The most wild thing about Cassian’s feral and constant defence of anything Rhysand is that it could be such a beautiful pain rather than a confusing annoyance.
Like I love “MMC who only thinks about FMC” as much as the next person but why wasn’t Cassian allowed a SHRED of character development.
What if every time Nesta says something bad about Rhys it’s like a barely healed over scab ripping open beneath her nails. The agony of 50 years, half a century without his brother. The loss barely healed before war comes, the time never enough. Distant, they’ve still been so impossibly distant. In the same room laughing and drinking whiskey but minds entirely occupied with their own personal destruction and salvation, both bearing the name Archeron. They haven’t even had a single good day, a single complete day, where one of them wasnt heartbroken or war wasn’t beating down their door.
And the entire cauldron-damned time he was quelling rebellion in Illyria it was all he heard. Insults for the brother who gave everything to save them. Again and again, his whole life Cassian has had to fight and punch and bloody in defence of his brother. It’s instinct. He didn’t even think, lashing out with words as if his mate was Devlon. And he regretted it. Of course, the second the words left his mouth he regretted them, but … it was true, wasn’t it. In a sense, in a horrible way.
Not the female herself, he knew, but what she reminded them of. She wore her trauma on her sleeve while they all choked and gargled on the blood still staining their hands and everyone hated her for it. Mor most of all, he guessed. An open wound, refusing to shut. It was why she was here. Why they were both here.
Fuck the money. Fuck the liquor and sex. It was the pain. The empty spot at the dining table, the aching absence in the pictures on the walls. They … well, he and Feyre, really, couldn’t stand her absence but her presence was nothing but a mirror. Reflecting everything still inside of them. Broken and raging and screaming insults at anyone who dared speak ill of his brother.
Habit, instinct, to lash out when one he loved was insulted.
He hated Nesta for hating Rhys. And he hated Rhys for hating Nesta.
Because what, in the almighty fuck, was he supposed to do with that?
When he loved them both so much.
andulkaphoto
germansingergirl
