A/N: I fucking love Nuada and have since 2008, but that also means he makes me sad and miserable, so I had to write this little idea I've had for literally a decade.
(Rewritten 2.23.2026 because this was originally from several many years ago and I was not proud of it; it is much longer and much more detailed than once it was. I sincerely hope those who have enjoyed this in its previous form enjoy it all the more now!)
Ao3
Please enjoy under the cut <3
Once, long ago, I made friends with Time. I myself was little more than a Careful Creature, young and curious. There is not much, now, I can recount of the days before him.
But I remember him.
He was enduring and ancient. Silver hair spilled down his face, and golden were his eyes. Broad was his back, strong were his shoulders, and heavy was his gaze. Heavy were his hands, too, and so quiet and reverent was his voice.
He had a clever tongue, a clever mind, and even in his worst moments, it was difficult to look away.
We had a few long years together—or, at the very least, I thought them long. He had lived beyond all but a small handful of equally-eternal cultures still surviving in the human world. His age was vast, so vast that even now, I cannot comprehend it as he could.
Our time was likely the blink of an eye, for him.
It was slow-going, our friendship. Tentative, from the very beginning, and later less so. He opened up, slowly. About old literature and old langues first, then the customs of fighting and war. Then, in the dark of one evening, the legends and stories of his people. Fairfolk, he called them. My people, he told me, voice low.
It was then that he told me of his armour, of his youth, of his childhood and of the Golden War. He told me how the Army functioned, and why they were once necessary.
His fingers grazed along my cheek, and into my ear, he whispered the quietest, truest apology for thinking me so terrible. He apologized for putting upon me the sin of being human.
A few years passed after that evening, years which tugged him close to me. His language became less foreign, more familiar; I do not remember when it became home.
I do not remember when he became home, or when I fell in love with him for it.
But he taught me. Taught me how to speak and write in his mother tongue, a swirling language more ancient than any living human could imagine. He wrote them in journals with yellowed pages, all of his tongue so that I could keep it close to my heart like I did him.
I have thumbed through the pages so often that the edges are worn soft, and every day I ache to hear him speak the words in my ear. I ache to have him behind me, humming songs I will never know the names of while he sways and dances with me in the candlelight of the room made his.
Perhaps it was ours, eventually, even if just for a breath.
He taught me of the trinkets and little machines he liked to make; tiny, but enduring machinations with minuscule springs and the smallest screws. He would spend his happiest hours making elaborate systems for puzzles or music boxes.
He made a music box for me, once, too. It still sits on my bedside, playing a song whose first three notes always make me choke.
One day, a new war came.
At first, I had desperately hoped we'd both survive, that he might find some respite from war after all his centuries. Then, as the dust and darkness closed in, I merely hoped I would die in place of him.
I would have died, rather than him, if only he had let me.
But he took the blow, and there is nothing I could have done but hold him. All I did was hold him.
All too clearly, I remember his blood. Sweet and red, not unlike the sash he often wore around his waist. It suited him, I told him once, a confession made when I was tipsy and hot-bellied from a mead he had bartered for in the Troll Markets.
His laugh was husky, quiet, reserved; his eyes spoke of a thousand endless affections that made the heat simmer hotter. I still wonder if the thumb against my lips was his way of saying he wished to kiss me, to have me.
I remember his blood. Warm, though never as warm or as sweet as the mead made me. He was dying and we both knew it. He asked so quietly, in some of his last breaths, if I would honour him by tattooing his royal marks into my skin. I could hear the silent plea beneath the words, the acceptance and confessions between the syllables.
To keep my people alive, he had said. To mend the bond which has been broken.
I hadn't needed his explanation, or the half-true excuse. I did not need his reasoning, because I knew he entrusted such weight only to me.
I knew why—even then, I could see it in his eyes. Those beautiful, tender, ever-feeling golden eyes.
I told him no, so quietly I told him no, and those eyes welled with tears that seemed more powerful than weak. I have still never seen such anguish.
But it did not last, not when I instead begged for him to carve the marks properly into my cheeks, like had been done for him, for his twin.
With the last of his strength, and with apologies thick on his tongue—I know it hurts, I know, you are doing so well for me—his blade bit so tenderly into my flesh. The marks were a mirror image of those which had eternally rested in his own skin.
When I wept into his reddened palms, he assured me that he should be the one to die—he had made too many mistakes, had too long been part of a peoples so old they had forgotten who they were, who they were meant to be.
He looked miserable for hurting me, even a little. I held his hands once the blade slipped free of them and let him feel the race of my heart. Drums, he whispered, I wish I could have danced with you with the drums as our minister and the forest as our witness.
He told me that he should die, and the world would be better for it.
But he could not let me die. He would not let me die, not in that place, not anywhere that was not a field of flowers and sunlight.
"I am an old fae," he told me, breaths still strong despite the blood which pooled under my knees. "This world has no room nor use for an angry, blackened heart like mine. I cannot change anymore, though you have softened me. But you—if you die, the world will be poorer for it."
He took one of my hands and pressed his spear into it, curling my grip tight and certain around it. He had blood in his teeth, and nothing but worship in his golden eyes.
I can swear to you I saw the first sunrise in them.
When his last breaths came, something inside broke. Even when the war was won, when the battle had been done, I had to be pried from his body. The warmth faded, the years became only memories instead of our everyday routine, and the sun seemed to die with him.
The sun died, and I felt the world shed its own tears.
Because I knew for certain that the moment he took his last breath, the world was poorer for it.
A deformed freak living in the crumbling decay of a Gothic era chapel to escape the judgment of a violent corrupt world? Guillermo really got his talons in Pearlman circa 2004 and did NOT LET GO.
People are posting the white haired hot guy from hellboy 2 recently and I'm just reminded that that movie has my favorite line in anything ever "I'm not a baby, I'm a tumor."
If he'd gained them in the war against the humans (or even if they're from Nuala's own injuries reflected on him) then Nuala would know how the injuries happened. But if some of these are from injuries sustained in his exile, then somtimes Nuala would find herself bleeding, knowing it comes from her brother, wondering how it happened.
Also fun fact but I was exactly today years old when I learned that apparently HE PLAYED THE CREATURE IN THE HALLMARK ADAPTATION OF FRANKENSTEIN TOO. in fucking 2004. so you know guillermo CLOCKED that shit and got him to play Nuada for Frankenstein nerd reasons now too. And I think I have to watch that version now also (book purists claim it is one of the most faithful adaptations of the book... so we'll see if that holds water)
successfully baited friends into watching hellboy 2 (beloved dearest movie), but that backfired cuz i was driven up the wall with the urge to draw pwince nuada
#project hail mary
#cats of tumblr
#photography
