On my third re-read of ACOTAR- I noticed something. We all villainize Nesta in the beginning, obviously because of her awful attitude, and see Elain as the "passive" one. ELAIN WAS ALSO WATCHING HER YOUNGER SISTER STRUGGLE TO PUT FOOD ON THE TABLE AND TOOK ADVATANGE OF WHATEVER MONEY FEYRE WAS ABLE TO GET.
"Ohhh but Elain is just softhearted..."
SOFTHEARTED MY ASS- Elain is the 2nd to oldest and knew her family was starving. Just because she wasn't outright mean like Nesta, doesn't mean she's innocent. She was heavily traumatized after the war with Hybern but like... she's still being babied because of it? What about Feyre, or even Nesta? Elain should've done more, and currently CAN still do more. Everyone, including the inner court, tip toes around her like shes some fragile thing even though she was the one who literally BEHEADED HYBERN!!! Does her inncocent and passive act excuse how she treated Feyre in the past? Nesta acknowledged her flaws and self hatred in ACOSF, but I don't think we will get that from Elain. I'm sorry but someone back me up on this or convince me to like her-
i mean we all know that the sisters were shallow archetypes for most of book one but it’s bad writing to just completely ignore everything that was written in the first book. Feyre implies that Elain was too slow to offer help when they were starving and instead chooses to plant flowers instead of vegetables. ignoring that fact that elain was also not the best sister in the beginning just to make Nesta the “bad” one is so weird. Elain can be quiet and girly while still being the same girl to ignore her sister going hunting everyday and refusing to help. being feminine and soft does not equal being a good person or faultless.
Summary: It’s been years since he ruined everything. She told herself she’d buried it, until he shows up in the rain, and every lie she told herself starts to unravel.
Warnings: angst, emotional breakdowns, past relationship/secret relationship, mention of statutory rape (reader not the victim, no depiction), prison mention, emotional whiplash, unresolved feelings, heavy themes, fem!reader, soft!damon
Words: 2.6k
Tune: Moral of the Story- Ashe
Notes: this one hurt to write, started off as closure with a redemption arc, ended as heartbreak. damon being damon, reader who deserved better. set pre-corrupt. thank you anon for the request and sorry for taking so many creative liberties with it! no use of y/n
─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: .☽ . :☆ﾟ. ───
It rains the night she puts the hoodie back on.
Meridian City smells like damp brick and late buses, halos of light puddling under the streetlamps. She’s halfway out the door before she realises what she’s wearing, black cotton gone soft at the seams, cuffs a little too long, the shoulder stretched where he used to tug it into place. It had sat crumpled in a heap at the back of her closet for years. Tonight it was the first thing her hand had found, like the universe was giving her a warning.
She tells herself there’s no time to change, that it’s cold outside and the hoodie’s warm. That keeping it on is about convenience, not sentiment. The door clicks shut and she keeps moving but the pull in her stomach stirs up memories that should’ve been buried.
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Campus is a dim grid of windows and trees dripping onto paving slabs. She cuts through the courtyard, head down, breath fogging in the rain.
Someone calls her name.
Her whole body locks up. A violent chill rolling down her spine.
She doesn’t turn around. Not yet. Not until she hears his footsteps behind her, slow and certain.
When she does, the world tilts a little.
He’s under a flickering light, the kind that the university wouldn’t replace because they made the area look older and more distinguished. There’s rain running down the hood of his jacket, his jaw is harder than she remembers, eyes darker. Same small scar by his mouth. The sight of him is a punch to her heart.
Her throat closes but not before she forces the words out. “What the hell are you doing here?”
He doesn’t flinch. “Hi to you, too.”
She stares, the seven stages of grief running through her brain. The air hangs between them, disconnected and cold. “No,” she says, shaking her head. “You don’t get to- you don’t get to just show up here. You can’t.”
“I was passing through,” he says, voice low.
“You don’t ‘pass through’ a fucking university courtyard, Damon. You came here on purpose.”Her voice catches on his name and he freezes, eyes flicking away in shame, like the ground just shifted under him. The breath he drags in after sounds like it hurts.
She laughs, short and sharp, ugly around the edges. “What? What did you think was going to happen when you turned up?”
He thought- hell, he doesn’t even know what he thought. The silence stretches until it’s unbearable. His gaze drags over her, stopping at the hoodie. Recognition flares in his eyes and fades. “You kept that.”
Her pulse jumps, she tries to shrug, pass it off like it doesn’t matter but she looks like a deer caught in headlights. “It’s just a hoodie.”
“Sure.”
“Don’t-” she cuts herself off, jaw tight. “Don’t speak to me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you think I still care, like nothing happened. Fuck, like you didn’t ruin everything you touched.”
She runs a hand through her hair, tugging at it like she’s trying to ground herself. He looks at her for a long time before speaking. “I know what I ruined.”
“Do you?” she snaps. “I really don’t think you do, Damon.”
“Yeah,” he says quietly, a sharp edge to his voice. “You.”
The answer lands like poking a half-healed bruise. Her hands ball in the sleeves of his hoodie before she can stop them. “You don’t get to say that- admit that. You told me you loved me. Fuck you. Do you have any idea what it was like? I found out from a fucking text- a text, from a friend asking if you were the guy I’d been sleeping with.”
“I’m not asking you to forgive me.”
“Good,” she spits. “Because I don’t.”
He nods once, like he expected it. “I didn’t come here for that.”
“Then why? What do you want?”
“I needed to see you,” he says. “Just once. To say I’m sorry without a headline doing it for me.”
Her laugh breaks halfway out of her. “You think I want an apology?”
“I think you deserve one,” he says, too evenly, not sounding like himself at all.
The rain presses down between them, hard and cold. She looks at him and feels every unslept night, every version of herself that tried not to care.
“You should’ve stayed away,” she says finally, voice raw.
“Yeah,” he says. “Probably.”
They stand there, staring at each other like neither knows who’s supposed to move first. The hoodie clings to her, feeling warm in all the wrong places.
Her mind drifts to what it was like before everything fell apart.
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They met in a lecture neither of them wanted to be in.
She’s early. He’s late. He slides into the seat beside her halfway through the professor’s introduction, smelling faintly of smoke and cologne, his eyes deep enough to make her forget whatever note she was pretending to take.
He doesn’t talk at first, just sits there, spinning a pen between his fingers, bored out of his mind.
Then he looks at her notes, smirks, and says, “You actually listen to this guy?”
She shoots him a look. “Not really, I just look everything up after.”
It should’ve stopped there. It doesn’t.
It turns into coffee after class, into him waiting outside the library, leaning against his bike like trouble wrapped up in black.
It turns into late-night study sessions that become less about studying. Ending with them slick with sweat, breathless and grinning, her textbook somewhere under the couch and their clothes littered around the room.
Into her wearing his hoodie because it’s always cold in her apartment and the smell of him makes her feel warm.
He tells her once that he doesn’t do relationships. Says it easily, like it’s a casual warning.
But he still shows up the next night, and the next. His toothbrush appears next to hers, then a drawer gets filled up in her dresser.
He’s not temporary. He stays.
When he touches her, it’s always like he’s surprised she lets him. When she kisses him, he freezes for half a second before melting into it, like he’s learning the concept of safety.
Sometimes, when he wakes up in the middle of the night, he just lies there watching her breathe, fingers tracing circles against her thigh.
He still gets too angry too fast, sharp words, slammed doors, that flash in his eyes that makes people back off. But she doesn’t flinch and she doesn’t leave. It does something to him, forces the storm to break early. He’ll mutter an apology hours later, quiet and awkward, and she’ll just shake her head, already over it.
It’s nothing he’s ever experienced before. It’s quieter, softer, woven between the shared coffees, the half-argued movie nights, the silence that feels like understanding.
It’s love.
────────────
Devil’s Night comes around.
The light in her bedroom is soft and golden, spilling through the half-drawn curtains. Somewhere down the street, someone’s honking their car horn and another person is shouting.
He’s standing by the dresser, tossing things into a duffel bag; wallet, charger, underwear. It’s not much, just a nights worth.
She’s perched on the edge of the bed in his T-shirt, legs folded beneath her, watching him move. The air smells faintly of coffee and his cologne, it smells lived in, familiar, like home.
No one knows about them. Not the full extent anyway. To everyone else, it’s a rumour, a fling, a bad idea she hasn’t changed her mind about yet. But here, behind the locked door, it’s quieter and real.
“You’re really doing the Thunder Bay thing again?” she asks, voice still rough from sleep.
He glances over his shoulder, half a grin forming. “It’s tradition.”
“A tradition that sounds like it’ll end in an arrest.”
He laughs, low and genuine. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”
She rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling. “You could stay, you know. We could do something normal for once.”
He turns at that, one brow raised. “Normal, huh?”
She nods, smiling despite herself. “Yeah, have a chill one before all the Halloween chaos tomorrow.”
He stops, fingers still on the zipper of his bag. For a second, it looks like he’s thinking about it. Then he shakes his head. “It’s just one night.”
She exhales through her nose, she knows how much it means to him, how this one night fuels him for the year. “Right.”
He crosses the room to her and stops just close enough that his knees brush hers. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” he says, reaching down to push a stray hair behind her ear. “Promise. We’ll go to the party. You can laugh at me in a mask or something.”
“You make a lot of promises,” she murmurs.
His hand stills. Then, softer, “I keep the ones that matter.”
He leans down to kiss her, slow, unhurried, like he’s fighting every instinct to ruin the moment instead of savor it. When he pulls back, his thumb lingers against her jaw.
“I love you,” he says. It slips out like it surprises him.
Her breath catches. For a second she almost says it back, but the words stick somewhere in her throat. She just nods. “Drive safe.”
He studies her for a moment, something flickering behind his eyes that she doesn’t quite understand. Then he presses a kiss to her forehead, grabs his bag, and heads for the door.
The apartment feels too quiet after it closes.
She listens to the sound of his engine fading down the street and tells herself not to worry.
Just one night. Then tomorrow, he’ll be home.
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The next morning she wakes to light leaking through the curtains. The warm, autumn sun that had surrounded them yesterday is gone, replaced with drab clouds and rain trickling down the window.
She stretches, half-asleep, thumb brushing over the cracked screen of her phone. She’s already thinking about the night ahead, the party, her costume. She makes a mental note to check if he’s got any clothes at hers that she can dress up into something occasion appropriate.
She shuffles to the kitchen, the coffee machine hums. Everything feels safe in the way quiet mornings do, right up until her phone buzzes.
She assumes it’s him, probably letting her know what time he’s leaving Thunder Bay. Instead she’s met by a few different notifications, three missed calls and a message from a friend she hadn’t spoken to in weeks.
She clicks it without thinking, half distracted by the mug, now filled with coffee, in her other hand.
Four sons of Thunder Bay elites arrested in Devil’s Night incident.
She freezes. Scrolls.
And there he is.
The picture is grainy, taken from across a street. He’s being led out of a house in handcuffs, head down, hair falling into his face. There’s a smear of blood on his jaw. He looks nothing like the boy who kissed her goodbye yesterday.
Damon Torrance, 20, charged with statutory rape.
The air disappears.
Her hand slips; the mug cracks against the counter, hot liquid spilling across her wrist. She doesn’t even feel it, just stares, unblinking, at the screen.
Then it hits.
Her breath catches hard in her throat. She takes a step back, shaking her head. The phone slides from her fingers and clatters onto the counter top.
Another text pings.
wasn’t this the guy you were fucking??
She rips the hoodie over her head, like it’s tainted with something evil. It’s thrown to the floor like it can bite.
It smells like him, Djarum Blacks, smoky vanilla and the detergent they had picked out together. It’s unbearable.
Her pulse spikes. A wave of nausea washes over her. Then she moves.
Drawers slam. Closet doors crash open.
T-shirts, joggers, the lighter he always carried, the notebook he used to leave here. All of it goes into a bag, fast and rough.
The room echoes with the sound of her breathing, the frantic rhythm of drawers and hangers and broken things. She mutters under her breath, voice breaking around words she doesn’t even know she’s forming.
When it’s over, she’s standing in the middle of the wreckage, chest heaving, eyes streaming, throat burning.
Only the hoodie’s left. It’s still lying on the kitchen floor, twisted and crumpled.
She stares at it for a long time, then sinks to her knees.
She should throw it away. She wants to.
But she doesn’t.
She pulls it toward her instead, bunching the fabric in her shaking hands. Curling around it on the floor, trembling, trying to breathe through the sobs that finally come.
Tonight there’s the party.
Everyone will have seen the article by then.
They’ll whisper, they’ll stare, and she’ll just be that girl, stupid enough to orbit him, naïve enough to think she mattered.
But she knows. It wasn’t a fling, or a mistake, or whatever they’ll call it. It was real. And that’s what she can’t forgive.
She presses her face into the hoodie, tears soaking the fabric.
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The rain hits heavier, it’s what pulls her back.
He drags a hand down his face, rain streaking through his hair. “You think I don’t understand what I did to you? You think I don’t wake up wishing I’d stayed? That I hadn’t gotten in the fucking car?”
“Stop,” she warns, voice cracking. “You don’t get to make me feel sorry for you.”
He laughs, sharp and humourless. “I’m not looking for that. I don’t even want it. I just- Fuck” He stops, jaw tight, eyes wild with something that makes him look like a wounded, wild animal. “You were the only thing that ever made me stop wanting to burn everything down and I still fucked it up.”
Her throat tightens. “You have no idea what it was like, Damon.”
He looks up at her, eyes glassy and bloodshot. “I know,” he says. “And I hate myself for it. You think prison fixed that? It didn’t. I got out, and it’s still in here,” He taps his temple hard. “You. All of it.”
She laughs, soft and bitter. “You don’t get to say that now. You don’t get to decide you care.”
His jaw flexes. “I never stopped caring.”
The rain is merciless, running down both their faces. She can taste it, salt, heartbreak.
“I loved you,” she says suddenly, the words shaking loose before she can stop them. “I never told you, and I should’ve, and I hate that I still mean it.”
He flinches like the words cut him open. “Don’t,” he says roughly. “Don’t tell me that when I can’t have it.”
“You could have,” she whispers.
“Yeah,” he says, voice low. “I know.”
For a beat, neither of them moves. He takes a half-step closer, voice dropping. “If I could go back, I’d stay. I’d pick you over all of it.”
She shakes her head, blinking against the rain. “You didn’t, though.”
He nods, a dark, broken sound leaving him. “No. I fucking didn’t.”
The silence that follows throbs like an open wound.
Finally, she steps back. “You should go.”
He hesitates, eyes flicking down to the hoodie clinging to her. His voice is low, soft. “You look better in that than I ever did.”
“Goodbye, Damon.”
He swallows hard. “Yeah. Goodbye.”
She turns before he can see the way her lip trembles or the tears in her eyes. The rain slicks against her skin, cold and grounding. When she reaches the end of the courtyard, she looks back once.
He’s still there, hands in his pockets, head bowed, the kind of ruin you can’t rebuild.
And she still feels it, that pull, quiet and dangerous, like her soul remembering its favourite mistake.
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