Never mine
Pairing: Azriel x Reader Length: 1,953 words Angst Level: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 (emotional masochists welcome) Trigger Warnings: Emotional neglect, unrequited love, self-abandonment, Azriel/Elain implication, bondlessness, quiet heartbreak
Inspired by 'Cry' by Cigarettes after S*x
I think I always knew he wouldn’t stay.
Maybe not in the beginning, when his touches were soft and his words even softer. When his eyes found mine across a crowded room and something in his expression faltered, like he’d seen something he wasn’t meant to want.
But even then, even in the first gentle tremble of hope — I knew. Azriel doesn’t belong to anyone. Not really.
And I stayed anyway.
Gods, I stayed.
For the quiet moments. For the shadows that curled around me like they recognized something in me that he never dared say aloud. For the nights when he’d fall into bed beside me with a kind of desperation that made it feel like love.
But it wasn’t. Not fully. Not enough.
I started breaking myself the day Feyre found her mate.
The bond had snapped into place so clearly, so impossibly loud, that it left something in my chest hollow and trembling. And then Cassian and Nesta — two storms colliding until they burned each other alive, and still, the bond was there. Tangible. Unshakeable.
But Azriel and I? There was no golden thread tying us together. No glowing tether from his soul to mine.
Just flesh. Just hands. Just stolen moments that didn’t belong to the light of day.
I never told him that I cried the first time he left before sunrise. I watched the sky turn violet, watched the curve where his body used to be cool and empty in my sheets, and I knew — I knew — that I was the only one falling.
I walk past him, toward the open balcony where the wind hiss at my skin.
I closed my eyes. Let the wind tug my hair like fingers that weren’t his. Let it bite my skin harder than he ever did, even in passion.
“If we don’t have a bond... then why does it still feel like I’m yours?”
I think that maybe it started unraveling the night he looked at her like that.
Not in the casual, almost-guilty way he did when he thought no one noticed. No, this was different.
He looked at Elain like the world might end if she looked back.
And she did.
Softly. Sweetly. Like she had no idea she was killing me just by breathing near him.
That was the first time I wondered if maybe we’d only ever been a placeholder. If I was just the shadow Azriel wrapped himself in while he waited for light.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he says now, standing in the doorway of my room like he hasn’t already done exactly that.
He always says it like it’s new. Like I haven’t bled out in his arms a hundred times already.
“I’m not Elain,” I whisper, voice brittle.
He freezes. Not because I’ve said something cruel — but because I’ve said something true.
A breath. A beat. A silence full of every word he never said.
“You think I don’t know that?” His voice is quiet. So fucking quiet.
“I think you wish I were,” I say. “Or maybe you just wish she were me. Easier. Less complicated. Already loved by everyone.”
He flinches.
Good.
I want it to hurt.
Because I’ve been dying in inches for months while he’s tried to make room in his heart for someone who barely looks at him. For someone who glows while I stay cloaked in shadows he called mine.
“You don’t understand,” he says.
“No,” I snap. “I do. You think she might be your mate. So you stall. You hesitate. You hold back, just in case.”
He doesn’t deny it.
And that’s the worst part.
I laugh. Not because it’s funny — but because it’s the only thing keeping me from breaking in half.
“So what am I, Azriel? Your contingency plan? Your…hole to fill?”
He says nothing.
Just looks at me with that sorrowful, broken stare he always wears when he’s caught between guilt and silence.
“I chose you,” I whisper. “Every fucking time. No bond. No signs. Just love.”
I step closer, trembling. “But you never chose me. Not really. Because somewhere in your heart, you’re still waiting for something else. Someone else.”
“It’s not that simple—”
“It is,” I say, almost choking. “It’s exactly that simple. You don’t love me enough to stop wondering about her. You don’t love me enough to stay.”
His wings twitch. His mouth parts like he wants to argue.
But there’s no lie big enough to fix what he’s broken.
“I wake up alone more nights than not,” I whisper. “And every time you leave, I tell myself you’ll come back differently. That you’ll look at me like I’m it for you. Like I’m worth fighting the bond that never came.”
“I feel things for you,” he says desperately. “Things I don’t understand. But Elain—”
“—isn’t yours,” I cut in. “She never was.”
And still, he says nothing.
Because deep down, I think he knows I’m right. I think he knows that whatever he and Elain are — or aren’t — is just a dream he won’t let go of. A possibility he’s too afraid to shut the door on.
Even if it means letting me walk out instead.
“I can’t keep being your almost,” I murmur, chest splitting. “I’m asking you to stop loving me like this. Like it’s a crime. Like it’s a secret.”
“You act like fate forgot about you,” I say. “But maybe it didn’t. Maybe it gave you me. And you were too busy chasing a golden thread that never snapped to see that you already had a soul beside yours.”
The wind howls.
He doesn’t.
“I’m tired,” I say. “Of begging with my eyes. Of being your secret. Of pretending that this doesn’t kill me a little more every time you leave.”
“I thought I was protecting you,” he says, desperate now. “From me. From what I am. I’m not—” He breaks off, his voice jagged. “I’m not him, Y/N. I’m not Rhys. Or Cassian. I don’t know how to love like they do.”
“I never asked you to be anyone else,” I whisper. “I just wanted you to be here. With me. When it mattered.”
And still — still — he does not move.
So I do.
I walk past him, past the bedroom that holds a hundred memories of him reaching for me in the dark but never in the light. I walk past the ghosts of every almost, every maybe, every word he never said.
And I stop at the doorway.
I don’t look back.
I look at him — one last time.
Azriel. Shadowsinger. The male I gave everything to. Who made me believe in love without a bond. Who held me like I was everything and left like I was nothing.
“I would’ve stayed,” I whisper. “Even without the bond. Even without her. I would’ve stayed and loved you until it destroyed me.”
Tears threaten.
But I don’t let them fall.
“You’re the one who walked away.”
And then I do.
I walk.
And he lets me.
Again.
⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽༓☾∘∙⊱⋅•
Azriel's POV
She glowed tonight.
Not like starlight. Not like Elain.
Like fire.
Like rage and rebirth and someone who survived her own ruin.
She stood in the garden in a midnight-blue dress that clung to her like a second skin, her laughter low and steady as it bloomed from her lips — those same lips I once touched with trembling fingers, too afraid to claim, too selfish to leave.
And I think I forgot how to breathe.
Because she wasn’t looking for me anymore.
Not even a glance.
Not even a flicker of recognition, like the memory of us had finally faded from her bones.
But I remember.
Gods, I remember everything.
The curve of her shoulder under my hand. The way her eyes used to search mine like she was trying to find something that mattered. The way she said my name like it was something safe.
Azriel.
No one has said it like that since.
Not even Elain.
And now—now she belongs to him.
The male at her side watches her the way I never did. Not because I didn’t want to. But because I was too afraid of what it would mean if I let myself need her.
Too afraid that if I chose her without a bond, the Mother would laugh and punish us both. That maybe I was only whole enough to wound.
But he doesn’t look afraid.
He looks like he knows he’s the luckiest bastard alive.
He looked at her the way I never did.
Like she was the answer, not the question.
And it guts me.
Because I could have. Gods, I could have.
I loved her.
I think I always did — in my own broken, hesitant way. But I was too busy listening for something that never came. Waiting for a bond that never snapped. Chasing an if while she was begging me to see the now.
I didn’t choose her.
And by the time I realized she was already mine, she had already learned to stop hoping.
She stopped waiting.
She stopped bleeding for me.
And now she belongs to someone who never made her ask to be chosen.
I don't blame her.
He just saw her — and stayed.
I don’t remember what joy feels like.
Not anymore.
Just the sound of her voice in my memory and the weight of every “almost” I threw away. I can still taste her in the quiet. Still hear her whisper, “Even if there’s no bond… I still choose you.”
And I—fuck—I just stood there.
Waiting for something better.
Something easier.
Something fated.
But fate never showed up.
And now I’m left with silence. With shadows that curl tighter around my ribs because they remember how she used to hold them in her sleep, whispering comfort to the darkness I never learned to live without.
I should’ve loved her better.
I should’ve loved her louder.
Not like a secret. Not like a sin.
But like a prayer.
And now she’s gone.
Not dead.
Worse.
Happy.
With someone who isn't me.
I watch her laugh — soft and warm, her hand brushing his as he tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. She leans into him like home. Like trust.
Like something I could’ve had if I’d just told her what she meant before it was too late.
I don’t sleep anymore.
I just lay in the dark and wonder if she still sleeps on the left side of the bed. If she still hums when she makes tea. If she still cries when it rains — and if now, someone holds her when she does.
I wonder if she still loves me.
And then I pray she doesn’t.
Because it would kill me to think she still does — and stayed away anyway.
I never said I loved her.
Not out loud.
And now it’s all I can think.
Over and over and over again, until it fills the hollowness I carved into myself with silence.
I loved you. I loved you. I loved you. I still love you.
Gods, I’d give anything to go back — to un-say every silence, to un-make every hesitation. To press my hands to her cheeks and say I love you. Stay. It’s you. It’s always been you.
But that moment is dead.
Buried beneath the weight of every day I waited.
Now I’m just the ghost of what she almost had.
And she?
She’s finally free of me.
I think that’s what kills me the most.
She let go.
And I never will.
She left.
Because I made it easy.
A/N: Sooooo what do you guys think of this? I was listening to this song and thought 'Why not'. Hope you guys like it, and if you do, please let me know!
Dividers by @enchanthings-a
