Prompt: Use the line "please don't do this" for Rowaelin.
Note: I'm not sorry
"Aelin."
His voice still echoed through her mind like an icy snowstorm; constant, lingering and ever-present. It had been weeks since it happened, when the world had gone to hell, and Aelin had been to blame. Weeks since she had run out of tears to cry, weeks since she had been forced to resume her position as Queen of Terrasen.
She held the council meetings like a puppet on strings; controlled, and unfeeling. Those faces blurred, the people sitting in the mahogany chairs before her became a single face, held a single name. A name she promised to never say aloud; a face she had spoken to a million times in her dreams.
"Please don't do this," she had whispered, but he hadn't listened. He had insisted.
"We can do this," he had said, as they lied together, like two eternal butterflies alone in the wind without anything to hold them back, without anything to slow them down.
But things had been different then. Though their mortal heartbeats continued to count to the very last seconds of their lives, they had been so sure of their immortality. To whatever end, Fireheart.He had given up his immortality for her, had wanted to grow old and die together with her; as rulers of Terrasen, as King and Queen, as husband and wife.
She was used to their victories; used to the days where she would enter the battlefield by his side, and emerge victorious-bloodied up, hungry, but still victorious. They had been fire and ice, they had been a soul combined, they had been carranam.
And she had lost him. Lost him to a dagger in the night, when his five friends had come under Maeve's orders, and skewered him like meat against a chopping board, until his body was in ribbons, and his face was in shreds.
Aelin had vomited when she saw the blood-his blood-stain the snow red, until all she saw was a frozen red river, where his life flowed away little by little. Until he was an empty body alone covered by mountains of snow, until he suffocated from the blood and the saltiness of betrayal. Until he was alone, dying alone, without her there by his side.
"As punishment," Gavriel had whispered when she had found him, though the message was clear enough. Aelin had refused Maeve's help in the final battle against Erawan. She had closed Maeve's final chance to get the wyrdkeys for herself, and because of that, Maeve decided to take the most important thing in Aelin's life away.
And though it hadn't been their fault, but the fault of the Queen that had sent them, Aelin had entered that killing calm for the third time in her life, where she needed to demand retribution.
The Cadre was no more. But she supposed that they wanted it that way. How could they live on, knowing that they had killed one of their brothers?
She did not regret it. But she did regret not ripping Maeve's head off that day in her office, when she and had walked out bound to the other half of her soul, and thought she had come out on top.
She could not say his name. But she could remember it. Could feel it on her skin, feel the story of him blaze through the tattoos that ran down her face, down her arms, down her breasts. She had sung his song to the gods until her voice was hoarse, and her eyes had teared up from the strain.
She hoped that he had gone to hell. Because when the time came, she hoped that she would see him there. "Together Fireheart," he had said.
And when the council meeting had finished, and she looked to the scar on her palm, the one that had bound them together in flesh, blood and soul, she whispered, so softly that no one but she could hear, "together, Rowan. To whatever end."
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