note/tw: Spoilers for ACOMAF, and mentions of rape. Rhysand's POV before, during, and after A Court of Thorns and Roses and A Court of Mist and Fury. Credits to Pablo Neruda for the poem in the summary (XVII, i do not love you...).
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THE BEGINNING AND THE END, AND ALL
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the tangled roots in between
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It begins as a nightmare.
This is not new: Amarantha's hands around his throat, her body pressing his into the bed, her touch marking his skin, segueing into the darkness, into his wings being pinned bloody to the sheets, until Rhysand can no longer tell what is real and what is not. It makes no difference to him; his nightmares have been given flesh decades ago.
No, this time the difference is in the absence of blood, and failure, and screams. Instead, Rhysand finds himself enveloped in the quiet of a winter night, the only sound the soft crackling of a fire in the hearth. There are no thoughts but his own in his head, no tangled minds to control, no words that aren't his and his alone. He could have wept from the quiet of it.
Rhysand doesn't know how long the dream lasts, but for the first night in decades, he finds refuge in sleep.
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Those in the Spring Court wear the masks of animals, and sometimes Rhysand lets himself feel envy. Masks of metal and glass would have been a welcome reprieve from his own, shaped from lies and deceit and never-ending pretend. But now he's being maudlin, and Mor would have laughed at him and Cassian would have beaten the dramatics out of him, because because because if this is what he has to do, if ripping his soul in half is enough to save them, to save Velaris, Rhys will gladly abstain from the light of day forever.
So he fixes the sneer on his face, looks down at the cowering fey that Amarantha would have him execute, and prays to the Cauldron that he'll be able to make it painless and quick.
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The first time Amarantha takes him to bed—the first time she rapes him—he feels like splitting his skin apart, but he bears it…bears it…because she had already torn through his mind and his powers and his heart, so this invasion of his body is just one more thing to sacrifice, one more thing to (un)willingly give.
The first time Amarantha takes him to bed, he makes her scream with pleasure until she can't distinguish the salt of his tears from the salt of his sweat.
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The dreams continue, and he takes his rest in these pockets of peace when he can. Sometimes he's dozing in a wood with washed out edges, sometimes he's back in that safe, dark room. Brief glimpses of a place not underground, precious pieces of a life not lived underneath Amarantha's oppressive weight.
Rhys doesn't know where these visions are coming from, but there isn't a lot left of himself to question any respite granted to him these days. Maybe they're only foggy illusions from the Cauldron, maybe they're delusions formed by a sleep starved mind, but then one night…One night he sees a pair of hands. A human woman's calloused hands, long fingers holding a brush gently, painting small yellow flowers on a worn table in front of her. Rhys watches, and he can feel the quiet care she takes in laying the color down on scarred wood.
The feeling is so simple, so pure, that it's profound.
Rhysand wakes with a sob halfway out of his throat, and stares unblinkingly at his own hands—shining and immaculate and as much a lie as the rest of him—until his eyes begin to burn.
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He begins to notice the woman behind the eyes, and they're not dreams any longer but a real life lived; strands of brown hair burnished with gold falling in front of her face, the strength of her hands clenched around a bow. Little scraps of a human existence. He gets a small taste of starvation, and discovers that the respite he finds in the small cottage is just as much a prison for her as this mountain is for him.
Despite it all, she still paints, and Rhys hoards these scraps of her existence, wishing he could do more, wishing he could fill the emptiness in her belly and quell the whispers of worry and fear in her head. She's given him this, her life and her mind, and he feels guilty—he feels dirty for sneaking through her thoughts like so. It doesn't matter that he'd never intended for this to start, intent doesn't matter.
With him, with everything that he's done, Rhys knows intent never will.
So for the first time in decades, Rhysand lets himself remember his wings, remember flying. Briefly, in only half thoughts, so Amarantha doesn't catch him, he dreams of the velvet of the night sky and fills his ears with the sound of rushing wind, the dark quiet of possibility stretching over his head like stars every night he had snuck out of the House of Wind.
He takes these feelings—as cherished as the truth of Velaris—and carefully tries to send them to the woman who paints, who is able to offer him these short moments of rest and peace. If he can do even a fraction of what she has done for him…Rhys hopes that she finds peace, whomever and wherever she may be.
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When Rhysand snaps awake from the dream—her nightmare—her fear, her scent still clings to him so strongly that darkness has begun to pool at his hands. Half-awake, half-blind with his own terror, Rhys clenches the soft, warm body next to him to reassure himself that she is still alive alive alive.
He's already pulling her to his chest when he realizes a second too late that the spill of red hair is wrong, that the scent is wrong, that even though the vision was startlingly clear it was still a dream, but Amarantha is already awake and murmuring you just can't get enough, can you, you whore into his ear, and her lips have found his throat and her teeth is drawing blood, and she's pushing him onto his back and god Rhys hates himself for slipping, for letting this muddle the remnants of the dream, to lose the scent of the woman with the painter's hands to the sick, familiar smell of Amarantha's arousal instead.
He's only half-here, and the bitch queen's hands on him are so much worse and so much more bearable all at once because he realizes the reason for the clarity of the dream, realizes that the woman is here, in Prythian, and he wants to rip Amarantha's hands from his body and roar at the irony of it all; he wants to find her and at the same time he hopes that they never cross paths, because Rhysand had wished her peace but instead, instead he has inadvertently led her into a land of monsters.
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Underneath it all, the scent of her haunts him all day. A whisper of summer rain, a night breeze before the storm. It reminds him so much of home that he aches.
tbc
note: Because Rhysand makes my heart hurt in a way that a character hasn't in a long, long while. There's so much potential with his POV and I feel like I didn't do him justice? Writing is definitely not like riding a bike. Concrit is and always will be appreciated!
edited 8/8/16