you.
But his voice was rougher than you remembered, lower somehow, and there was something caught inside it that made every careful defense you had built over the years shift uneasily.
You swallowed. “Hi, Azriel.”
His name felt dangerous on your tongue.
Familiar in the worst possible way.
It summoned too much. Every argument that had not truly been an argument. Every glance held a moment too long. Every near-confession buried beneath duty or fear or pride. Every Solstice night, every training ring, every brush of his shadows against your wrist when he thought you were not paying attention. Memory rushed through you so quickly that you almost swayed beneath it.
Azriel noticed, of course he did.
Nothing had ever escaped him, least of all you.
His eyes softened by a fraction, and the softness hurt more than indifference would have. “I wasn’t sure you would come.”
There were too many things hidden beneath the words.
I looked for you. I wondered. I hoped. I was afraid you wouldn’t.
You heard all of them and trusted none of them.
“Of course I came,” you replied, forcing your voice to remain even. “It’s Rhys.”
For a moment, Azriel said nothing.
His gaze stayed on yours, steady and unreadable, but something tightened near his jaw.
As though that had not been the answer he wanted.
As though there had been another answer he had hoped for, one neither of you had earned the right to say aloud.
Dorian cleared his throat gently, not because he was uncomfortable, you realized, but because he could feel the pressure thickening in the air. The storm had gathered faster than you intended. Somewhere above the House of Wind, clouds were beginning to smother the stars.
You dragged yourself back to the present and glanced between them, suddenly aware of Dorian’s hand still loosely around yours. “Azriel, this is Dorian.”
His attention landed on the place where Dorian’s fingers touched yours, and something in the space around him sharpened. The shadows at his shoulders stirred for the first time since he had crossed the terrace. One slid down his arm like spilled ink, vanishing before it reached his hand, but not before you saw the slight flare of his siphons.
Small enough that anyone else might miss it.
Large enough to make your heart twist with cruel satisfaction.
“Azriel,” he said, extending a hand.
Dorian accepted it easily, his expression open and pleasant in the way it became when he had already learned everything he needed to know from a single glance. “Dorian.”
Azriel’s grip looked controlled.
“Prince,” he said, and though the word was perfectly polite, you knew Azriel well enough to hear the blade hidden beneath it.
Dorian only chuckled, either unaware or deliberately pretending to be. “Just Dorian is fine. I try not to lead with the title unless I need someone intimidated, impressed, or deeply bored.”
You nearly loved him for it.
The atmosphere grew heavier anyway, the air pressing against your lungs as though the storm above had begun descending toward the terrace. Dorian glanced upward, then back at you with the faintest raise of his brow. “You know, in most courts, this would be considered a weather concern.”
Before you could answer, movement behind Azriel caught your eye.
A female approached through the crowd, and your stomach sank before you could understand why.
She was beautiful in the sort of effortless way that felt unfair. Not dazzling. Not striking. Simply beautiful. The kind of beauty people trusted immediately. Long chestnut hair cascaded over her shoulders, and laughter still lingered in her eyes from whatever conversation she had just left behind.
Gods, that almost made it worse.
Because she didn't carry herself like someone trying to impress Azriel.
She carried herself like someone who already knew she belonged near him.
That, more than anything, was what struck you first.
Not the way people turned slightly as she passed.
Azriel sensed her before she reached him.
A slight turn of his head.
A subtle shift in his stance.
But enough to tell you that he had expected her presence, or at least was no longer surprised by it.
Something cold moved through you.
The female smiled at him first, bright and gentle, then looked to you with curiosity blooming across her face. She seemed kind. That was the worst part. There was nothing sharp or cruel in her expression, no calculation, no triumph. Only interest and warmth and a faint excitement that made you feel suddenly, viciously ashamed of the bitterness already rising in your throat.
Azriel looked between you, and for the first time all evening, he seemed uncertain.
Not enough for Dorian to notice, perhaps.
You noticed everything about him, even now, especially now.
“Y/N,” Azriel said carefully, and the caution in his voice made the cold inside you spread. “This is Selene.”
The pause before he continued was brief.
Selene's face lit with recognition. “Oh,” she breathed, stepping closer before you had time to prepare yourself. “I’ve heard so much about you.”
The words struck with ridiculous force.
You looked at Azriel before you could stop yourself.
What version of you had survived twenty years inside his mouth?
Had he told her you were an old friend?
A woman who had once been stupid enough to refuse a necklace because accepting it would have meant admitting she wanted more than he was ready to give?
The questions rose like thorns, but Selene had already reached for your hands with a smile so genuine that you forced yourself to meet it. Her fingers were warm around yours, her delight painfully sincere, and you hated that your first instinct was to search her face for evidence of things she had not done to you.
None of this was her fault.
The knowledge did not soften the ache.
“I’m glad to finally meet you,” she said, still smiling. “Azriel never says much, but when he does, people tend to listen.”
You could not help the faint, humorless curve of your mouth. “That sounds like him.”
Azriel’s attention flicked to you, swift and sharp.
For a heartbeat, something like memory passed between you.
Not meaning to find anything.
The delicate chain rested against Selene's throat like a secret made visible, the stone at its center catching a sliver of faelight and throwing it back in a soft, familiar gleam.
Your entire body went still.
For a moment, your mind refused to understand what your eyes had already recognized.
The small, almost hidden detail at the clasp that you had once touched with trembling fingers beneath Solstice lights, staring at the gift Azriel had placed before you with that careful, guarded expression that had made you want to cry even then.
That was the cruelty of it, wasn’t it?
You had looked at the beautiful thing he offered you and seen every unspoken word between you reflected in the stone, every possibility, every danger, every reason accepting it might shatter whatever fragile thing you had been pretending not to feel. So you had pushed it back toward him with a smile you still remembered hating and told him it was too much.
You had meant: I am terrified of what this means.
He had heard: I do not want it.
And now it rested against Selene's skin as though it belonged there.
As though it had found a home after you refused to be one.
The terrace tilted beneath your feet.
Dorian’s hand tightened around yours.
Azriel saw exactly where you were looking.
You knew the moment he realized.
It happened quickly, but not quickly enough. His face changed, the mask slipping in a way so brief and devastating that you almost wished it had not happened at all. Regret flashed across his features first, naked and immediate. Then pain. Then something that looked dangerously close to panic.
The thought arrived with such quiet cruelty that it nearly made you laugh.
The answer to a question you had spent twenty years pretending you were not still asking.
Unbelievably, humiliatingly stupid.
Some secret, stubborn part of you had come back to Velaris believing that perhaps distance had lied. That perhaps the years had not buried everything. That perhaps, when you saw him again, there might be something left between you worth aching over.
Perhaps that was the worst part.
Because Azriel was looking at you as though you had just found the knife he had forgotten was still buried in your chest.
The word left you softly.
The sort of calm that never truly meant peace. The sort that arrived when the clouds had already gathered and the storm was only deciding where to strike first.
Selene glanced between you, confusion dimming some of the brightness in her eyes, and guilt lanced through you so quickly you almost flinched. She did not deserve this. She did not deserve the storm gathering above your head or the venom sitting beneath your tongue. Whatever Azriel had done, whatever history had led to this moment, she had merely walked into a wound she had not known existed.
Truly smiled, even if it cost you something.
“It’s lovely to meet you.”
Her answering smile was smaller now, uncertain but kind. “You too.”
Then you looked at Azriel.
At the male you had loved too long and hated too poorly.
At the shadows curling anxiously near his wrists.
At the siphons glowing faintly again, betraying what his face was desperately trying to conceal.
At the regret in his eyes, deep and immediate and useless.
Your smile did not falter.
Anyone listening might have mistaken them for a compliment.
Azriel heard the funeral.
You saw it in his face, in the way something behind his eyes went utterly still, in the tiny, helpless movement of his hand as though he meant to reach for you and had finally remembered he no longer had the right.
Dorian moved before you had to ask.
His fingers laced with yours properly this time, not possessive, not performative, simply steady, and you let him guide you back toward the open doors where light and music spilled from the celebration inside. You did not look away from Azriel as you passed him. Not once. You held his gaze with every shard of anger and misery and old love still burning inside you, because if he was going to watch you walk away again, then you wanted him to understand exactly what he had placed around another female’s neck.
Behind you, the first crack of lightning split the sky over Velaris.
The thunder followed a heartbeat later, violent enough to silence the terrace.
And when the storm finally broke above the House of Wind, you did not need to turn around to know that Azriel was still standing exactly where you had left him.
A/n : well well well, the ansgt is BACK !!
I loved writing this part, I had this idea for such a long time ! Hope you enjoyed it 💙
I don't know if I'll turn in into a serie yet, let me know !
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