This is a sort of sequel to Checkmate. It's set in the same universe, but I wouldn't say you'd have to read that to understand this, though it would help (a lot). All you really need to know is that Nesta's the Queen of Scythia, Nessian was an arranged marriage, and they played a game of chess when they first met.
I basically wrote this in an attempt to tie up a few loose ends I'd left in Checkmate, but it went off track quite a lot. Overall, I've decided to rewrite Checkmate filling in all the plot holes, but I'm just posting this because I finished it and whilst it's angsty, I kind of like it.
It's set about fifty/sixty years after Checkmate, and assumes that Nesta and Cassian fell in love around the time/after they were officially married. Character death warning (because angst, right?).
Disclaimer: I don't own ACOTAR.
Nesta could feel the sickness racing through her body like the wildfire Cassian had always claimed she possessed.
It had already torn through her body once, years ago, and she'd wept and screamed as she lost the function of her stomach and bladder and wet herself and vomited everywhere. She'd shouted at anyone except Cassian - loving, passionate Cassian whose fire was only tempered by steel - who tried to come near her, and she'd even hated that he had to see her like this, so weak and out of control.
She was a queen. This was not queenly.
The sickness begged to differ.
She'd had to shirk her ruling duties onto Elain and Feyre, the latter of whom returned from visiting the Night Court suspiciously often, for a three week period, since Cassian wasn't trained in running a country, nor did he want to leave her side. She'd thought she might die from it then, a young woman barely turned thirty, and that more than anything had led her to fight so hard.
She had no children. Elain was her heir, and her middle sister was married with her youngest being courted, so it was no matter of who would succeed her. What had destroyed her was that she'd never get the chance to have that sort of joy with her husband - never have the flesh and blood proof that their unlikely romance was real. Real, and very, very powerful.
Powerful enough to bring the Queen of Scythia back from the brink of death when by all accounts she should be well gone.
But that was then. This was now.
Now, she was in her eighties. She had still been going strong and healthy when taken ill, and was still a perfectly capable ruler fifty years after her appointment. But this was a new strand of a disease that had mutated in the decades since she last contracted it, and it was out for vengeance.
On the sixth night, when the moon was a crescent and Nesta was on fire despite the frost glimmering on the landscape beyond the window, she had known with clarity that she was going to die.
She hadn't told anyone of that fact for another three nights. And then, while her husband was away dealing with the temper tantrum of their fifth grandchild, when Feyre was on one of her frequent visits to their homeland after she managed to postpone her duties as Rhysand's wife, High Lady of the Night Court, she'd caved and admitted it to her sister.
Feyre had already known. Feyre had understood. They were cut from the same cloth after all - they knew each other in a way that did as much harm as it did good. And Feyre had understood why Nesta wasn't afraid.
Oh, her sister had cried. Those grey eyes they both shared had welled with unshed tears, and though she refused to let them fall there and then, Nesta knew they would descend like rainstorms that night, when everyone else in the world was asleep. Because Elain had died happily in her country manor with her husband only a few months earlier, and once Nesta left, Feyre would be all alone.
"I'll join you soon," Feyre had said the night she realised that. "I know I will. But until then, I love you." She'd leaned forward and kissed Nesta's burning forehead. "Both of you."
Their time had come. This was the way of life; this was the way of death. They had ample offspring to carry on the bloodline, and an ample legacy in the improvements they'd made in their country.
As Feyre's old friend Suriel would say: They had left the world a better place than they had found it.
This was what was right.
But none of this made the moment any easier. None of this meant the grief in Cassian's eyes as he tenderly kissed her knuckles - gentle, he was always so gentle with those he loved, she'd been so surprised when she'd finally been convinced to get to know him - was any less heartbreaking. None of this changed the fact she was leaving him alone.
No. Not alone. He had their children, and their children's children. He had Rhys and Feyre, though Azriel had passed away less than a year ago. He would not be alone.
He would just be without her.
Cassian didn't insult her by asking her to stay. He knew what her stance on this was. And she firmly believed this was the right moment. Not to mention the battering he knew her pride would take if she had to admit that she couldn't stay. The illness was too potent.
She couldn't stand this delicacy anymore. She couldn't stand being treated like a figure of porcelain. If she was going to die, she was going to die like she had lived: with her head held high.
She jerked out of bed suddenly, ignoring the startled noise that came from her husband, and slumped into the chair in front of the table. There was still a set of chess pieces scattered across the board from their last game, which had ended so abruptly when she fainted in the middle of Cassian's move. She reached out a hand and moved one of her pawns forward.
"Your move," she said. Her voice didn't shake. It didn't.
He grinned. He was latching onto some semblance of normal just as much as she was. "I promise I'll beat you this time, Nes." She'd given up on telling him not to call her that forty five years ago.
"I doubt that, you brute," she snapped back. It felt so good to be able to take that pent up frustration at her own weakness and vent it at someone. "Now, are you just going to stand there, or are you going to play?"
He sat in front of her, and they played. He slid her pieces back onto the intended squares when her hand shook too much to move them, and those few times he slid it onto the wrong square, she snapped at him to stop cheating. Just as he'd hoped she would.
All was not lost yet.
Pawns clattered to the floor when her shaking hand knocked them off, but it didn't matter. "Check," she gasped. It was getting hard to breathe; she could feel the burning sear through her lungs. Her eyes darted around the board with a keenness that was probably superficial. She'd won, she was sure.
But it didn't matter, nothing mattered, because it hit her then that she couldn't breathe, she couldn't breathe, and she was going to die, now, and why couldn't she breathe-
"Nesta," Cassian breathed. "Nesta." He was begging, but she didn't know who he was begging, or what he was begging for. All she knew was that her strong, kind husband was clutching her hand so hard it should hurt, but she couldn't feel it, couldn't feel anything, and why couldn't she breathe-
"I am glad," he whispered. "I am glad, so very glad, I had this time with you. And my one regret is that we did not have more. But I got to meet you, got to know you, got to love you, and I can't ask for anything more. I will see you again, I promise. I love you, Nesta Archeron," he murmured. "I love you."
It wasn't such a bad way to die, she thought. It felt right.