This is my first attempt at the Wicked Lovely fandom. Please forgive how mediocre this is.
He still has dreams of her; her eyes lust-drunk and her small fingers tangled in his long hair. Leslie looks as she did when she was still the past-king's beloved conduit. She is swathed in a dress made of bone-corset and red velvet and her lips hold the copper after-taste of blood. She smells like sex and humanity and gore and her flesh is like glass under his fingers.
"I still love you," dream-Leslie whispers into his mouth, so sweet and cloying. Distantly he thinks that he doesn't not remember how her voice sounds, that the dream version is fuzzy and indistinct.
"You never loved me," he replies because, really, all they ever had was lust, and now they have nothing.
Dream-Leslie leans back, nails diggin into his scalp and legs tightly wound about his waist as they'd never been in true life. When he looks at her her eyes have turned the inky black of a dark fae. She smiles at him so pleasntly, just as she had in the alley so long ago. "But, I could have. If only you hadn't screwed it all up."
And, he wakes up then, alone in his quarters and strangely dissatisfied.
He thinks that one cannot be a court regent without suffering some manner of unrequited love. He sees this in the king and queen of summer and the solitary winter queen (and in some part he sees it in himself) and thinks this assumption must be true.
Whenever he goes to see her, Donia is a little more like her predecessor then before. She is aloof in her posture, surrounded by her frigid fey and her blindly faithful guardsman.
"Why do you keep coming here?" the winter queen will ask him. "We have no business with each other that I know of."
"I might be lonesome," Niall confesses.
"This is the wrong place to come to quell your loneliness," she retorts tertly.
"Not even for a moment?" And she says nothing because fey cannot lie and he knows she is too weary to bend the truth.
Being with Donia never fills the hole, but she is not afraid to hurt him. She is filled with a bitterness sweet on his tongue and leaves him aching with frostbite and dozens of cuts made by her sharp fingertips. Her ire is meant for another, but it is his small satisfaction all the same.
"You are a lovely distraction," he tells her. She is naked, unabashedly, and mottled with the loveliest bruises in purple and blue.
"And, you are a suitable outlet for my discontent," she replies, quite honestly. "But, I am sure that is all you will ever be."
"Too true."
He leaves her house, house of her predecessor that she is more alike then different now, cold and battered and just as hollow as before. A queen of ice never could fill the emptiness in his heart.
Trysts with Donia are fleeting. For the majority of his time he remains in his Dark Court, drowning his lust in his ever-abiding faerie when it arises.
More often then not Seth is somewhere among them, usually with the Hounds who have so enthusiastically begun to train him in the ways of combat.
Seth makes a good faerie. The sharp angles and ethereal aesthetic of them is more suiting then his mortal skin. Sorcha's blood churns in his veins, giving him the alien quality of her, his eyes far seeing and faraway.
"Do you still not return to your summer queen?" Niall asks him, as a friend and not a king.
"She hasn't called for me. I assume she is still "figuring things out" with her Keenan," Seth replies somberly. He is still so hung up on that girl, sad as it is. Niall pities him.
"Summer fey are fickle," he tells the once mortal. "And, traditionally, are not practitioners of monogamy."
Seth nods, solemn, his heart still ailing for his summer girl.
Niall's fondness makes him want to make his friend forget. And, deeper, he sees the opportunity that Seth's fragile state provides (and feels only moderately guilty, knowing he will take it).
"Do you believe in true love, Niall?" Seth asks him.
"Not at all."
He leaves his fey to their dancing and their carnage and lust, retiring to his private quarters. Seth follows out of heartbreak and loneliness, just as Niall knew he would.
"How do you like being king?" Irial only comes to him briefly, the occasions always too far between. He is painstakingly lovely, still holding the same allure he had before he had gifted Niall the throne.
Niall goes through cigarettes too quickly when Irial is around. He grinds his fourth to dust under his boot and looks away.
"It is a taxing job, but I enjoy being away from the summer court," he says, all the while staring with forced fervor at the wall just above his companion's head.
"As anyone would be I'm sure."
The distance between them is maddening. He lights a fifth cigarette. Before the smoke and ash can fill his mouth he tastes the want he knows is Irial's. He inhales deeply in an attempt to rid himself of it, but it remains.
Irial smiles and it is lovely and disconcerting in equal parts. When his hand brushes Niall's mouth he doesn't look away.
"Have you missed me, Niall?" he asks.
And, Niall says nothing because making a half-truth is too much effort and bridges the distance between them.