The Things We Left Unsaid - Pt 4
Part 3 - Masterlist
Azriel x Reader Angst / Slow Burn
A few days had passed, and nothing had changed.
If anything, it had gotten worse.
Dorian had left yesterday, kingdom business his Hand's letter said, and you understood, you did, but his absence had left a particular kind of quiet in its wake that you hadn't been prepared for. He had been your buffer. Your excuse. The reason you could sit at a dinner table and direct your attention somewhere safe, the reason you could laugh without it meaning anything, the reason you could be in a room with Azriel and not feel the full, unmediated weight of him pressing against every careful wall you'd spent the better part of a century building.
Without Dorian, there was nothing between you and the thing you were not ready to face.
You had filled the space the only way you knew how: with company, with movement, with the deliberate occupation of every hour that might otherwise have gone quiet enough to think.
Feyre had been generous with her time, and Nesta more so than you would have expected, and if you were being honest with yourself, genuinely honest in the way that only happened late at night when there was no one left to perform for, you had loved every moment of it. Loved being back in these rooms, this House, this city that still knew your footsteps better than any place you'd been in all the years of moving through the world.
Home, it turned out, had not forgotten you either.
The only slight complication was a certain shadowsinger.
He was always there, somewhere at the edges of things: at the far end of the dinner table, in the library when you arrived and gone by the time you'd settled, a presence felt in hallways a beat before or after you passed through them. Close enough that the awareness of him was constant, distant enough that nothing was required of either of you.
He had not come to find you.
That was the thing you kept returning to, in the small hours when the room was dark and there was nothing left to do except think. After the corridor — after everything you had said and not said, after his voice cracking on please and the way he'd stood there after you left, rooted to the stone like something had knocked the direction out of him — you had expected something. Not a resolution. Not a declaration. You weren't ready for that and you knew it and some part of you was grateful for the distance. But something. A look held a beat too long at breakfast. A shadow brushing your wrist in passing. Some small, unmistakable sign that the corridor had mattered, that he was carrying it the same way you were.
Instead, nothing.
The far end of the table. The library vacated. Hallways that rearranged themselves so you never quite arrived at the same moment.
He was avoiding you.
That was the conclusion you had reached by the second day, and once you'd reached it you found it remarkably difficult to put down.
It was almost funny.
The rational part of you understood, in the abstract, that he might simply be giving you space. That after you had said I'm going to bed and walked away, he might have decided that pursuing you further would be unwelcome, that the merciful thing was to let you breathe. That his distance was consideration rather than indifference.
You understood that in the abstract. You did not believe it.
Because you had spent years watching Azriel give you space. Years of him stepping back, stepping aside, managing his own feelings into such careful silence that you had eventually concluded there was nothing to manage. You knew what his consideration looked like from the outside. You knew exactly how indistinguishable it was from simply not caring enough to cross the distance.
And you were not, you told yourself firmly, going to be the one to cross it first.
Not this time.
Not again.
Something about that conversation in the dark had shifted something loose inside you that you couldn't press back into place regardless. The words kept surfacing without permission — I would have come, the second you asked — catching you at odd moments, in the middle of conversations, in the thin grey light before sleep. You replayed them and felt the warmth of them and then felt the anger underneath the warmth, because words were easy. Words in a dark hallway at three in the morning with no one watching cost nothing. It was everything else that had always been the problem.
You wondered, more often than you wanted to, whether he was thinking about it too.
You were fairly certain he was. You were absolutely not going to ask.
You were thinking about this, staring at the middle distance with the unfocused attention of someone whose mind had wandered somewhere they hadn't meant to send it, when Rhys's voice cut through the quiet of the study.
"Are you even listening?"
You blinked. He had set down his pen at some point without you noticing, and was watching you from behind the desk with the expression of a male who had said something twice already and was choosing, with great deliberateness, not to say it a third time. Cassian, sprawled in the chair across from you, was watching you with significantly less restraint.
"What?" you said.
Rhys's mouth curved. "I said, get ready for dinner."
"What dinner?"
"We're having a few people over." He leaned back in his chair, perfectly composed, giving absolutely nothing away. "We wanted to bring the people we care about closer. Post-wedding. Keep the warmth going a little longer."
Something turned over in your stomach.
You rose from your chair and crossed your arms. "Fine," you said, with a smile that matched his in precisely the ways that mattered. "I suppose I can survive one small gathering."
Cassian was on his feet before you'd finished the sentence, materialized at your back with both hands on your shoulders, steering you toward the door with the irresistible momentum of someone twice your size who had decided this was happening. "That's the spirit," he said cheerfully, ruffling your hair as he pushed you both through the doorway. The door clicked shut behind him.
His steps fell into rhythm with yours.
For a moment he said nothing, which from Cassian meant he was thinking, which was always slightly alarming.
"You know what you should do," he said eventually.
"Do I even want to hear it?"
"Wear that dress," he said, as though it were the most reasonable thing in the world.
"What dress?" you asked, knowing exactly what he meant.
"Come on. Don't play stupid with me."
"That dress," Cassian said, almost reverently. "The one that nearly killed Az at Solstice."
You kept walking. Eyes forward. The dress was in the back of your wardrobe. It was going to stay there.
"Do you want me to make him suffer?" you asked. "Because I don't."
"Sure you don't." The grin was audible. But you knew it was a lie.
You stopped and turned to face him. He was already grinning, wide and entirely without shame, the grin of a male who had been watching something develop for a very long time and was deeply enjoying the view.
"You really think I bought the act with Dorian?" he said, before you could speak. "The little perfect prince?" He clicked his tongue. "Sweetheart. Give me some credit."
Your mouth opened.
"Yes," Cassian said, reading your expression with obnoxious accuracy. "Exactly." He laughed, warm and entirely without mercy. "You were never into pretty boys anyway. I know your type. You like them dark and brooding and absolutely insufferable." He winked. "Sound familiar?"
You shoved him sideways into the wall.
He went, laughing, caught himself against the stone with one hand, completely unbothered. "Shut up before I rip your tongue out," you hissed.
"Oh," he said, utterly unintimidated, a slow grin spreading. "Nesta gets very... upset when something of hers gets damaged." He let that sit a beat. "Very upset."
"I'll take my chances," you said, and turned back toward the staircase before he could see your face do anything you'd regret.
Behind you, Cassian's laughter followed you all the way up, loud and cheerful and utterly devoid of shame, and you kept walking with your chin up and your expression fixed firmly forward, and absolutely refused to think about a dress hanging in the back of your wardrobe that you had, in fact, packed entirely on purpose.
You descended the stairs with Mor's arm linked through yours, and felt the room shift before you'd reached the bottom step.
She had appeared at your door an hour earlier with the best bottle she'd found in Rhys's wine cave and a look that made very clear she had opinions about how the evening was going to go. You had let her. Mor with a purpose was not easily redirected, and somewhere beneath your carefully maintained indifference you had wanted to. She'd lined your eyes with dark kohl and pressed red onto your lips and stepped back when she was finished with the satisfied expression of someone regarding completed work.
She'd opened the wine and you'd drunk more of it than was strictly sensible. The dress had been hanging on the back of the wardrobe door the whole time — deep blue, the color of the sky in the hour before a storm commits to itself — and neither of you had mentioned it, and you had put it on anyway, and when Mor's expression shifted into something between impressed and slightly alarmed you had simply finished your glass and told yourself this was going to be fine.
It was just a dress.
Fine.
Let him see.
You felt it the way you always felt it — in the back of your teeth, somewhere beneath the sternum, the specific frequency of his attention finding you the way it always had, like it had never learned not to. Several heads turned as you descended, and Mor leaned in close, her voice low and deeply amused against your ear.
"Well. I knew you'd turn heads." A pause. "But more than me?"
Not the whole room. One specific corner of it.
You didn't look. You didn't need to. You kept your eyes forward. Rhys and Helion were already deep in conversation near the far window — and Helion saw you before you'd reached the bottom step.
"Well well well." He stepped away from Rhys with the ease of a male who moved through every room as though it had been built for him specifically. He looked you over without apology, then turned back to Rhys with an expression of exaggerated reproach. "You could have told me your most gorgeous Night Court member would be joining us tonight."
He took your hand, pressed his lips to your knuckles. "Hello, Sunshine."
You laughed, short and genuine. "High Lord." You inclined your head.
He pulled you in, one hand at your elbow, close enough that it was familiar rather than polite. "Come now. We are very past that."
You smiled at him with real warmth. Helion was easy to love — uncomplicated, generous, the kind of male who had never cost you anything. You had known him for decades, fought beside him in wars that left marks you didn't discuss. He flirted with you the way he flirted with everything beautiful, reflexively and without expectation, and you had long ago learned to receive it as the affection it actually was.
"I came back for Rhys and Feyre's wedding," you said. Your attention moved, briefly, to the other side of the room.
The shadows at the ceiling had grown darker.
Good.
"So you're staying a few days?" Helion asked, something bright in his eyes.
"More or less." You didn't know how long you would stay. How long you could bear it.
"Come visit me in the Day Court before you leave." His smile said everything his words didn't.
From somewhere behind you, something cracked — glass, or something close to it, sharp and quickly swallowed by the noise of the room. You did not turn around. You kept your eyes on Helion, let the sound settle in your chest, and told yourself you felt nothing about it.
Helion glanced past your shoulder, briefly, and something moved in his expression: amusement, calculation, the look of someone who had understood the game being played and found it deeply entertaining. He leaned in slightly, said something low about the eastern trade negotiations that made you laugh louder than it warranted, and you were aware, with complete clarity, of exactly what he was doing and loved him for it.
When you finally turned, it was on your own terms.
Azriel was looking at you.
He had not stopped looking at you. That much was clear from the specific quality of stillness he was wearing — his glass gripped too tightly, shadows coiling restlessly at the ceiling above him. Selene stood at his side, her hand on his arm, speaking to him quietly. The voice of someone trying to reach a person who had gone somewhere unreachable.
He did not look at her.
Then Selene followed his gaze.
Her eyes found you, and what was in them, the pain, yes, but beneath it something almost like recognition, a thing finally seen clearly, made guilt move through you fast and unwelcome. She didn't deserve this. Whatever anger you carried, it belonged to him, not her.
She looked at Azriel one last time.
He still did not look back.
Something in her face settled quietly into a decision. She removed her hand from his arm. Turned. Walked away with even, unhurried steps, and did not look back, and the dignity of it cost her something visible and private that you looked away from because watching it felt like an intrusion.
The evening closed back around you.
You found Mor, found conversation, found another glass of wine that disappeared faster than you'd planned. The anger in your chest did not go anywhere — it had years of practice at staying exactly where it was put — but the wine softened its edges slightly, turned it from something sharp into something that merely ached. You laughed when something was funny. You held your own in an argument with Amren that went three rounds and ended, as arguments with Amren always did, in a draw neither of you admitted to.
You were fine.
You were doing completely fine, until Helion said something that made the table laugh. You laughed too. And then your eyes moved across the room without your permission and found Azriel standing apart from all of it, watching you with that expression. The laugh died somewhere in your chest before it finished leaving your mouth.
You felt it at your fingertips first. The faintest pull of electricity, thin and restless, crawling over your knuckles before you'd even registered the feeling behind it. You pressed your hand flat against your thigh and held it there until it passed.
You needed air.
The balcony was empty when you slipped through the doors, and that was the point.
You needed the specific quality of Velaris at night, the city spread below in its impossible beauty, the stars doing what they did here and nowhere else — making themselves close enough to touch. You placed both hands on the railing and breathed out slowly and told yourself you were not hiding. You were simply taking a moment. There was a difference.
You had been there approximately two minutes when you felt the shadows.
They came before he did, skimming low across the marble, and then his presence at your back — close, closer than necessary, the warmth of him reaching you before any point of contact. His breath against the back of your neck, shallow, like he'd followed you out here without entirely deciding to.
"Why are you wearing that dress?"
Low. Rough at the edges. Not smooth. Not controlled.
You kept your eyes on the city. "What dress."
Something that was almost a groan left him. "Don't do that." He was closer now, his breath grazing your ear. "You know exactly what dress. You know exactly what you're doing."
You turned around.
Had to step back to do it, your back meeting the railing, nowhere left to go. You looked up at his face properly. And his face —
He looked wrecked.
Not composed, not guarded, not the careful nothing he showed the world when something inside him had moved too violently to be trusted in public. His eyes were burning, shadows coiling restlessly at his shoulders, and he was looking at you the way you had spent so long convincing yourself you'd imagined, like the sight of you was something he didn't know how to survive and had stopped trying to.
It made you angrier.
That he could look at you like that now, tonight, after days of nothing. After hallways vacated and tables kept carefully between you, days of distance that had felt, from where you stood, exactly like every other silence he'd ever given you.
His jaw tightened. His gaze dropped once, to the dress, to the way the fabric fell, to the slit at your thigh, and came back up dark. His shadows surged at his shoulders, a brief, violent thing he didn't bother reining in.
"What would your princeling think of this?" he said. Rough. Proprietary. Spat out before he'd thought it through.
"Don't." Something flared in your chest. "Don't you dare use Dorian."
He exhaled hard through his nose. A muscle jumped in his jaw. "You brought him here." Low. Controlled. Barely. "You knew what you were doing." His eyes found yours, dark and direct. "And it worked."
"Good." The word came out cold. Deliberate. "Then maybe now you know what it feels like." Her eyes didn't leave his. "Is that why you disappeared for almost a week? You couldn't stand the sight of it?"
Something moved across his face. "I thought you needed distance from me."
"You thought." You stared at him. "You said nothing and I left, and here we are again, and you're still—" Your voice cracked slightly and you hated it, hated that he could hear it, hated that the anger and the hurt were so tangled up they kept bleeding into each other. You huffed, trying to collect yourself. "Where is your—" you let the word sit "—girlfriend anyway?"
"She's not—"
"Is this what you tell yourself to feel better?" You cut across him. "She left. I watched her leave. Do you want to know what her face looked like when she realized you spent the entire evening not once looking at her?" You shook your head. "She didn't deserve that."
"No," he said quietly. "She didn't."
"And I didn't deserve five days of you treating me like something fragile from a safe distance."
He flinched. A small, involuntary thing. And something about seeing it, the evidence that it had landed, that he felt it, made your eyes sting in a way you absolutely refused to permit.
He looked at you for a long moment. Something shifting behind his eyes, frustration rising through the hurt. "What do you want from me?" His voice came out rough. Not angry. Genuinely lost. "You're angry when I'm there. You're angry when I'm not. Tell me what you want and I'll do it."
He took a step toward you.
"Don't—"
"Then tell me." His eyes were dark, fixed on yours. "What do you want?"
The question sat between you.
You looked at him, at the burning in his eyes, at the restless half-reach of his hand at his side, at the shadows gone completely still around him as though even they were waiting, and felt the answer rise in your chest like something you had been holding underwater for a very long time.
"I want you to know what you want," you said.
You exhaled. Something in your chest caving slightly under the weight of it, the anger still there but softer now, fraying at the edges into something that hurt more than fury ever could.
"I needed you to choose me, Az." Your voice came out quiet. "To fight for me." You looked at him, really looked, and let him see all of it for once, the exhaustion, the longing, the years of it. "But all you ever gave me was an almost."
The word landed between you like something dropped from a height.
Almost.
The necklace. The almost-kiss on Solstice night, his forehead nearly against yours, his hand half-raised, and then nothing. The specific nothing of a male who had pulled back at the last possible moment and left you standing there with something you had no name for and no way to put down. All the almosts, stacked up across years, each one a door he had walked to the threshold of and chosen not to open.
Something fractured in his eyes.
Not surprise. He'd known, some part of him had always known, and that was perhaps the worst part of all. What was there instead was the expression of a male looking directly at the cost of something he could not take back.
"I'm sorry, I —"
The balcony door opened.
"There you are." Cassian's voice arrived before the rest of him, loud and cheerful and entirely oblivious. He stepped through with a glass in each hand. "Mor said you'd snuck out here. Rhys is getting sentimental, he's about to cry into the good wine, you need to come—" He stopped.
Looked at you.
Looked at Azriel.
Took in the distance between you, the electric stillness of the air, the particular charge that gathered before a storm broke, the fact that neither of you had moved since he'd appeared.
"Ah," he said.
Something moved across his face, not quite regret, not quite satisfaction, something more complicated than either.
"I can—" He gestured vaguely back toward the door.
"Cass." You moved before he could finish, lifted the glass from his hand, no room for argument. "Perfect timing." You did not look at Azriel. "I was just coming inside."
Cassian opened his mouth.
Closed it.
Cast one look over your shoulder at Azriel, the look of a male communicating an entire conversation in a single glance, and fell into step beside you as you pushed through the door and back into the warmth and noise of the party.
The door fell shut behind you.
You did not look back.
But you felt it, the stillness on the other side of the glass, the weight of his attention following you through it, patient and unresolved and entirely unwilling to be left behind by a closed door.
You took a long sip of wine.
Cassian, beside you, said nothing for a long moment. Then his hand came down on your shoulder, warm and steady. "He'll come around," he said quietly. "But you have to let him in at some point." A beat. "Don't bite his head off before he's even tried."
You kept your eyes forward.
Even though your heart was looking back.
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