Lucien Vanserra's life, explained through the maturation of his face. Elain has had enough of being protected.
Rare Jewel
After the war, Feyre encourages Elain to invite Lucien to Velaris. Lucien wants permission from the lady herself. Elain wants Lucien to come to Velaris, but it's difficult to speak when he's washing her hands.
Pearls
Part One
Lucien finally learns the truth of his heritage. Elain finds herself a willing source of comfort.
Part Two
Elain and Lucien, on their way to the Day Court, stop in town for a festival to eat and dance. Lucien sabotages himself.
Part Three
Elain and Lucien practice fishing and arrive in the Day Court.
Part Four
Lucien tells Helion the truth.
Part Five
Elain and Lucien explore the Day Court. Elain realizes she's in far deeper than she realized.
Part Six
Elain and Lucien attend an opera, then a party.
Part Seven
Stirrings in Autumn and drunken confessions
Chance Encounters
A series of chance interactions between Elain and Lucien, and one where they meet by choice.
Throne of Glass
Wolfsbane Masterlist
At the base of human desire is the urge to belong, however that takes its shape. Cerise is over one hundred years old and still doesn’t know what belonging looks like.
Cerise Whitethorn is nothing and no one. Her only worth is in the blood oath she swore to Maeve, Queen of the Fae. She is known only by her orders, by her oath. She is the White Death. But what is she when the oath is broken?
(Continued on A03)
For the holiday season I really wanted to commission Elain and Lucien enjoying Starfall at the Night Court 🩵
@cedarcia thank you so much for creating this exquisite artwork! Elain & Lucien look so happy and captivated by all the shooting star-spirits!
All the details in this artwork are lovely! From the snow covered roses, the shooting stars, the night sky, the snow covered balcony —everything is perfection!
@cedarcia thank you so much Kat for taking this commission! Thank you for being so kind during this commission process! It’s always a joy to work with you 🩵
“Did you think it was mere hatred that prompted my brothers to do their best to break and kill me?”
We love the idea that Lucien has been glamouring himself to hide his Day Court powers, especially while growing up in Autumn, for his own self-preservation. We wanted to commission an art piece that depicted his powers surfacing, and all the inner conflict and angst that must make him feel.
Thank you so much conchetujoon for your incredible talent and for drawing Lucien so beautifully!
by conchetujoon
commissioned by me and @eluciensversion
Summary: Stirrings in Autumn and drunken confessions
Word Count: 2.8k
A/N: it's been a while! thanks to everyone bearing with me. I couldn't do it without y'all's support.
Lucien stared at her as if she’d hung the very moon, hands trembling upon her waist as he fought the urge to dip his fingers beneath gauzy fabric and feel warm skin. Her eyes sparkled as she peered up at him, and he could hear her heart hammering over the low roar of music, almost as if frightened of his rejection. As though he could reject her.
You’re my mate.
He nodded once. Twice, and then cupped her face and kissed her swiftly, fully. Her face was warm beneath his hands, so he refrained from tasting her and the wine on her tongue, and instead fought every urge that protested against his pulling back.
Her fingers trembled against smudged glitter. “I’m sure this will somehow reach Nesta and Feyre before I write.” The laugh was light and trembling, like the fluttering of a hummingbird’s heart.
“My father will beat you to it.” He could not, however, fight the urge that had him running his fingers through loose curls. The first time he visited Velaris, she’d worn her hair carefully to hide the pointed ears, but tonight, Elain was positively Fae. As if she had walked out of nature itself, one foot still in the forest. “It seems he’s already beaten us in one sense.”
Elain’s plucked brows furrowed, and she turned to see Helion dancing with one hand on the golden hip of a scantily-clad female and the other holding the stem of steadily emptying glass. The glaze over his eyes was all alcohol. Her rosebud mouth twitched. “So it would seem. I don’t suppose you’d care to catch up.”
The fingers in her hair twitched, catching on errant curls. “You’d like to dance?”
Elain grinned. Sharp canines flashed.
Whatever the golden, shimmering stuff was, Lucien didn’t know, didn’t care. It looked like ichor. Looked like a river in the dying sun as it dribbled from the corner of Elain’s mouth and her tongue darted out to lap it up.
Her skirt was rucked up against him as she danced, cheeks flushed and eyes heavy. The sticky gloss on her lips was smeared across his face now, and he could still taste the latest drink she’d had between songs.
“Elain,” he said lowly into her ear as she fell into him, lining up every inch of her with every inch of him, “Elain, you’re drunk.”
Not a condemnation, not when he was halfway there himself, but in a throng of people he didn’t recognize and with a female he adored very much, he wouldn’t drink himself into a stupor. Even when the attendants were bringing more over by the second and it was the finest he’d ever tasted.
She laughed gleefully, rolling her hips, and his hands tightened on them. Gods, she would be the death of him. “Dance with me.”
“I’ve been dancing with you all evening.” His mouth brushed her ear, and she really wondered why in the world he was being such a bore. How much more obvious did she need to be that she wanted him? He was so gorgeous. And evidently stupid. “The party’s winding down, Elain; we should go up to bed.”
Oh, that sounded like a fantastic idea, and she hauled him along readily with a sudden change in direction that had Lucien exclaiming. His hair shimmered, ribbon on fire, as it flowed behind him. She wished only to braid it.
That was a lie. She wished to do a great deal to him.
Her feet caught amongst themselves and spilled and crashed and tumbled, hopefully right into him, and she squealed with delight when broad hands closed around her hips and hauled her right up into a chest.
Vaguely, she heard a complaint about Nesta and someone being killed, but Elain didn’t pay it much heed when his hair was right up against her nose and she could smell him.
“Don’t come crying to me when you’re ill in the morning,” Lucien muttered dryly, carting her up the stairs and praying one of her maids would be awake to help her change. Beautiful as her clothes were, they certainly weren’t comfortable to sleep in, but Elain hadn’t wanted to so much as see him for so long. Him seeing her in an entirely separate sense seemed largely out of the question. “I didn’t think you’d be a flirtatious drunk.”
“Only with you,” she sang into his ear, nipping the lobe, and he hissed.
“Stop that,” he said gently as they reached her quarters, adjusting her against his chest to open the door to a warm, dark room. “You can try that again in the morning, if you like.”
Elain sighed dramatically as he found her bed in the shadows and laid her upon it to deftly unwind the straps of her sandals. Thin red lines were left in their wake, Elain’s face scrunching up in discomfort – an expression Lucien could not stand, gently massaging her calves, coaxing blood back into her veins.
“Let’s not wear those again,” he murmured, kicking the shoes beneath her bed lest she trip over them in the morning. “Who in hell tied them so tightly?”
Elain pushed lightly against his stomach with her foot. “Jealous?”
He looked up incredulously, his brows shooting to his hairline. She was hardly even looking at him, staring at his chest while half of her seemed poised to tumble right off the bed he’d just set her on. “Of what?”
“Getting to touch me.”
“I’m touching you right now.”
“Not enough.”
Lucien snorted, readjusting her before she fell and sidestepping the hands grabbing for him like a hawk for a kitten. If only she was sober enough to understand just how funny he was. “I think both of us have had enough for tonight.”
Predictably, this was met with some sort of protest, but Lucien was already in the bathroom, wetting a towel to clean the cosmetics from her face when he heard a soft sniffle.
“Lucien?”
Halfway back from the bathroom, he looked up from the dripping cloth to find Elain propped up on her elbows, tears glistening in the moonlight peaking through the curtains as her mouth trembled, his own popping open.
Lucien strode to her side and cupped her face in his hands, forcing her to meet his eyes. “What in the world is the matter, Elain?”
She hiccupped. Her hands came up and held his to her face, gripping tightly despite the incessant trembling that had taken hold of her at some point in the last ten minutes. Tears flowed freely and curved over his fingers, the smell of salt enough to set his knees wobbling. “You don’t want me,” she choked.
He was quiet for a moment. His lips twitched.
Before she could see it, Lucien swept down and pressed a kiss to the crown of her head, smoothing her hair. “You are very drunk,” he said against her, “and I’m starting to wonder if you’ve ever been drunk before. Were you nervous to call me your mate tonight?”
Elain nodded, her hands dropping down to her lap to pick at her nails. He caught it quickly, having no intention of seeing her bleed, and crouched down beside the bed to meet her eyes. Their foreheads thudded together as he said gently, “We can talk about this come morning.” More likely, afternoon. “But for tonight, you just need to know that I care about you very much, and that you don’t need to be nervous about… feeling whatever it is you feel.” He smiled. “You’re the only female I danced with, Elain. Certainly the only female I looked at.”
A pretty blush stained her cheeks, eyes dropping down bashfully. She had mentioned sending Feyre memories to have painted. This one, he thought, would be his own request. To immortalize the vulnerability in her face, wide-open and trusting when but a month ago she had all but despised the sight of him.
He took up the cloth again and set about wiping the cosmetics from her face, and when those were almost gone and she’d grown irritated with the process, he let her go. It was well after one now; he wouldn’t bother the servants but couldn’t stand to search through her drawers, so he left her for just a moment and returned with one of his shirts.
Convincing Elain to change was a considerably more involved process than he imagined, but eventually he turned around and waited until the rustling stopped to turn again, finding her nestled beneath the blankets. She looked up at him expectantly, her large eyes thankfully free of tears.
Stooping before he could allow the fear in his heart to override the joy dancing in his blood like champagne, Lucien swept back hair – damp from the cloth – and pressed a kiss to her forehead. And for one brief moment beneath moonlight that spilt over her lovely face, he found himself in the stories he had once distracted himself with as a boy: A beautiful maiden, adored by the earth, and on occasion a slayer of wicked kings, staring up at him, a rake, a beast, with any sort of affection. Perhaps she would make him a knight.
Though, he thought more seriously, many of those stories had not included drunken weeping, or the vomiting sure to ensue upon reaching his own quarters. Lucien was well and truly convinced that whatever his father was serving had been laced at the hands of the High Lord himself.
“Good night, Elain,” he murmured, resting his forehead upon hers. She preened, leaning up and brushing their noses together, her own scrunching up with a pout. “I’ll make up for your complaints with breakfast in bed, alright?”
“Bacon?”
“Oh, of course.”
“Tea?”
“I would be a fool not to provide such amenities, my l… ady.”
Thanks the gods she giggled, drunken stupor too great, and at once fell back against the pillows, closing her eyes, leaving Lucien to rear back as if he could escape the pounding of his heart and the trembling of his hands. What a mess.
There was no outrunning the sun in the Day Court.
It was futile for most, living in a land where the mornings and afternoons were radiant, and the sight of the setting summer sun brought in thousands of tourists decade after decade, but it was most futile for Lucien, considering the male sitting across from him in a bolt of white fabric wore a crown that was not only fashioned after the sun, but also reflected its rays into his eye.
Helion sipped his tea like a cat drinking from a pond while it mulled the death of a canary across the way. Unwise though it was to take his eyes off Helion, Lucien looked to the ceiling, the gold of his rings flashing brightly.
“No son of mine could be such a lightweight,” the High Lord muttered. His dark eyes narrowed, weighing something Lucien did not want to begin to fathom. “Have we really thought this through?”
Lucien scowled and massaged his temples, stomach flipping at the eggs piled sky high before him. “You set this entire thing up.”
“Me?” Helion’s eyes widened, a hand flying to his heart in the portrait of innocence. How in the hell had his mother put up with him long enough to procreate? “Why, no. I only happened to hear that Elain would be attending a performance near here, so I gave her my tickets for the box.”
“Giving you time to put on an elaborate party.”
“Don’t be silly. We would have had the party regardless.”
“Exactly what were you serving last night?”
Helion’s teeth flashed in a wicked grin. “It’s new. One of my favorites, actually. How did Elain like it?”
Lucien gestured to the place setting beside him and the plate he fully intended to fill and deliver, even if she didn’t remember the promise he’d made her last night. He’d come down here for the express purpose of doing so, only to find his father already in the chair across from him with only two other place settings. Either he had servants alerting him to Lucien’s every move, or he had been sitting here for hours now on the off chance that Lucien dragged himself out of bed. “She liked it very much.”
Helion chuckled, the sound low. “Oh, don’t think I didn’t hear what happened. Can we expect a mating ceremony soon?”
“Not if you intend on serving that drink,” Lucien muttered as he shoveled eggs into his mouth, lacking all of the dignity which had been trained into him. He doubted sincerely that Helion gave a damn.
“I suppose it’ll have to wait until your mother is with us.”
So tender, the way he said it.
Lucien looked up from his plate, brows flicking up to his hairline. “Eris sent word?”
Just last night, there’d been no response. If Eris had already sent something along, there could be no doubt on his moving soon.
But Helion shook his head, staring out the window, towards Autumn far to the south. His hands twitched with the promise of violence upon the table, as if he prayed to be called in, to snap Beron’s neck himself. Or put the finishing weapon in the Lady’s hands and carry her from Autumn’s remains. “I have a feeling.”
Helion was old enough, wise enough, that Lucien did not doubt it.
The dining room doors groaned open, Lucien hissing and twisting from the noise only to receive a sharp kick in the shin from his father. He looked up incredulously, mouth parting, but Helion’s eyes flicked to the door in command before standing as he called, “Elain! Good morning, my dear.”
Elain looked far more put together than he did, resplendent in a pale blue sundress, though her eyes were heavy-lidded and reddened, dark circles beneath them as she carefully avoided the sunlight streaming in from the windows.
And he’d be damned if his father didn’t wave his hand and shut the curtains immediately, as if Lucien hadn’t been wincing for the last half hour.
Elain smiled gratefully as she walked over to where Lucien had risen to pull out her chair, brown eyes meeting his.
“Good morning,” she murmured. Her eyes searched his face, perhaps for some sort of rebuke, or a confirmation that her confession had truly happened, that he still felt as he had the night before. “I hope I didn’t cause too much trouble.”
Lucien shook his head, ignoring his father, who pointedly looked anywhere but at them yet was very clearly eavesdropping and enjoying every second of it. “Not at all, Elain. I promised to bring you breakfast, though.”
She blinked. “What?”
Oh, thank the gods. Perhaps that meant she didn’t recall his slip-up. Lucien gestured to the food on the table, all of it full of fat and grease. “You had some complaints last night. I was going to make up for it with breakfast.”
A light blush stained her cheeks, crawling around the pearls still in her earlobes and right up to the pointed tips. “I can’t imagine complaining about anything you did. If I did, it must be because I’ve grown so accustomed to how well you treat me.”
Lucien huffed a soft laugh, eyes flicking to his father, who quickly averted his attention to his own breakfast. “I’ll tell you later.”
Elain nodded, flush darkening as she doubtlessly considered just what sort of things she might have complained about, and sat down, pouring herself a cup of tea while Lucien filled her plate. She winced at the smell of it, face a bit green.
Helion chuckled. “If you can stomach it, it’ll help.”
As Elain forced it down, Lucien turned again to his father. “You think Eris will send word today?”
Elain paused, looking between them. He imagined that most looked at her and saw a pretty face, saw lovely dresses and the kindness that seemed to radiate from her, and wrote Elain off as lacking the cunning of her sisters. But there was a keenness in her eyes, sharp as a dagger’s edge, that sent a thrill down his spine. “Are there any stirrings in Autumn?”
“A bit of discontent,” Helion murmured. “But little regarding Eris’s forces, which I will take to be a good sign. I don’t imagine Eris will let the situation sit for terribly long, now that Day and Night are waiting in the wings. He’s working with borrowed time.”
“And your role in it?” Elain asked quietly, and Lucien knew her mind had flashed to the tapestries in the hall.
“To be here.” Helion stared down into his glass like he could see her reflection in it. “To bring her home. Wherever she’d like that to be.”
Perhaps it was selfish, but Lucien longed for it to be here, in Day. To be with his mother again after so long apart. It had been an age since he allowed himself to consider how desperately he longed for his mother. Decades since he saw her for more than a passing glance, since he’d felt a mother’s embrace.
And though he knew, somehow, that Helion would take the Lady of Autumn wherever she wished, would never speak to her again if she so chose, he knew what Helion begged the stars for.
Summary: Elain and Lucien attend the opera, then a party.
Word Count: 2.6k
The theater was dark, a rare mercy in Lucien’s long life. He’d been staring at her since he came to her door not even an hour ago to find her in a deep pink gown the color of the dying sun, the bodice pushing up her pale breasts. At the time, he was polite, his eye kept to her face save for the moment he caught a sparkle in the light coming through the high windows.
Her golden-brown hair was tied up neatly, exposing the arches of her cheekbones and the rising flush along them as she realized where his attention had gone. Following the course of her cheekbone brought him to the arch of her ear, and the pearl shimmering in its lobe.
She’d worn the earrings once before, but had not expected him to arrive in Velaris that day, so he did not allow himself to extract from it any sort of hope or expectation. Now, though, when she was blushing so prettily with her chin angled high, he found hope blossoming in a long-forgotten part of his chest.
By the time they arrived at the theater, he was hardly occupying his own head, and she brought him up to a private box – Helion, apparently, had found out they were attending tonight and insisted upon upgrading their tickets. Lucien didn’t quite know how to feel about it, the efforts his father was so desperately making, but he didn’t have time to, because Elain walked past to take her seat, and her scent took hold of him utterly.
He wasn’t sure how long the performance had gone on now, entranced as he was by her reactions – little laughs or gasps or the gloss of tears over her eyes. The darkness spared him from her noticing, and from the crowd below potentially realizing that a mere emissary sat in the High Lord’s box. Helion had promised to be wary of their relation until his mother was safe, but it seemed he could hardly stand to keep from giving him everything he could.
Elain’s fingers gently brushed against his. Tentative, hesitant. Lucien turned his hand, leaving his palm flat but open until she curled her fingers around his.
The rest of the show seemed to fall away.
She held his hand for the rest of it, and he only realized that the show had ended because she released his hand to clap, turning to him with such a dazzling smile he forgot how to breathe. Over the roaring applause, she leaned in and asked, “Did you understand the language? I didn’t understand, but it was lovely all the same.”
Lucien found then that he had never understood any language in his life.
“Do you think we could come again?”
Anything she wanted.
“I should have been going to operas long before now, but I’m glad I came with you.” A small smile touched her full mouth, lined in sticky, sparkling gloss that caught the dim light in their private box. “I’m very glad, Lucien.”
“If the lady would like to keep attending operas,” he said quietly, wondering if perhaps they were no longer referring to the opera – the plot of which he knew only because he had seen it perhaps ten years prior – “then I would oblige her.”
She laughed softly. He’d heard louder laughs from her – startled ones, full ones. But this was quiet. Intimate. “You weren’t paying attention at all, were you?”
His mouth twitched towards a smirk. “I was.”
“I thought Isolde was wonderful,” Elain gushed. “Brilliant, you know? And it was so sad, Tristan’s madness. Do you think it’s true, that love is madness? I wonder why they thought that. Perhaps because it was so out of reach – though I confess I’ve thought the same once… or twice…” Elain trailed off, her eyes softening. “Ah.”
Lucien only leaned over the arm of their chairs and kissed her.
Gentle and sweet, swift as a hummingbird, and he pulled back before she’d fully recovered from her shock, because the intention of it had been naught but affection. “It could be madness,” he said quietly. “But I think it would be a wonderful thing, to be consumed by love.”
Elain searched his eyes. “So much so that an Isolde of the White Hands must suffer?”
“I wonder if the Cauldron gave me to you so that you could cut through my bravado. And I thought you didn’t understand the language.”
She waved the playbill in his face with a spark in her eye that said she’d caught him. “You’ve been elsewhere since you came to my door.”
“Then you are Isolde, and I am Tristan.”
“I hope that doesn’t mean you’ll be marrying me to your uncle.”
Lucien laughed. “What I am trying to say, Elain, is that I am also very glad.”
Much of the audience had filed out by now, and so he rose, offering her a hand to help her up. Hand-in-hand, they made their way down the stairs and towards the exit, the skirts of her dress brushing against his leg like the whispers of temptation. Gods, she was lovely – and remaining with him in Day. She would not return to Night; he would not say goodbye and hope against hope that she would write.
“You should probably stay away from comparing your love affairs to opera,” Elain quipped as the cool night air hit their faces, the scent of it touched with ocean salt and the sweet lavender of her perfume.
It took everything in him not to ask if she really found this to be a love affair, or if it was just the term which had first come to her mind. She was not a conquest, nor truly an affair. . . this was his mate, a female that he very much adored and was exploring something more with. What that something was, he wasn’t exactly sure.
“I see you enjoyed the box!”
Lucien choked, even as Elain turned and managed to speak for him, so polite and wonderful and understanding when she slid a bit in front of him to take the full dazzling brunt of his father.
Helion looked no less resplendent than he usually did with a white bolt of fabric over his chest and around his shoulders, gold pieces locking it into place and a golden snake curling around his bicep. He, for once, forwent his spiked crown of sun rays, but thin chains and bangles adorned his ankles and wrists, rings stacked upon the long fingers which now curled around Elain’s own to bring the back of her hand to his lips.
“One of my favorites,” he drawled. His dark eyes glittered with mirth – oh, he’d planned this entire evening. Lucien wouldn’t have been surprised if he had someone tell Elain where the theater was and when the next performance would be. “And the first time it’s been performed in fifty years – the perfect excuse for a party, I think.”
He could have denied the obvious invitation. Helion had phrased it just to give him an out if Lucien found himself vehemently opposed to it, but Elain couldn’t hide the flicker of interest and excitement in her eyes. And he couldn’t deny her anything, not when she offered to linger in Day just to give him a plausible excuse for being here.
Lucien met his father’s gaze. Under all of the excitement for the upcoming party and the mischief for what it would surely devolve into, there was a glimmer of cautious hope that had his heart lurching. Lucien nodded. “We’ll be there.”
Helion beamed and extended his hands for them to take. “I’ll winnow you right to your quarters,” he offered, and even the weight of centuries of knowledge couldn’t override the unmistakable joy in his voice. He threw Elain a wink. “Dress code optional.”
A dark flush spread across her cheeks, but she took his hand all the same, and Lucien could do naught but follow.
For all her teasing, Elain was a damned woman.
Upon arrival to her rooms, she discovered upon her bed a package wrapped with a golden ribbon, and amongst the crinkling papers found a gauzy, pellucid garment of cream that she could only assume to be the feminized version of Helion’s. She was hopeless in how to wear it, but Helion must have accounted for it, because two servants came in almost as soon as she had opened the box and helped her dress.
The hem cut to her upper thighs, clinging to every curve and draping between them with the held of golden pins and bolts. Helion, it seemed, was proud of his Pegasi – each of the pins had a small carving of one standing proudly, wings extended high. The fabric dipped between her breasts, cutting dangerously low. Perhaps Helion was playing matchmaker.
The jewelry, by comparison, was simple but of fine make, as she would have selected for herself. Stacked necklaces, one diving down between her breasts and beneath the fabric, with matching bangles for her wrists and ankles. The pearls, though they did not match, she kept, the maids laid her hair around her face and down in her back in ringlets sparkling with glitter.
She thought as she stood before the mirror that she would have another opportunity to tease Lucien, in awe of herself as she ran her hands along the sides of the fabric and turned and twisted.
Elain prepared herself to tease him the entire way down to the party, even when the music fought to override her thoughts and the scent of incense drowned her utterly. Throngs of people gathered in the hall, lounging on low cushions and rugs and drinking fine wine that seemed to pour endlessly. Others danced, some sensually enough that her face burned and she turned away, and she was turned about everywhere she went. Tables lined the sides of the room with desserts and confections piled high, and she knew that Helion had not planned this suddenly. Perhaps he had always intended to throw the party, or had lined up Lucien’s visit with this even when he was merely an emissary, just to have a bit of fun, but. . . this level of extravagance. . .
“I thought the same.”
His voice was low, molten like chocolate, and she turned to him, mouth dropping open to exclaim at how even Rita’s had never seemed like this and oh, how lovely it was, and she would stay forever if he—
All hope of teasing him for ogling drained right out of her head.
The same gauzy fabric was slung low over his hips, leaving his chest completely and utterly bare. Someone – someone she would thank on her knees – had doused his skin in glittering oil, and in the light above, he shone like the sun. She followed a trail of golden glitter down to the fabric bolt, eyes locking in on his Adonis belt.
The powerful ‘v’ of muscles was enough to have her cheeks blazing red, and when she caught a glimpse of red hair. . . gods above.
And his arms. . . wrapped in golden cuffs, his hair spilling like molten lava over his broad shoulders. . .
Lucien huffed a soft, almost sheepish laugh, and said of himself, “It’s a bit much, I know. But Helion sent it, and even maintaining that I’m just an emissary, it would have been odd to refuse.”
Elain shook her head and forced herself to swallow against her dry throat. “You look beautiful.”
Lucien’s cheeks colored right up to the tips of his ears, and he didn’t bother fighting the wide grin that burst across his face. “From a lady so lovely as you, that is a compliment of the highest order.”
Gently, as if he feared being rejected, he set his hand upon her elbow and steered her towards one of the tables of food. “It was a long show,” he said by way of explanation, “and if your time upstairs was anything like mine, they were too busy trussing you up to feed you.”
The dessert he’d been so eager to sample the previous day was in abundant supply down the table, so she nudged him towards it. Her instinct was to pick one out for him, wanting to pick one that looked especially perfect, but she felt the bond lurch in her chest. Not yet. One day. She wanted it to be something she had made – she wanted to make this. To see his face when she presented it to him and reminded him of this adventure of theirs.
Lucien seemed oblivious to her plans as he offered one to her before taking one for himself, and gods above, she really was terrible, watching him eat and lick his lips and the flash of his sharp teeth—
“I never want to hear another joke about where my attention lies,” Lucien drawled, his eye sparking with wicked humor. He’d finished the pastry already, and hers was only half-eaten, chewed mechanically in her stupor. “Eat that, and then you can ogle me while we dance.”
Elain had never eaten anything faster.
Lucien brought her to the center of the crowd, under the heavy volume of the sensual strings and heavy brass, and drew her tight to his chest. The moment they came apart, his glitter would be smeared all over her. She found she didn’t mind it, that claiming.
“Helion and I spoke before you arrived,” he murmured as he rocked them together. Nowhere near as intimate or sexual as the dancing of some of the others, but the consideration in it, when she knew that he had likely once participated, made her heart flutter. Despite the kisses and her attention, she feared ruining what they had by rushing. “He’s sent word to Eris and is awaiting a response.”
Her eyes flicked up to him, widening. “It’s time?”
“Not now.” His voice was a slow, soothing drawl. “Soon, but Eris isn’t exactly open about his plans. We don’t know how ready he is, how many soldiers are in his pocket. But soon.” His eye flickered, and he sounded almost a bit nervous when he suggested, “And then you can meet my mother, if you like.”
Elain’s eyes softened. “I would love to.”
“If you wanted to return to Night during the height of it, I would understand. It’s not your battle.”
More hesitancy. Fear of rejection, of assuming her feelings to be greater than they were.
Elain had known from the moment she began traveling with him that he was farther along than she was, that he was more comfortable with the idea of their innate intimacy and that he knew where he wanted this to go. Handsome and wonderful though he was, she’d been. . . unsure, she would say, about the idea of such intimacy. To be known on the level that Rhys knew Feyre and Feyre knew Rhys. The hesitancy, the fear, had gone deep enough that not once had she ever referred to him as her mate.
But feeling him against her, seeing that fragile hope in his russet eye and the mechanical one for once wholly still and focused upon her, Elain knew what she wanted. “It is my battle,” she said quietly, and the next phrase felt like throwing herself from a cliff and plummeting into the sea, limitless and unexplored. It tore out of her like the release of an ancient dam. “Of course, it’s my battle,” she murmured, leaning deeper into his chest and squeezing the hand that held hers. “You’re my mate.”
Summary: Elain and Lucien tour the city. Elain realizes she's in far deeper than she thought.
Word Count: 2.7k
Considering her forwardness in offering Lucien a kiss despite all her time of evading him and his scent of apples and bourbon, Elain thought it rather silly that she found herself so anxious – and yet as Lucien ducked into his own quarters to freshen up, she lingered in the doorframe and tucked her trembling hands behind her skirt.
He’d already kissed her, she reminded herself as she watched the muscles of his back move while he checked the knives strapped beneath his tunic and to his sides. He’d kissed her so brilliantly that the memory of Graysen and the lingering regret of Azriel had been utterly dashed from her mind, burned out the moment his lips roved over hers and his tongue swept into her mouth. She might rationalize that having done it before actually made her more nervous now, for the first kiss could be explained away as a moment of passion, and she could have denied the point that she kissed him back right up until he broke away and she tugged him back down. Even still, her attraction for him could still have been nothing more than the result of proximity to a handsome male and the tug of a bond existing outside of her immediate control.
This promise of something later, though, indicated its thoughtfulness. And the fact that she did not wish to revoke it frightened her.
Lucien looked over his shoulder, arching a brow as he walked towards the door and offered her his arm. Courteously, he said nothing about the mild flush on her cheeks or the wideness of her eyes.
She slipped her hand under and around to rest lightly on his forearm, resisting the incredible and sudden urge to grab hold of his bicep that had a small, dying piece of her mind looking upon her in ever weakening reproach while the rest of her demanded more, more, more.
But Lucien seemed unaware of her struggle with dignity and led her along as if he knew this palace intimately and brought her to the balcony looking out over Day’s capital. She might have asked why, but the shimmering veil of the palace wards faded just at the edge of it and parted over Lucien’s skin like water.
Lucien frowned. “He’s keyed me to the wards already,” he murmured, turning over his shoulder to let his metal eye click and whir. “Just how in hell did he manage that?”
Though there was something dark in Lucien’s eye and an immense sort of sorrow, or perhaps longing, Elain couldn’t help her tiny smile. It seemed appropriate that the male who wished to gift Nyx had a Pegasus would also be the sort to bring his son into his life as quickly as possible, even if he was still reeling.
Hesitating, she said, “You’ll be on the will by dinner.”
It had every chance to offend him, and she would flee right back to the Night Court if it did.
Lucien tipped his head back and laughed.
It was a merry sound that blazed like dawn and was as warm as the sun, and she felt like a cat for all the desire that suddenly flooded her demanding she bask in it forever. The laugh alone should have told her and everyone else who his father was, and it wasn’t for the similar timbre of it, or the rhythm, but for the way it was pure light.
It was the sort of laugh that her giggling softly, and Lucien’s eye widened at the sound. He turned to face her, grinning broadly, and then they were both laughing for no real reason at all, the servants in the hall pausing and looking over with furrowed brows.
She’d deprived herself of him for too long.
Lucien brought her to a small restaurant within the city that lay nestled between a clothier and an old townhome for sale. The bistro was a pale blue, a mural of a wide lake beneath the sun painted across the front, broken up only by windows and the wide-open door.
He led her up the front steps and into the interior – natural wood paneling that groaned, tall windows in the back and front to replace the light lost by having buildings on either side. Stained glass filled them, depictions of various High Lords and heroes, and above, in the ceiling, was a skylight.
They were seated by a small table near one of the stained-glass windows, Lucien pulling out her chair without a word. His eye trailed up the image, and a wry smile touched his mouth, but he said nothing as he turned to her.
“We’ll have to write to your sister,” he said quietly. His low voice rumbled down her spine. “But I don’t think it wise to explain the whole of it.”
In the case of interception. Elain nodded slowly and waited until the waitress had set down two glasses of water before she answered. “I’ll send it. No one would think anything of it, as opposed to their emissary.”
She almost flinched at the word. It just served as a reminder that he would likely not be returning to the Night Court any time soon, perhaps other than to retrieve of any of his personal effects from the apartment across the city, and that a title much larger than emissary awaited him, regardless of how he felt about it. When the time came, the magic would presumably choose him.
But Lucien’s face was perfectly smooth as he perused the menu. “We’ll have to explain the same reasoning to Helion.”
“If nothing else, you know he’s taking it well.”
“Or he’s panicking.” Lucien smiled a bit at her over the menu before setting it down. “I’d rather talk about you, Elain.”
The slow drag of his tongue over each letter had her drooping like on a warm sunny day, the anxious beating of her heart easing until it was almost leisurely. The waitress came and went; she had the vague recollection of ordering and receiving her meal but spent the whole of the time watching him.
“—it washed me out terribly; compared to Feyre and Nesta I was positively wretched.”
Lucien’s eye sparked. The corner of his mouth ticked up in what she now knew to be the precursor to flirtation. If she leaned forward a bit and brushed back her hair so he could see the pearls in her ears, it was entirely coincidental and not at all because she delighted in the hope and attraction that had that tiny smile widening. “You’ve not been wretched a day in your life,” he murmured, and she envied the tea he’d been drinking. Oh gods, what a bizarre thing to feel. “But if I never see you in Night Court black again, I will take that to mean you’ve found a place that feels like home.”
“I love Feyre dearly,” she said quietly. “And Rhys, and Nyx, and all of my family. But as much as I tried, Night was never quite right for me. Never quite my home.”
His eye searched hers as it danced across her face. They’d had a similar conversation at the festival, and though it had only been a few days, it felt as if it were a lifetime past. “It’s too cold,” he said quietly. “At least for me.”
She nodded. “Most of the flowers I prefer don’t grow as easily there. And. . . I would be content to spend all my days outside. But I’d freeze doing that.”
Lucien huffed a soft laugh. “I can’t promise that winter doesn’t ever hit Day, but it’s certainly not as brutal.”
The light through the glass cast dizzying kaleidoscopes across his skin and set his eye ablaze. The sun caught upon the soft sheets of blazing hair and set it burning, just as she was sure to do if he kept looking at her like that.
Eventually, she slipped away to the restroom before her heart could explode out of her chest, hurrying inside and staring into the mirror. Her face was flushed in the aftermath of a compliment, hands trembling with the fear of somehow ruining it. She splashed cool water on her face, watched it drip down her wrists before she located towels and dabbed it up.
Gods, he was gorgeous.
When she returned, the table had been cleared and Lucien was waiting for her. It was only then that she realized what the stained glass was.
Above him towered a man eerily like Helion, with amber eyes and dark skin, broad shoulders and a vague rendering of the nose that had passed to Lucien. The male wore the same crown Helion did, and with the simplicity of the stained glass she might have thought it really was Helion were it not for the young boy sitting at his sandaled feet – Helion’s father, then. And Lucien’s grandfather.
Executed Under the Mountain, she recalled, and the weight of the sorrow rocked her. Lucien had been an adult, had perhaps even met the male, and they’d never known what they were to each other. They’d never gotten the chance.
They spent the remainder of the day exploring the city. She was content not to mention the stained glass, and he said nothing of how she had agreed so quickly to linger in Day. It was not a promise of anything. It was only a kindness, to give him a safe way to meet with his father without fearing for the life of his mother.
The dessert Lucien had wanted to try was a flaky pastry with custard that tasted of lemon and cinnamon. He bought one for each of them and sat on a high wall looking down upon a strip of beach, and while she might have said that the sun was setting and they should return to the palace quickly, the thought never crossed her mind next to Lucien. He’d been keeping an eye out the entire day.
It melted in her mouth, earning a soft moan. If she’d been paying attention, she would have noticed the tips of Lucien’s ears flush, but he only said quietly, “I feared that I would come here and realize it could not be my home.”
Elain’s brows furrowed as she looked over at him. He watched the stars, the ships in the harbor and the people still lounging on the beach. She understood for once what Rhys meant when he claimed the nights in his court were the most beautiful – the stars shone brighter there, the sky a thousand shades of blue and purple and black. The night did not prevail here. Day did, and already she was desperate to watch the sunrise.
“I worried I would come here and feel what I felt when I went to Summer. I visited once, and beautiful as it was, I knew I wouldn’t want to live there. Spring was home because of my friends, but I was bored. It was too refined. And Night’s landscape is harsh, as we’ve discussed. So I thought there might be something that glared out at me, and I did not want to realize that I would be bound to a place I did not love.”
“And?”
Lucien shook his head. “I won’t say it’s home yet. That takes time. But it is the most beautiful place I’ve ever visited.”
Gently, she knocked his boot with her foot and smiled up at him. “The dessert lived up to your expectations, then?”
“It did.” His eye narrowed in on the corner of her mouth, and he gave her a half smile as his hand lifted and inched near her chin. “It seems you did, too.”
His callused thumb brushed against the corner of her mouth, wiping away a bit of crumbling pastry. But his hand lingered. Slid fully against her cheek to cup her face.
Lucien’s breathing had slowed, eye dark and the other perfectly still as her lips parted with the shortness of her breath. It caught his attention like a predatory cat with a swishing tail.
“The lady suggested a kiss,” he murmured. “I find I’m amicable.”
Elain could only nod and lean closer to him. “Good.”
“Good.”
A breathless laugh. “Very. . . very good.”
Slowly, gently, as if time itself had slowed to give them an eternity to make up for the years they lost, his lips claimed hers, warm and leisurely and steady. She opened for his tongue and swallowed the soft, shaky sigh he let out, draping her arms around his neck and tugging herself closer to the heat radiating from him.
His other hand held her waist and drifted to the small of her back, the one on her cheek slipping into her hair and angling her face for better access. A soft, breathy moan left her mouth, and at the very sound of it, the air around them warmed, Lucien’s grip tightening.
She knew he’d go no further unless she asked for it. Was being careful not to frighten her, or himself. And as much as she wanted him to ravish her utterly. . . she still did not know him fully. And this bond between them would only grow to demand more if she took him to her bed.
And after everything that happened today, she didn’t want it to be merely a distraction. She wanted it to be because he loved her, and she loved him, because they were promising something to each other beyond the few weeks or months she would stay in Day.
She pulled back gently, eyes slipped shut, and gently rested her forehead against his to hear the thundering of his heart and the heavy breaths from his mouth. “We should stop.”
He nodded wordlessly.
“I’m sure there’s lipstick on your face.”
A soft huff, but still neither moved, only opened their eyes to look at each other. Lucien’s thumb drifted gently across her high cheekbone, and he murmured, “I didn’t think I’d ever get to do that.”
“And? Now that you’ve had a few.”
“Perfect.” He reached up to smooth her hair with a gentle hand. “You may very well have created a monster.”
“You can’t be worse than Rhys.”
He winced. “I’m sure sharing a house with the pair of them is its own form of horror.”
She laughed softly, stirring his long lashes. “The worst part is when Feyre tries to play it off.” Without thinking, she reached over to straighten his lapels, knuckles brushing against the warm, strong column of his neck. It bobbed beneath her touch. “And then Rhys comes in smiling like a cat with its prey.”
Lucien laughed. “An image I didn’t think would ever exist.”
“You seem to generally be in a state of surprise.”
His eye softened, meeting her own, and the hand that lingered on her back tightened just a fraction. “I consider it to be a good thing.”
“A pragmatist, are you?”
“A realist.”
“Clearly it’s not so real, if you’re always surprised.”
“Fitting, then, that my mate is a Seer.” He leaned back just a bit and thumbed at a bit of smeared gloss on her chin. She did the same to the mess of it on his face, though she didn’t get very far, her hands sticky.
“The servants will have something to talk about,” he muttered dryly as he peered down at her fingers and touched the sticky residue on his face. “As will anyone that walked by in the last ten minutes.”
A dark flush stained her cheeks. Gods, she was losing it.
Lucien turned around and slid down from the wall, offering her a hand to climb down. Where hers shook with adrenaline, his looked surprisingly steady until she took it and found his skin to be unnaturally warm.
He winnowed her back to the balcony without his eye ever leaving hers and escorted her back to her room. He seemed to simmer with something unsaid, so she leaned up on her toes and pressed a kiss to his cheek.
“The theater,” she reminded him quietly. “Tomorrow evening at seven.”
He nodded, stricken by her kiss, and before she could think too long on it or wonder if it had been, for whatever reason, unwelcome, he swept down and pressed a kiss to her forehead. A soft laugh bubbled out of her, but he was already gone.
no way ppl are using ai to write ao3. what happened to being a tortured writer. what happened to blood on the page. what happened to the ao3 curse. people used to get run over, have their houses burned down, break their entire spines and they still put in the work to finish a chapter. fuck you, using ai. y’all are weak
For centuries now, he had spent lonely nights before the high windows of his quarters, towards the Autumn Court, until at last he had realized that were he to fail in immortalizing her, he might convince himself it had all been a dream. And so, despite the insistence from several of his closest friends and confidants that it would be to his detriment to do so, he had made a set of tapestries. He lounged now on pillows as close to the color of her lovely hair as he could find, but it was not as silken as hers had been as it slid through his fingers, or as sweet smelling as she was when in his bed. The scent of her had clung to his sheets for years after. Had clung to him, though he had been forced to glamour it for her safety and nearly wept at the action.
He should have wondered at it when first she came again into public with a new babe at her breast. He had wondered it, and dismissed the notion immediately, for Beron would never have allowed a child of his to survive. Not if he could keep the murder quiet.
The babe had been swaddled in deepest red so unlike anything found in his own court, and Beron claimed he was born in the dead of night and that they had hidden the Lady’s pregnancy, had pretended the boy was older than he was – anything to act as if it wasn’t one of Helion’s later trysts with the Lady of Autumn that had sired the sleeping baby.
He’d a cap of deepest red hair woven with spun gold and skin a touch darker than his brothers, but Beron attributed it to relatives of his wife. It made very little sense, really, but Helion had really honestly thought that any son of his would have been murdered the moment he was born.
And, for that matter, he was never allowed close enough to truly see or smell the baby. In fact, he had not seen the boy again until he was about ten or so, and by then, his scent was like any of the other sons of Vanserra – pain-riddled and sickly sweet. He should have realized the latter half was a glamour.
His russet eyes were his mother’s, and it had been a terrible pain to look into them. It remained that way for a long while, until Helion chose to accept it as some sort of gift from the Mother that the color was refreshed to him so that he would not forget that exact shade.
After that, it was not until Tamlin took Lucien in that Helion saw him now and again at meetings, but Helion had never thought about the shape of his nose, nor the rumble of his voice just a hair too deep to have been from Beron. Genetics, he’d told himself, were fickle. The boy was probably Beron’s. Certainly Beron’s. It was so difficult for the Fae to conceive; it was impossible that this was his son, and that he had missed the whole of his life.
And then Lucien had gone before Amarantha, and Helion had watched in muted horror as the Lady of Autumn wept for her son, as the young male’s eye was torn out by wicked, curved nails. Had watched Amarantha stomp the eye beneath her heel.
Perhaps Lucien was only curious about the affair. Had learned something from Eris, likely, who had always been a bit too shrewd, even in his youth, a forced lesson under Beron’s fists. Lucien was only concerned for his mother and her safety, needed to know if Beron knew the truth.
Helion nodded. The powerful column of his throat bobbed, hands trembling over the edge of those auburn cushions. His voice was little more than a croak. “I did.”
Lucien sat remarkably still on the couch across from him, fiery hair glinting in the morning light. It caught on a faint sheen of sweat beading his brow. Not so unflappable, not now. “For how long?”
“Several years.” Wonderful years they had been, in many ways. And in others, they had been among the worst of his life, to watch her go back to that male even as he begged for her to remain. That last time, he’d gone to his knees and held her to him and pleaded with her to accept his protection and remain with him.
But, for the sake of peace, and for the sake of her sons, she had gone. He would have raised her boys, if she’d let him.
“When did it end?”
“A few years after the War.” Helion took a long draw from his wine. Lucien refrained from his own. “She ended it.”
Lucien’s throat worked. His long, scarred fingers drummed along the edge of a cushion. “Why?”
“She feared for her sons’ safety.” But, he was beginning to realize now, perhaps an additional son’s conception had been what pushed her over the edge. A son who would be born of love. Who would know nothing but pain because of it. “She feared for you.”
“I had been born?”
Helion shook his head. A great sense of shame washed over him, for the male before him, whom he had failed. “She was pregnant with you. No further than two months.”
Lucien was terribly pale. “But my scent. . .”
“Is your mother’s.” Helion leaned forward, extended wavering magic towards Lucien, sorted through the mating bond and protections and old spells that lingered, and all the way to something deep, deep down. So wonderfully done, so brilliant. “There is a damper, a. . . some sort of lock. Your fire has escaped it, and—”
“I broke a spell, that day in Hybern. When Elain came out of the Cauldron.”
And there it was, clear as any other sign. Helion’s eyes flicked to Lucien’s, painfully somber.
“Did you ever even consider it?”
Helion nodded. “Once. When I saw your mother hold you, and I saw how she adored you. She loves your brothers, but. . . it is different, I believe, that you. . .” The words curdled on his tongue. All these centuries where great and terrible knowledge bore down upon his shoulders, and yet this was the thing which he could not say. “That you were born of love.”
It was only now that Lucien swept up his goblet and drank from it deeply. Helion watched him. The bob of his throat, the forced steadiness in his hands. Larger than any of his brother’s – Beron was a tall, lean man where Helion was broad.
“But,” Helion added quietly, taking in his son, “I convinced myself it could not be true. I thought Beron would have killed any child of mine at birth; I believed we would not possibly conceive a baby.” His mouth threatened to wobble under the burning weight of Lucien’s stare. “We were so careful, Lucien. You – I wanted a family with your mother desperately. I wanted to marry her. I begged her to leave, but for Eris and the others, she wouldn’t. I spent years planning how I would break her out, drag her and all of her sons out, even if it meant waging war against the Autumn Court, but. . .” Helion sighed, standing. “Will you walk with me, Lucien?”
He could have summoned it to himself easily. But he needed to move, to drive out the energy thrumming in his veins. He needed Lucien to see his home, and everything in it that had always been for her.
Lucien stood silently. “You never knew?”
Helion led him into the hallway, back towards those tapestries. “I imagine,” he murmured, “your mother knew that, had she confirmed it, I would have brought down the entire Autumn Court to bring you home, and anything else that stood in my way.”
Lucien stumbled to a stop before the second tapestry and the female dancing within it with hair the same shade as his own.
“As it was,” Helion breathed as the tapestry before him faded away and he saw her as clear in memory as if it had been yesterday, with her pale, delighted face, such joy though she would soon be sold to an Autumn lord, “your mother told me not to come. If I had retrieved her, war would begin, and it would be solved only by killing Beron, which would have forced one of your brothers’ onto the throne far too early.”
“Eris is ready now,” Lucien ground out. “He’s been preparing to kill my – Beron for months now. The rest of my brothers would fall in line.”
“If Eris would do it, I would aid him. But forgive me if I will not move until Eris has confirmed that he is prepared to take the throne, and that he would not then move to bring your mother back to Autumn.”
Her other fear, that whichever of her sons ruled would then try to bring her back, and would wage war again. Eris wouldn’t, not now, but the others might have, vindictive as they were. And she could not bear it.
Helion led him away from the tapestries and up a flight of twisting stairs. He knew Lucien noticed the style of the pots along the wall, each bearing blooming flowers and leaves. The pots were ancient now and imported from a kingdom thousands of miles across the ocean, now fallen – his mother had always had a particular fancy for pottery of that land, and so Helion had gone there himself and brought back for her pots and ceramics and jewelry. She had potted the plants herself over the course of several evenings. Only a select few were allowed to tend to them, protected as they were by powerful charms.
“Your mother was and is everything to me,” Helion said quietly as they reached the doors to his suite. It opened beneath a gust of wind, and he made for the chest of drawers nearest to them and waved his hand. The glamour disappeared, and an additional drawer appeared atop them all, long and thin. The lock turned and the cavity opened, a gentle wind pulling free the thin envelope that floated now towards Lucien. “And when she left, I was in quite the state.” A small, self-deprecating smile that did little to ease the ache in his chest. “She sent me this.” He nodded to it, Lucien’s face stricken before it. “You may read it, if you like.”
Lucien’s jaw worked. But he shook his head.
“She didn’t intend for me to,” he murmured. “She never intended for this to happen.”
“No.” Helion’s tongue darted out to wet his full lips, bile rising in his throat. “No, she did not. But it does not make you wrong, to have come seeking answers.” He cleared his throat and fought the urge to implode. “I will see about releasing the spell binding your magic. It would be faster, if you stayed in Day until it was done, but if you do not wish to, I will make it work. And I could find someone else to break it if—”
Lucien shook his head again. “Word would get out.”
And there it was, the damning blow. He didn’t want to announce it. Did not care in any way to attempt at recognizing something between them.
Lucien turned on his heel and was gone.
Elain had finished her breakfast and begun reading when the door to her suite flew open and Lucien stood just before the threshold, thrumming with fire and ire, his eye blown wide and sweat sliding down his skin.
She stood slowly, careful not to startle him or send him running in the opposite direction. She’d honestly wondered if he would come find her, considering the heated kiss in the woods. Where did they stand? “Lucien?” she breathed softly.
Was this how he had felt when she’d been lost in her head?
“I told you,” he said hoarsely, fighting to smooth out his tone and recollect himself, shaking so violently she thought he might shatter, “that I would tell you everything once we arrived, and if it. . . was determined to be accurate.”
Elain stepped towards him, finding herself unafraid. Because the ire in his eye had already banked at the sight of her, and the shaking had become related to sorrow and agony and overwhelming confusion. His eye was glassy, a terrible tremor in his hands. “Would you like to come in, Lucien?”
His body jerked forward, but his feet didn’t move. “I—”
“You may come in.” She gestured to the little table by the windows. In his position, she would have appreciated the attempt at normalcy. Too many people treated her like a fragile, porcelain doll when she was anything but. Looked at her baking and her flowers and her dresses and assumed that, because she was no warrior like her sisters, that she was inept. She wondered if Lucien had faced similar things, if people had looked at the seventh son who ran wild in his youth and thought him to be a fool. “There’s some tea left, if you’d like it.”
He finally entered the room as he ran a broad hand through his hair, but he said quietly, “I can’t, if you offer it.”
Sinking down into one of the chairs, he looked so distraught that she knew he wouldn’t be able to speak of it yet, so she sat across from him and said conversationally, “I was thinking about sharing a few memories with Feyre and having her paint them. The view from the bridge, especially.”
Lucien nodded, attentive. His focus seemed to lock onto her entirely. “She’d capture it well,” he rasped.
“I thought so. And I’d like to bring back some seeds. I don’t know how well they would fare in Velaris’s weather, but I’m sure I could find a greenhouse, or some sort of spell. It’s really a shame.”
“You could stay.”
The words tumbled out of his mouth so quickly she forgot he was an emissary.
Lucien leaned forward and, unconsciously, she found herself doing the same, her subconscious warning that this was a delicate moment.
“Helion is my father.”
Elain blinked, fighting to maintain her composure for him, because the words were worryingly detached from emotion.
“He had an affair with my mother during and just after the War, and I was the result of it. Beron suspects. And based on your expression,” he added with a wry grin that didn’t meet his eye, “I would say you were correct in thinking you had no idea what Rhysand and Feyre told me.”
Did it make her a terrible person that she didn’t know exactly what to do, what to say? Was asking questions invasive and prying, or helpful or considerate or what? But she supposed that Lucien had never shied from speaking with anyone about something difficult, and might therefore appreciate the same candor.
“Did Helion know?” she asked quietly, shooting a careful look at the door. Lucien had shut it behind him, but it did little to circumvent Fae hearing.
Catching the direction of her attention, Lucien murmured, “I put up a shield when I came in. And no, he did not. He suspected once, but didn’t seriously consider it.” He rubbed at his jaw, the other hand flat on the table. “He offered me a letter my mother wrote him. I stormed out.”
“I imagine it is a better reaction than most would have,” she offered quietly. A moment of hesitation, and then she laid her hand over his. “You were with him a considerable amount of time, considering the gravity of what you’re saying. You must have heard him out.”
“Some. There’s a spell of some kind binding the magic I inherited from him, so I’ll have to remain in Day until it’s undone. Coming and going would draw suspicion, especially from my – from Beron.” His jaw worked. Bitter humor lit his eye. “I’ve done that more than once.”
It would take time to adjust to the phrasing, yes, and she could have said that, but instead decided to nudge his foot with hers and tease gently, “Oh, what a terrible failure. However shall I live with such a mate?”
He blinked, startled by the use of the word, but immediately, his face softened, and his shoulders sagged. “I’ve no idea,” he breathed. “I suppose I’ll have to come up with a way to make it up to you.”
She searched his face. It was a joke, but there was certainly a genuine offer tucked within it. “You could make it up to me,” she said carefully, “by coming with me to the theater tomorrow.” The boldness that had stricken her eased just a bit, and she added hastily, “Assuming you aren’t meeting with – with him, but—”
His hand turned over beneath hers to close around her fingers. “Tickets to the theater already?” He grinned, canines flashing. “My, you work fast, Lady. But of course, I will escort you to the theater. Anything else?”
Pausing, Elain mulled it over. She had an opportunity to play anything which did not work off as a joke, and he knew it, which was why he’d offered it up. “Do you intend to stay here until the spell is broken?”
“I do.” He inhaled sharply. “And if. . . if Helion would name me his heir, I’d move here permanently. Probably after Eris takes the throne and my mother is safe, or if we come up with an explanation for why I’d remain here.”
An idea sparked. She gave him a sly, shy little smile. “Then you shall make up your fumbling words to me by being my companion in Day. You see,” she said with a growing grin at the surprise widening Lucien’s eye and setting the other into clicking and narrowing, “I happen to be researching botany, and where better to do so than in the libraries and gardens of Day?” Squeezing his hand earnestly, she continued, spinning lies so easily she should have been rather concerned: “Feyre’s Solstice gift to me was the construction of a greenhouse. But most Night Court plants don’t do well in warmer weather, and thus, I’m looking for things to plant. It could take me months.”
Lucien’s breathing stuttered, and then he leaned closer to her across the table until their noses brushed and breathed, “Elain, you are brilliant.”
She laughed delightedly, making a sport of chasing the shadows away from his eye. He rose and came to stand before her with her hand still clutched in his, drawing her to her feet and closer and closer until they were chest-to-chest.
“As your companion,” he said, “I find it is my duty to take you to lunch. If it pleases you.”
“It pleases me very much.” She pulled her hand away only to loop it through his arm. “And then might my companion consider whether he is agreeable towards taking a tour of the city?”
Leading her from the room, Lucien considered for a moment, a small smile on his mouth. “I find myself to be agreeable, yes. Day has a famed dessert I’ve yet to try, if you would find yourself so inclined.”
“Oh, much inclined.” A thrill shot down her spine at the idea which formed as Lucien brought them through the halls. “At the end of the evening, if my companion would show me to my quarters. . . he might be amicable towards a kiss.”
Lucien’s throat bobbed, and then roguish charm flashed across his face, eye darkening as it drank her in. “He might indeed.”
Summary: Elain and Lucien practice fishing and arrive in the Day Court.
Word Count: 5.1k
Cool water lapped around her bare ankles and cooled the flaming mortification which suddenly possessed her when she pulled off her boots and followed Lucien into the flowing river. His eye shone like citrine, but he turned away quickly to face the water and glittering fish scales, and she could have sworn a touch of color stained his high, elegant cheekbones like the kiss of sun after hours spent beneath it. The fish on the bank flapped but a few times before their eyes went dull, both caught by Lucien. Water soaked the sleeves of her sweater, try as she might to roll it up, and splashed into the loose strands of curling hair clinging to her skin.
Lucien offered her a small smile when she cursed, shimmering scales slipping past her fingers for the tenth time that hour, and said lightly, “Perhaps we should take a break, Lady. Before the fish begin to anticipate your prowess.”
A soft scowl touched her mouth, and he seemed to revel in it.
“Elain,” she reminded him coaxingly, but did as he suggested and got out of the river, dripping water into the grass and shivering despite the warm night infested with bullfrogs and crickets. The heavy sleeves of the sweater were made worse by the water, and she paused in her examination of them to find Lucien standing but feet from her, fish in hand and a tentative twinkle in his eye.
Something earlier had shaken him, and she could not decide if the fault belonged to her, or to himself, or to whatever thing it was that Feyre and Rhysand had told him those days ago at dinner – whatever it was that the High Lord and Lady of Night had known to be such groundbreaking information that they thought it best to have Nyx removed, in the event of some sort of explosion of magic.
Lucien led her back through the trees and to their small fire, taking from his pack a knife. She sat on her bedroll as gutted the fish, watching the glint of the knife, of his hair in the flames and the flickering of the tendons running up his arms. He was not so broad as the Illyrians, but she rather preferred it. The thought had her balking.
But what was there to balk about? She had already chosen to accompany him; she had danced with him. She spent more time in his presence in the last hour than she had since meeting him. And yet it was now, watching him, seeing a vision of what could be, that she gave pause.
Perhaps it was that her sisters no doubt already spoke of it, or because there would be no returning to any form of aloofness on her end. Not because she could not do it, for she could, and she would feel cruel and wretched for having done it to him but would all the same continue on with her life if she found nothing of interest in him. But it was because she found she did not want to and was realizing with increasing clarity as each second passed that Lucien brought her joy.
They spoke not a word until they were eating, and she looked around for something to wipe her fingers. A flash of white fabric caught her peripheral.
“Thank you,” she murmured. It may have been the firelight, but she could have sworn the barest hint of a blush dusted his high cheekbone as he dipped his chin.
He’d the kindness to bring two small tents, and while some part of her wished one of them had been misplaced, she was touched by the consideration. But it meant that their time for tonight grew short, and she had. . . well, she really had no idea what was to come after their journey. After dancing this afternoon had been cut short, and that strange, stilted moment where she couldn’t tell if he would kiss her or bolt, she wouldn’t have been surprised if he immediately found some other station to occupy himself with, either in the Spring Court of the mortal lands.
She watched him between the flames and found him doing the same, fire blazing in that metal eye, and gods above if he wasn’t the loveliest thing she’d ever seen. The roguish edge of him gave her half the mind to abandon all pretense and kiss him as she should have done in that town, but she remained rooted to the spot, flushing at the thought, and began, “What they kept from you. . . how long did they conceal it?”
Lucien’s jaw ticked. His eye went distant, looking far off into the south, towards Day. “Feyre first drew her conclusion when she met Helion at the High Lords’ meeting. I feel a fool for not having even considered it, but the idea that—” he cut himself off, shook his head. “A while.”
Elain’s eyes narrowed. She’d only ever seen Helion a few times at a distance, her sisters far more acquainted with him than she was, but he’d seemed generally amicable. A lover of innuendo, she heard, who at one point was rather enamored with Nesta. “Meeting Helion?”
Lucien stared at her for a moment, mulling something over, before he got to his feet and said as he came around the fire to stand over her, “I owe you a dance.”
She blinked. “I’m sorry?”
Holding his hand out to her, beckoning with a curl of his fingers, Lucien only spared her a disarming grin she knew had served him well, though before her it remained fragile. “The magicians took a break,” he murmured. “And I was a coward.”
Elain took his hand and let him pull her to her feet, into the circle of his arms, and fought her shiver when one of his hands found her waist. “You’ve been rattled.”
“There are things which I would prefer not to discuss in the open,” he admitted quietly. “I’ll explain everything when we reach Day, if it. . . if Rhysand and Feyre are correct.”
“You owe me no explanation.” His feet moved surely, leading her into a dance, and she followed as easily as if it were breathing. “I ask as a friend.”
Lucien’s mouth thinned for a moment. “I wonder how many of those I truly have.” He brought her in a circle around the fire, and as close as they had been this afternoon, they were as distant, as if he feared her reproach, or his own folly.
Elain pressed closer. “In my case, you shouldn’t wonder.”
Surprise crossed his face, then gratitude, and he searched her eyes as if in disbelief before at last he said quietly, “Then you shouldn’t wonder in mine, either. If it’s not too great a presumption.”
It was not. He had been her friend for months now, though she had not been his until fairly recently. He had seen more of her than most, and it was for that reason, and for the flickering of shadows in his russet eye, that she leaned up and pecked his cheek.
Fleeting, a chaste brush, and yet her heart leapt into her throat and her face grew warm – but that was just the fire, not any attraction or embarrassment or anticipation; it really was just the fire and the warm night – as Lucien’s feet came to a stop, and each inhale had her chest brushing against his.
He blinked thrice, grip on her waist and hand tightening momentarily before he inhaled sharply and said, “I hope you don’t find this to be too presumptuous, either.”
And then his mouth was on hers, warm and soft and coaxing, and she sighed against him as his hand left hers to plunge into her hair and pull her close. His palm settled against her jaw and pulled her up, into him, a soft noise of wonder leaving him, and she was forming a plan to have him do it again when he pulled back from her.
Their noses brushed, and they went no further. It had been swift, and powerful, and when she licked her lips she tasted the crackling flames of him, felt something glow in the pit of her stomach. Lucien’s eye darted back and forth over hers. His broad chest heaved beneath the confines of his tunic and he said, voice rough, “I’m sorry, Elain; I—”
She grabbed the collar of his tunic and pulled him down to her mouth. As brief and powerful as the first had been, this was slow, languid, the melting of his lips to hers, his hands settling on her waist and pulling her flush against him as he groaned. Mouths roved, his tongue darting over her bottom lip, and she opened for him with a gasp, twining her arms around his neck.
She had half the mind to tug him into the grass when he moved to brush his mouth along her jaw, her ear, her neck, his tongue lapping and soothing, teeth nipping, and when his lips burned against her collarbone, he paused and raised his head. Resting their foreheads together, he panted, “Not here. Not – not now.” His thumb slid across her cheekbone with utter reverence. “Not yet.”
Not when they had yet to discuss what lay between them, when. . . when he was giving her a way out, so that, at the end of this trip, if she wished to move on, there would not be a night between them. The shimmering thread would not have strengthened.
And then there was the wicked gleam in his eye, the promise.
Not here, not in the woods. In a bed, safe and warm, with plenty of time and space and privacy.
Elain nodded as her hand slid down to rest just over his thunderous heart. “Later,” she breathed. “Later.”
He was such an idiot.
Lucien lay awake for hours in his tent, staring at the canopy above him and listening to the gentle winds through the grasses, the babbling river, but nothing would conceal from him the slow, even breaths emanating from the tent beside him. She doubtlessly would have let him share it, or come to bed with him, but. . . she still didn’t know what he was. Hell, he didn’t know what he was, or who he was, or what fate would bring. Tomorrow, in Day, or perhaps the day after, if Helion postponed or some such thing, he would know, and he could tell her, and she would enter into this knowing full well that a life with him, with a High Lord’s heir, would mean a life ruling. A life of threats, against herself and her children. It had been one thing to be the seventh son; he knew then that he would not inherit his father’s title, and had little interest in it. Helion, on the other hand, had no other heirs, and if Eris had spoken true, if his mother had put some sort of damper on his powers and still he had broken the enchantment holding him in Hybern, then Lucien would very likely move to Day.
Beron more than likely already knew; he was no fool. What he was, was prideful. And if word got out that his mother had cuckolded him with the High Lord of Day, with Helion and his laughing face and sharp tongue, Beron would rain hell upon them all.
It would have been funny, if his mother was anywhere but Autumn.
That would be his first request, if it was all true, and he knew somewhere in his heart that it was. To tell no one but Elain until his mother was free, however that would happen. Maybe Eris could be persuaded to move up his coup, rather than Helion becoming involved and risking an all-out war amongst courts.
Lucien blinked. What court didn’t he have ties to? A nasty curse left his mouth. He’d been practically banned from all the ones he spent any length of time in; who was to say Day would not be the same?
It was a miserable business.
Sleep evaded him that night.
From the moment Elain woke the next morning and left her tent in a soft pink dress – they would be winnowing straight to Day, and if her assumptions proved correct, they would be met by an ambassador of some kind, if not by Helion himself – Lucien watched her with a sort of sleepy expression she had seen Rhysand give her sister, but there was a guard just before it, as if today proved some sort of test. He was careful not to let anything seep through the bond, and in fact had been careful of such things since the bond snapped, but she could read enough of it on his face. A courtier and emissary, yes, but Elain had grown up in her father’s home surrounded by wealthy vipers. She was no fool, regardless of what so many seemed to think.
He packed up their camp and shouldered the bags, eyes cutting to her from across the small glen. “Did you sleep well, Elain?”
Her name on his tongue sent a shiver down her spine. Cheeks flushed, she nodded and fought the old urge to twist her fingers behind her back. “Fine. And you?”
It was a lie, more or less. She’d spent an hour or two replaying over and over in her mind the feeling of his lips, his tongue, his hands, the overwhelming smell and heat of him, the bourbon and fire and apples. But in the time she slept, she was warm and comfortable, and perhaps had felt the strength of his arms around her waist, heard the beating of his heart in time with her own.
“Fine.” His metal eye darted about and whirred, clicking and narrowing, though on what, she wasn’t sure. Could he see the golden thread between them, or did it remain hidden, in that place between their souls? “We’ll reach Day in two jumps. I’m not sure who will meet us, but if it’s Helion—” a flicker of fear flashed in his eye, concealed quickly but a wry grin— “he’ll likely fly in riding a chariot.”
Elain laughed softly. The world around them buzzed, drawing them towards Day, but Lucien’s muscles were rigid, his throat bobbing. She was courteous enough not to point it out, but he knew she could see it, and, realizing he needed a bit of a push, she reached over the remnants of their fire and extended her hand. “We wouldn’t want to miss such a spectacle.”
She could have sworn Lucien went a bit green as he took her hand. “No,” he murmured tightly. “We wouldn’t.”
The world twisted around her, whipping her body through time and space, stretching and kneading her like dough, and then her feet landed lightly in cool, dewy grasses, melted snow clinging to blades and a light chill kissed her skin. She tilted her face up towards the cloud-kissing mountains, and then Lucien’s hand squeezed hers tightly, and the darkness closed it.
Instinctively, she shut her eyes and gripped Lucien as tightly as she ever had, knowing that if she let go, or the rip current of time tore her away, she would be lost in this place between realms forever, and released a rushing breath when sunlight pierced through her eyelids.
Elain opened her eyes and may as well have been struck dead.
They stood on a bridge of glass with shimmering veins of gold, rushing waters down below, and she turned behind them, releasing Lucien’s hand, to stare in wonder at the lush, rolling hills, the white houses fixed amongst them and the glittering rivers and lakes. It stretched out for miles, valleys and plains below the long slope of the bridge, and she would have to show Feyre the memory if only to have it painted, would have to see their gardens, for if this was a city and looked so lovely, the nature of it must be even more so.
Lucien’s voice was low in her ear. “Turn around.”
Her skirts swished around her ankles as she did, looking straight ahead, across the bridge to the high spires of a palace reaching high above the clouds. Nearly translucent, but shimmering with the same gold she stood upon, green grasses flowing out and intersected by tiny veins of rivers to coalesce into the waterfall tumbling over the cliffside.
Lucien’s chuckle was dry, and she thought it might have been rather sad, but considered it no longer when he murmured, “Look up.”
And there, coming from the palace and cutting through the sky so richly blue, was indeed a wicker and gold chariot, its iron axle tree leading to two Pegasi, one dark as night and the other like the blinding dawn, each with golden frontlets. Eight-spoked wheels, the gaps in the chariot’s sides revealing the flowing red cloak waving behind the charioteer like the dying rays of the sun.
She leapt back a few steps as the Pegasi landed at the end of the bridge on the palace’s side, the two beasts folding in their broad wings just as the rider dismounted, his face split in a bright grin as he strode right for them.
Helion.
“Little Lucien!” he called, and she had to fight the urge not to gape at him – at the single bolt of white fabric pinned together by a golden clasp which bore the same intricate detailing as his steeds’ frontlets. “You’ve not visited Day in quite some time. Imagine my surprise when I, beginning to feel quite left out, hear word from dear Rhysand.” His amber eyes glowed beneath the sun, and Elain had to wonder if he’d positioned himself just to the shocks of gold in his eyes would glow in the early morning light. “A matter of some importance, he’d said. He sounded rather strained.” Helion’s jovial face turned somber for a moment, and it almost threw her backwards, the grave weight of knowledge and wisdom which darkened his eyes. Perhaps it was the reason for his flirtations, a distraction from the things which hounded him. “I heard Nyx had been born. Were there complications?”
Lucien shook his head. His face was green again, his jaw clenched tightly and his throat working. “Nyx is healthy.” Helion’s shoulders sagged just slightly with relief. “It concerns me, High Lord, and is a deeply private matter.”
Helion cocked his head. A golden crown sat atop his head and glinted so brightly with the angle that Elain squinted. He looked between Lucien and Elain, and though Lucien’s eye was magical, she wondered if Helion had the same ability to see spells, to see bonds and shields and all sorts of things which evaded most others. “A matter concerning the bond?”
It was an effort not to flinch.
“A matter concerning my mother.”
Helion suffered the same effort. His eyes hardened, fighting rapidly against the flare of panic they’d both already seen, and even the Pegasi seemed to halt, the female’s hooves clicking on the bridge. “Ah,” Helion murmured. “Yes. Well. . . we shall retire to my home.” His eyes flicked to Elain and, with great, effort, softened, and his voice was strained as he said, “Lady, you are lovelier than rumors suggest. I’ve yet the pleasure of meeting you, though I’m acquainted with your sisters.”
Before Elain could decide what to do, be it curtsy or nod or some such thing, Helion strode forward and kissed either cheek. She half expected instinct to demand Lucien freeze or snarl, but he only watched on. As if something had overridden it. As if the bond knew Helion to be no threat.
“Your home is stunning,” she said, dragging her eyes away from Lucien. “If you’ve public gardens, I’d love to visit them.”
Helion settled a hand on her upper back and steered her, with Lucien, towards the end of the bridge, the Pegasi shooting up into the sky with a command from the High Lord. “You may visit them whenever you like, but you have access to my private garden. I’ll escort you to it, perhaps tomorrow after lunch.” He blinked, looking at Lucien. “Assuming you have time to linger.”
Sunlight caught on Lucien’s eye, on the blazing gold amongst the red of his hair, and something in Elain’s mind began to form. His nose, his complexion, the broadness of his shoulders. . . none of his brothers carried the same traits. They could well be from his mother’s side, or a distant relative, and yet, he’d broken that spell binding him in Hybern. And his mother was of some importance to Helion.
“That depends on you, High Lord.” Lucien was remarkably still for a male so obviously anxious. “You may wish to throw me out the moment I speak.”
Helion laughed. “Are you simply trying to be banned from every court? Have a complete set? Why, Lucien, unfortunately I am a selfish male, and banning you may earn Feyre Cursebreaker’s wrath. Feyre Cursebreaker is a dear friend; I won’t stand to lose her company, especially not before I’ve met the babe.”
There was a sort of longing in his tone. A male who had been denied something lovely.
And, deciding to offer him some sort of lifeline, to take the attention away from Lucien for just a moment so he could get a breath down, Elain said, “He’s a very happy baby. We think he’ll skip crawling and go straight to walking.”
Helion beamed. The palace was coming closer now, guarded by similar wards to Rhysand’s, though Helion’s glowed with a sort of proud radiance. “I sent him a stuffed Pegasus. It was a compromise; I’d offered to send a real one.”
“Oh, I remember. Feyre thought you had to be bluffing.”
“Trust me, dear, I would have brought the Pegasus myself, if only to see Rhysand’s face. Alas, he put his foot down.”
They reached the edge of the wards, and passed within them, a feeling like warm sunlight washing over her skin and easing the mild chill which had begun to reach her in the cool morning. The moment they passed through, Helion turned to them and extended his broad, callused hands. “We’ll winnow directly into the main hall.” He looked to Elain. “Will you be joining us in my office?”
Lucien would let her, she knew, but the look in his eyes as he stared at Helion was so nervous, so tentative and horrified and disbelieving, that she would let him come to her if he so chose. Elain shook her head. “I would decline,” she said politely as she took his hand. “Winnowing is still new to me; it’s left me a little dizzy.”
Helion saw the lie for what it was, eyes glinting like a cat’s in the dark, and then the world twisted for but half a second before they were standing in an airy, golden hallway, red carpeting spilling across the floor and fine tapestries hanging from the walls, interrupted by high windows looking over the sea and the cities below. He dipped his chin, releasing their hands, and said, “I understand. I shall have someone bring you to your rooms, and see about you having a meal. We shall be together for dinner, but until then, you have free rein, Lady.”
One look at Lucien, and Helion led him down another hallway, oddly silent as they disappeared. Elain turned towards the tapestries, taking each one in.
The first, a golden throne room, a lounging man surrounded by courtiers and writhing bodies, and yet the edges of it were black, as if loneliness encroached upon him. She certainly knew the feeling.
The next, a female in that same ballroom with flowing auburn hair and fair skin, wearing a gown of deep green. The male stood before her, held her, danced with her, and there was such adoring love, as if the very threads of the tapestry knew and had laid witness, that Elain fought the urge to look away and grant them privacy.
After that, another dark room, the male alone in it. Then a glen, a house, the female fleeing. Another, in each other’s arms, and—
“Lady?”
Elain jumped, a soft oh! escaping her mouth as she whirled around from the tapestries as if she were a child caught up in the dead of night. She was High Fae now, and should have heard the light footsteps or smelled the servant’s scent on the breeze, but the tapestries had been so hauntingly beautiful and had seemed to emanate sorrow and love.
The female before her was slight, all sharp angles and narrow amber eyes like a hawk. Her hair was bound in a tight coronet, swept back from her face and out of the way. Interlocking golden hoops hung from her ears, and though it looked as if it should have been heavy, they swayed lightly. It was the only adornment on her, her white tunic and breezy pants altogether rather practical. Little dust smudges darkened the fabric, as if she’d spent time amongst ancient texts or antiques.
Elain flushed and smoothed her skirts. “I’m sorry,” she said earnestly. “I was lost in thought.”
The female shrugged. “The High Lord sent me to show you your rooms, with the stipulation to escort you to breakfast, if you so choose. You may eat in your room, if you prefer.”
A grand dining room, empty but for her and the whisper of wind through high ceilings. . . the loneliness of the first tapestry seemed to reach for her again with desperate hands. Elain shivered. “I think I’ll take it in my rooms, if that’s alright.”
Nodding, the female turned and strode down a hall across from the one Helion and Lucien had disappeared down. She could have sworn the blaze of fire and sunlight emanated from that direction, but her guide did not mention it, nor did she appear to be remotely affected by it, so Elain only followed her down winding halls and up twisting stairs until they reached a set of doors.
“Breakfast will be along in half an hour,” she said simply, and before Elain could thank her, the female was gone, the only evidence of her presence the lingering smell of old books.
The bedroom was wide and open with ceilings towering high above her, her neck aching as she craned it back to look at the mural painted across it in pale pinks, blues, greens, and reds illuminated by sunlight crashing in through the floor-to-ceiling windows across the room. The bed was opulent, large enough for five, and she wondered if that had been a personal choice by Helion, perhaps partly in the hopes that Azriel, Cassian, and Morrigan would eventually give in. The sheets were a rich crème with red and gold accents like the sun, low hanging curtains from the rosewood posts sweeping across in waves of crimson. The same wood made up the desk, the dresser, the bedside tables, and the breakfast table by the glass balcony doors looking out over the mountains. North – towards the Night Court.
She padded across the room into the bathroom, leaving wooden floors for warmed tile and marble countertops, a massive tub overlooking the landscape and already filled with clear, sparkling water with the walls holding scented soaps and salts.
Padding across the room towards the sitting area of crème and gold chairs by the fireplace, a plush rug between them, Elain had just sat down in the leftmost one and realized that the dark furnace was out and she had no idea how to light it when the entire palace rumbled.
The paintings and tapestries on the wall shuddered, a candelabra slamming to the ground. Elain jumped, heart hammering, a pale hand over her chest. Gods, that. . . could that have been Helion? Or Lucien? Perhaps she wouldn’t have much time in this room, if the meeting was going that poorly.
The door swung open, and heat burst in, wiping away the comfortable warmth of the room. A servant hurried in bearing a silver tray with her face flushed and her eyes wide, but she only said a bit breathlessly as she set it down on the breakfast table, “Apologies for the interruption, Lady.”
Elain’s chest rose and fell hard beneath her dress. “Is everything all right?”
“Of course.” The servant set about pouring a cup of tea, busying her trembling hands. “The High Lord was likely just a bit startled; he’s been busy as of late, a bit wound tight—” she trailed off, looking right at Elain’s ribs, and her mouth parted. “I don’t mean to imply. . . your mate is not in any danger, Lady; the High Lord is very kind.”
“I know,” Elain murmured, though her heart still hammered, the thread around her ribs taut between them. A few months ago, she would have vomited on her shoes at the words ‘your mate,’ and while it itched beneath her skin, her stomach didn’t roll and her skin was not clammy. “Maybe he was just. . . amused, or something.”
She knew for near certain that he wasn’t.
Lucien couldn’t breathe.
Chest tight, sweat dripping down his skin beneath the too-tight, scratching tunic, all while Helion lounged on low-lying auburn cushions – red, and he thought he might vomit, because it may as well have been all the confirmation he needed. Maybe he didn’t need confirmation. He could see it in the nose that was not Beron’s or his mother’s but Helion’s and in the skin darker than his brothers’ and he’d always wondered why.
He'd wondered why his father hated him so and his mother adored him so. Why she loved him so affectionately and doted on him even when her eyes were haunted and her porcelain skin was bruised beneath sweeping, bellowing sleeves. Her sweet voice, her scent. . .
“I’ve not seen your mother in quite some time,” Helion purred. Sunlight caught and sparkled on the spikes of his crown as he drank wine from a golden goblet before him – deeply. Unsettled. “Not since the War. How is she?”
Lucien’s throat bobbed. A single drop of sweat slid over his Adam’s apple. “Last I heard, she was well.” He’d not seen her since Helion had. The idea flipped his stomach. “But as this visit relates to my mother, I don’t mean that she sent word, or anything of the sort, but. . .” Rhysand and Feyre couldn’t be tied to it. It was too great a risk.
U cannot convince me that cass didn't have to go through *months* of physiotherapy and rehabilitation to be able to fly again after the debacle in hybern. And u cannot convince me that any of them would have let a stranger do it. Cass needed the emotional support anyway.
Lucien’s reputation follows him throughout the courts of Prythian, but according to @cauldronblssd , @velidewrites and myself, there’s no reputation more important than being hot as fuck. For Day 6: Reputation of @lucienweekofficial , we’d asked the talented @/kowc0a_ to make those thighs THICK and they’ve had us screaming since the very first sketch.
Thank you @/kowc0a_ for making our vision of Day Court Lucien come to life so beautifully! The sheer amount of details in this piece have us INSANE — just look at the fire wrapped around his arms? His tiny little skirt? The anklets? His reputation really does precede him and all we really want is just ONE chance. Just one. Or two. Maybe three?
✴ a one shot inspired by the theory that Elain reminds Rhys of his sister
✴ word count: 1.1k
✴ warnings: grief, loss, nightmares
✴ Hespera Masterlist
Rhysand woke to a room cloaked in starry midnight. His eyes scanned each corner for threats, heart beating so quickly it ached in his chest. He was too warm, skin sticky with sweat.
Thunder rumbled, rattling the glass of the windows. It took him a moment to understand that it hadn't come from himself, but the summer storm approaching Velaris. He held his breath, glancing toward Nyx's bassinet, but the wards had held. The sound hadn't gotten through and his son was still asleep, little face peaceful and painted silver with moonlight.
Rhys's gaze shifted toward the bed. The space beside him was empty and the anxiety rattled harder against his ribs. He knew Feyre was only at the House of Wind with Nesta. But he needed her now.
Before he could stop himself, Rhys was out of bed and tugging on clothes. His nightmare and the real world were still merged, horror crawling down his spine. In this strange version of the world, a pair of glowing purple eyes overlapped with a pair of shining hazel ones. The sharp sting of loss filled every inch of him, coursing through his veins like the night-kissed power he'd inherited.
If Feyre were here, or Cassian, or Az, they would help him slide back into reality. But they weren't here and he was stuck in this world of rumbling darkness. This rendition of the truth, created by his nightmare.
Running down the hall, he barely registered how stupid this would look and how foolish he would feel in the morning. He didn't care. He couldn't care. Not with the panic and the grief warring for space in his mind. And worse, something deep in his gut was clawing for a shred of hope. He fought for it, chest heaving. Because accepting the truth would hurt more than he could bear.
Trembling fingers grasped the doorknob to Elain's room and swung the door open wide. Lightning illuminated her form as she shot upright, fear written across her features. Thunder rolled again and Rhys jumped, scurrying toward her. Elain's shoulders sagged as she realized it was just him, though her brows furrowed at the wild gleam in his eyes, the sheen of sweat on his torso as he struggled for a breath.
"What's wrong? Is it Nyx?" She pulled back the covers and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. Another flash of lightning ignited the amber of her eyes.
When he saw it, the honey brown that was supposed to be violet, Rhys crumbled. He dropped to his knees by Elain's bed, the harsh thud of his landing coinciding with another wave of thunder. When the sound faded, sobs filled the room. Rhys bent forward slowly to rest his forehead on Elain's knees.
She was still for a moment, processing the High Lord coming undone at her feet. Then she silently reached toward her sister, hoping the message made it to her, before pushing Rhysand back with gentle hands so she could kneel in front of him. She wrapped her arms around him, letting him weep into her shoulder. An image drifted into her mind and she didn't know if it had come from her own gifts or if Rhys had shared it with her. Wherever it came from, it sent a wave of aching grief so strong it pulled tears from her own eyes.
The heart-shaped face of a winged girl, blushing and laughing. Her golden skin and thick black eyebrows matched Rhysand's. Her eyes the same shade of violet, flecked with stars. Unruly black curls bounced over her shoulders. She was so young. Younger than Feyre had been when she'd gone over the wall with Tamlin. Elain could see her youth and promise, possibility wreathing those dark curls like a halo. As brilliant and glowing as her brother's power.
"Hespera," Rhysand croaked, grasping fistfuls of Elain's nightgown. Her jasmine scent filled his nose and pulled another choked cry out of him. It was not Hespera's scent. Not the smell of summer nights and moonflower he'd likely never experience again.
Elain's heart broke in two as she understood. He had come looking for her. He would not find her, would never find her again.
Rhys had told her once that she reminded him of his sister. It had filled her chest with warmth, made her eyes gleam with the honor, though a part of her had wondered if he was just being nice.
Now, she knew it was true. As he had rushed in his half-awake state to her room, to the closest thing in this living world he could find to his sister. Mind hazy from his dream, he had forgotten she was gone. Elain knew what it felt like, the jumbled mess of emotions that came from dreaming of one you've lost.
"I'm sorry," Elain whispered, threading her fingers through his own inky hair and cradling his head. The floorboards dug into her knees and snagged against her nightgown but she did not move, only reached toward Feyre again. "I'm so sorry."
Elain couldn't guess how long they stayed like that, Rhysand enveloped in grief as the storm raged outside. She listened carefully for Nyx but he seemed to be sleeping through it all and she thanked the Mother for it.
Then she heard the snap of an incoming winnow and hurried footsteps on the stairs. Feyre ran past Elain's open door, doubling back when she registered what she'd seen. She stopped in the doorway, eyes drifting over her mate in Elain's arms, the panic in her eyes turning into sorrow.
"Feyre's here," Elain whispered as Feyre sat on the floor with them. Rhysand released Elain, looking at Feyre with such devastation in his red-rimmed eyes. Feyre held his face in her hands, brushing away the tears, murmuring comfort.
Elain wondered how her sister could stand even a fraction of the grief he must be sending through the bond. Her thoughts flashed toward her own mate, wondering if he had ever experienced such an episode and held it in so as not to send it to her unwittingly. It was another wave of pain in her already twisted heart.
She stood and walked toward the door a little numbly. Tea. Tea might help.
"Thank you," Feyre whispered over her shoulder at Elain, tears falling freely down her cheeks.
Elain nodded, not bothering to wipe away her own. For the millionth time, she cursed the cauldron for the power it had thrust upon her. This time, though, she did not wish to be human again. She wished for more. Something greater than her visions, greater than either of her sister's stolen powers. Something that could reverse the cruel death of Rhysand's sister. Or something that could help her dole the most fitting justice. She would send that vengeance to the afterlife, if she must.
Just as Nesta hadn't seen the silver glow of power in her own eyes, Elain could not see the golden light of her own.
Summary: Lucien Vanserra's life, as explained through the maturation of his face. Elain Archeron has had enough of being protected.
Word Count: 2K
For Lucien Vanserra, there was an inherent connection between his idea of his own face and his understanding of himself.
As a child, he had plump, rosy cheeks that were pinched by plenty of courtiers and his mother’s handmaidens, a pert nose, and large, russet eyes that gleamed with such innocence that his father had struck. The face he had seen from the ages of three to four indicated to Lucien that, though he had suffered, he was a happy child, and loved dearly by many.
At the age of five, Eris had begun his training. Simple defenses, at first, but as he grew, Eris taught him to fight. Lucien had thought nothing of it; his eldest brother was showing him attention, attention which he did not receive from his older brothers. Many of the ladies in court commented on how quickly he was growing, how much taller he was than his brothers at the same age, and how he bathed in the sun for hours and hours. His mouth was his mother’s in its fullness, but different in its quickness to smile. His mother smiled rarely.
Then, Lucien had thought that he was very loved. Now he knew that face to have been his damnation, when his features were all his mother’s and none of his father’s, and for that, she loved him above her other sons. Showered him in affection she had not been so quick to give them, and thus from his very birth he had been shunned by all but Eris.
Eventually, that face was darkened with bruising that healed quickly in appearance but slowly in his heart, and in those years, he did not understand himself. He did not understand himself as he grew and grew, surpassing his brothers in height. He was slimmer where they were broad, his skin darker than their fair, pale skin. His mother and his father were both pale, and sometimes he wondered if some of his mother’s screaming was because of him. His smiles came less easily, and many a visitor commented on how remarkably similar his appearance was to his mother’s.
But when he became a male and his face was more defined, when his training had filled him out with fine muscle and broadened his shoulders, Lucien Vanserra came to know himself as something wild. The sharp edges of his cheekbones, the plane of his nose, the strength of his hands. He tore through the smaller Autumn towns on the outskirts of his father’s territories, bedding females and returning days later to the Forest House flushing and grinning. Being the youngest of his sons, Beron very rarely reprimanded him - right up until Jesminda.
With Jesminda, his face had become, he thought, infinitely more beautiful, for it was a thing that she loved, and he had smiled far easier, had smiled without the restraint of his rakish youth when he still felt the sting of his father’s hand. The sun had shone from within his very skin, and her hands ran over his skin as if it were fine silk and she a seamstress who would create from it something indescribable.
And even after she died, his face was something Lucien had come to rely upon. He knew, objectively, that he was attractive, and so it came as no surprise that it worked in his favor as an emissary. The effects of a quick, lashing tongue could be soothed by attraction.
Yet now he sat on the cold tile of his bathing room, head against his knee and chest shuddering with each ragged inhale that washed over him the taste of bile. His hands trembled, though he clutched his breeches against it. Tamlin and Alis all but forbade him from the mirror and had gone so far as to cover it with a black shroud, but Tamlin had gone out that night to scout, and Alis was with her nephews, leaving Lucien to stumble in and tear it free.
He had known his face was vile. Tamlin had retched upon his return; Alis had ducked from the room as he slipped from unconsciousness to weep. Lucien imagined then that even his own mother could not love him, for she loved him because he did not look like Beron, because he looked like her. Now he was but a ravaged corpse of something once beautiful.
The gaping hole where his eye had been was an abyss much like his heart, his soul crashing back down into the murky depths of despair he’d only just begun to try at pulling himself free from. He’d collapsed to his knees and vomited up his meager dinner.
His entire life, his intelligence had been his greatest indicator of himself – his tutors had marveled at his quickness, and really the only reason that Tamlin had allowed him to remain in the manor had been because of his mind, his aptitude for diplomacy where Tamlin demonstrated a rather obvious and damaging lack thereof. The mask that wrapped his face just weeks later was, he thought, a permanent reminder of just how fleeting his intelligence was, of what sort of fool he truly had to be. If he had not been a fool, Jesminda would be in his arms, his bed, his eye in his socket and his face in the mirror. Now, there was only the mask, a devastatingly lovely thing fashioned after a fox. He’d been quick to accept the offer, to hide the wretched face, though the scar remained visible. Nuan’s golden eye whirred in his skull, and for a moment, he felt right.
Lucien had spent countless nights shredding his own face into bloody ribbons, yanking at the mask that sweltered in the heat and left his skin bereft of the sun’s gentle rays, the very thing which had made him so lovely in his youth.
All for it to come free from his face with nothing but a gentle brush of his fingers.
Cold air had hit his face in a rush, and he’d wept where he stood beneath that accursed mountain, feeling his skin at last, scratching the wicked itch on his nose that had not left in fifty years. Then his fingers brushed the edge of that scar, and he had hardly gotten out of the main hall before he was vomiting across the stone floor.
The mirrors in his rooms were all destroyed within moments of returning home. He’d scrubbed and scrubbed at his skin, shaking, weeping, until Alis had scented blood and barged in to stop him. One touch of her small hand on his arm, and he’d allowed her to guide him over to the bed and bade him to rest.
How Elain was expected by the Cauldron to love him, to be attracted to him, Lucien did not know. He could not fathom it. She had wanted a mortal man, and where once he might have been something akin to one beyond his ears and his teeth, he was as distinctly far from Grayson as he could get. Mortal men simply did not have golden eyes of magic that whirred and clicked and spun, seeing webs of spells and trails of bonds. It was not done. Grayson was a lord, a restrained, poised young man with an estate and nothing to be said of his reputation. Lucien Vanserra was a rake, a disavowed son of the High Lord of Autumn, murderer of his own lover. He had a tongue so wicked it cost him his eye; surely, Grayson had never said anything so rash as that.
“Lucien.”
Lucien blinked. At once, the mask in his hands faded, for he realized that he had been staring at his palms and the scars flecked across his skin, and he dragged his eye from them to the door.
Oh. Yes. The River House. Feyre had requested his presence, had wished to speak after their last interaction at Solstice, and Lucien, though hurt still lingered low in his belly, did not desire to lose whatever he had left of her friendship, and attended. Dinner went on late into the night, and she had coaxed him into staying in one of the rooms upstairs – a guest bedroom, she claimed, but Lucien was not always a fool. The furniture, the deep red of his bed, the view towards the forest across the Sidra were all things Lucien might have picked for himself, if he bothered to do such a thing.
Elain, resplendent, stood in the doorway, hands twisted in the soft green of her gown. Lovely in Spring’s colors, his mate. Her golden brown curls bounced along the expanse of her shoulders, trailed down towards a string of pearls.
She frowned. One of her hands drifted to her chest. “I. . . thought I felt you.”
Lucien grimaced, waving her off and thanking the Mother his hands did not tremble. “My apologies, Lady. A moment of thoughtlessness.”
Shaking her head, Elain stepped over the threshold, casting the lightest, fastest of glances across his space before she said, “I thought you had been hurt. You frightened me.”
“I am sorry for that, and all the other times before.”
“Feyre was very glad to see you. She regretted it, you know. How Solstice ended.”
Feyre had, in loose terms, said as much, and embraced him so tightly he’d choked. Lucien nodded. Was that really what she had come for? It had been so long now that hurt or disappointment did not so much as flicker. “Thank you.”
He turned back towards the window, intending to return to his spiraling thoughts, when Elain added, “I regretted it, too.”
Lucien blinked.
Elain drifted in, shutting the door behind her with a soft snick. Her fabric shoes slid across the floor as she came to stand in his line of view by the window, eyes shimmering against the stars blinking high above.
“I wanted you to come back, so I could speak to you. But I didn’t know how to reach you.”
“Lady—”
“You’re crying.”
He raised a hand to his eye, felt the truth of her statement in the heat that met his fingertips, and said quietly, “So I am.”
At that, she cocked her head, the motion a bit sudden as if she still had not adjusted to her body. “I Saw that you would. I saw a fox in a snare, weeping. I knew it was you. You will get free, in time. When the sun comes.”
Lucien wasn’t sure he was breathing. “Is that why you came here?”
“I came here because I felt you, and I worried. That is natural, is it not?” Elain folded her arms across her chest, lips pursed in mild irritation. “Do you know that I was glad when Nesta lashed out at me, because she had ceased to treat me as if I were not capable of withstanding it?”
“I understand, Lady.”
Her brows furrowed. “I am not a lady. I am only Elain.”
Only Elain. As if she were not the most beautiful female he had ever seen, outshining the sun itself in both body and soul. Lucien shook his head before he realized he was doing so. Elain laughed softly.
“Feyre says you are a rake,” she said conversationally, and it burned him to know that they spoke of him, that his reputation had come along and destroyed him before he ever had the chance to do so himself. For once, he could not blame it on his family name. “Rhysand says you are a fox. Nesta says that you are not to be trusted, that you are the reason I am what I am.” He flinched. “But I would like to know you for myself. I have little desire to be protected.”
“I am afraid, Elain,” Lucien murmured, tongue stumbling over her name, “that I do not know myself well enough to help.”
Elain hummed. Her eyes scanned his face, his eye, and she did not shrink back in revulsion – no, something in her scent shifted, wrapped in him pleasant warmth. “I suppose I shall have to find out, then.” A small, coy smile touched her lips, and Lucien realized with no small amount of. . . of joy that he had been played. “If that is all right with you, of course.”
