Cassian's Love is Warm (Part 1/3)
It will get fluffier as the fic progresses, but it's the start of Nesta's life in Illyria
Sometimes, Nesta dreams of war.
Her blankets and pillows are arrows and shields discarded along the ground. The monsters under her bed are men with axes and ruthless eyes. Blood-stained teeth grimacing in blood-covered skies, Death is the master of them all. He wields them like puppets, strings sewn into the sleeves of their armor. He makes them dance with a sword in their hands, forcing their eyes open when the bodies start piling.
When they plead for safety, Death laughs, tells them that he is helping. It's not their body lying on the ground. In her dreams, they scream for her. Or maybe, the wind does, calling out to the girl with grief tattooed on her arms. Surely, she will understand their pain.
Death hears their pleading with a playful smile, perfectly content with the mess he leaves behind. His face a portrait of greed and ecstasy.
She's never sure which side she's on. In her dreams, she is merely standing at the edge of the world, waiting for the end. Nesta watches as lines of blue and green mold into burnt oranges and reds. She isn't far enough to stop the spray of blood that hits her face.
All screams sound the same when everyone is dying. Nesta thinks they sound a lot like her sisters.
Although the sound simplifies into low humming, she hears each and every one of their heartbeats as if it resides in her own chest. Thump after persistent thump. It doesn't matter which color they strap against their backs. In the end, it all turns to red. The world sun-bathed in roses.
When she wakes, Death sleeps on the pillow next to her. Like a lover, he trails kisses up her spine. His manic laughter swallows her screams as she pushes him away. Nesta runs as far as the door, protects herself in its bare wood, and clasps her eyes closed. He disappears in a wisp of smoke, while the shadows ask for her name.
Nesta supposes, she is already fae, they cannot steal a soul which does not have a soul. But Nesta thinks her soul is hiding. Just like her heart. Hiding somewhere between a cold winter night and a stack of wood that doesn't burn.
She thinks her soul is disguised as something akin to fire. The same fire that turns each soldier to ash, and each worry to dust. Each dream into another day, another hour, another minute gone by. The same light she holds on to when the darkness surrounds her. Her soul blazing so bright, it burns like bitter frost.
Nesta pretends their love is a game. Different than a war, but just as precarious.
She knows that when fae hide, they disguise themselves as beasts, and when her sisters hide, they disguise themselves in pretty words. Lyrical phrases that profess they only want the best for her. So, Nesta lies just like they do. Just like Feyre does, when she says that it's her own fault she let things get too far.
Her hands have bloody half-moons where her nails dig into her skin, but she says that she is just fine. Her magic haunts her even more than her dreams, but she tells them she sleeps enough.
She plays dress up with her feelings, like she's eight again with little sisters. She dresses her grief in wolf fur, puts red on harsh words…
But, the wolf skin turns out to be real and its bite is a little too rough. Its teeth sink into her arm, leaves wholes in her skin, trails and trails of grief left naked with fear. Nesta pretends it isn't there, but the pain doesn't go away and neither do the scars. It just becomes another game, that she wins by being silent.
When they kick her out, though, she can't lie anymore. Nesta is enraged. Not the kind that yells and screams and kicks, but the one that hides beneath her skin, waiting and very much alive. The nagging pain of a wolf's jaw that does not let go for anything.
Her routine is perfect. She takes only as little as she gives. Small glances for one-word greetings, rent for appearances. She crafts the mask of painted indifference, pretends that their invites mean nothing until they just stop inviting her and pretends it doesn't hurt when they do.
It isn't good enough for her happy family. They don't know that she sees a fearful little girl in her own reflection, and for them, she kills her with fists to the glass.
The little girl doesn't die, though, and maybe that's why she doesn't win that little game of theirs.
In another mirror she's there, in the reflection of wine in a glass bottle, in the polished metal of a door knob. She lies in a pool of her innocent blood, but her heart still beats. Beat by persistent beat. Nesta hears it ringing in her ears like screams.
Sometimes, she thinks Cassian can hear it, too, the pounding of a headache she can never get rid of. If he does, she might not just be crazy. But, then he looks away as blue passes hazel, or pretends just like she does, that he doesn't hear a sound. She chooses to indulge him just like all the others.
No, if Nesta looks shameful, covered in vomit and last week's clothes, it is because she isn't a good enough liar. Not good enough at dress up or playing house or pretending that she's fine. Just a portrait of someone her sister doesn't even want to hang on her wall.
Cassian says nothing to imply that he notices the enraged grief she stores in her lungs, or the fear she takes with her to that little cabin in the woods. Its foundation wedged between the mountains of Illyrian cries and her own, silent monsters that hide in the evergreen and the ones that hide under her bed.
She wonders if he hears the regret in every sloshy footstep as they make their way to the wooden door. Wonders if he cares about her at all, or just pretends to care, or wants to care, but can't. Their once promised time slipping through their fingers, perhaps, disappearing altogether when she can't stand even herself.
Though, Nesta wonders how Cassian can stand this house. It is too plain, too lonely for someone like him. Not for someone so… chaotic.
There's something cold about it.
A bitter frost sleeps in the living room, nestled deeply in the bare walls and the cracks in the dining room table. Every window is open, which is odd for someone exuding caution. They chip away any semblance of warmth.
The empty fireplace reminds them of their distaste for sympathy and like the snow outside, their presence leaves the house a structure of silent complicity. Like somehow, they are punishing each other by living here, and the house is making sure they suffer—promising, almost threatening, that the cold is more at home than they ever will be.
The door of her bedroom is both her menace and her solitude, and crossing its threshold is anything but matrimonial. Cassian gives her space when she steps inside, and Nesta half-expects to wake up in her old apartment to find this to be some alcohol-induced dream.
His looming body paints shadows on the naked wall. Along with the rest of the house, it's undecorated. Its wood panels and white sheets whispering that she does not belong.
Nesta is grateful for the house's words. The feeling is mutual…and familiar.
When she turns back to Cassian, he is messing with the wood left beside the fireplace and it is not a dream anymore. Not a nightmare or a hallucination or a numbness she can't get rid of. She isn't numb when she tells him no. Nesta feels the heat even as he looks at her curiously; he stokes the fire with every second he touches the match.
Nesta fights everything in herself not to call him a bastard or a prick or an ass or any other name she can associate with him and his family. Maybe he sees her rage, kicks at it slightly and patiently waits. Questions if its bite might sting much worse than the words she spews. But he steps away from the fireplace and doesn't touch the wood again.
She hears his cautious footsteps from across the room, watches as Cassian's eyes glaze over the picture window. Perhaps coming to the obvious conclusion that it's winter and cold. Her feverish skin hasn't looked, though. The temperature of the room rising even with the loss of a warm body.
When he returns, he is carrying a mountain of blankets, each a different color than the last. A cacophony of oddly shaped patterns and furs. He places each one on top of the other, lying them down on sheets that are far too thin for Illyrian winter. He is all hard lines and few words, but the crease in his brows warns her not to argue with him. She wants to anyway, just to see what it'd look like.
He asks her if she needs anything else and just like that the room is freezing.
His eyes hold no fury, only compassion and Nesta has to wonder what she looks like to make him look like that. Maybe she looks like she feels. A candle with no more wick to hold the flame, it all but blowing out when her sister tells her that she isn't wanted. She isn't good enough.
Her eyes burn, and the emotions well up in the corner of her eyes. Nesta finds that her body can't lie as well as her mouth. Words get stuck in her throat, harder to swallow as he looks at her from the bed with the colorful blankets. She clenches the tears in her fists and holds on as her chest tightens.
Cassian notices her slow-blinking eyes, her shaking fists, the way her head lulls at the sight of warmth. Perhaps, can tell that she has not been comforted for much of her adult life and maybe most of her childhood. Maybe she lures him with images of an injured fawn, maybe she looks at him with the eyes of a wolf. Dangerous only because she is scared and can see no threat past his body.
He walks slowly to her, lets her decide if she wants him to touch her. Nesta resists the urge to crumble into a ball and sob, but she makes no complaints as he gently grasps her shoulders. He folds the blankets back, easing her into the promised warmth.
It isn't dark outside, but he closes the curtains, and shuts the door quietly when he leaves.
They stare at each other before the door shuts completely, and Nesta demands to know where her anger went, if it would roar as loud if she wasn't half as cold or tired. But her fury isn't for him… so it doesn't matter if she feels it or not.
Nesta just hopes that, by tomorrow, the fire inside of her is still silent and burning.
Her anger, the only family she has left.
The clash of swords is brutal. The groans coming from the beaten make her sick. Nesta wants to go home, though she supposes she doesn't have one.
The men fight until they bleed, the same red as all the rest. They fight until they can barely stand and still they continue, wearing mud like clothing. She watches as they're pummeled into the dirt and are satisfied by it. The bruises somehow making it onto her own skin.
Perhaps she is a little too human for all of them, or maybe she is something else entirely. Her grief unrecognizable to the once human and the never human, and not even to the Illyrian, though they stare at her harshly. Like they are just as confused as Nesta about who she is.
Nesta decides she hates them all, the same hate that rages against her own body.
Not because they are at a clear disadvantage in their current state of politics. Not because the women have no rights and the men have no voices. Not because she is caged with them, trapped on a spinning wheel with the rest of the world and the choices they couldn't make for themselves.
She decides she hates them for the stories they don't tell. A lover of knowledge values truth above all else, and each wound is a lie. When they stare at her, their eyes scream. Each man and each woman scream, and Nesta is one of them, because she can hear them all.
The silence is their enemy. Worse than death's preternatural wink. It threatens them like the promise of war.
Cassian may train them to fight monsters, but he doesn't teach them how to fight the ones inside of them. The ones that fear cages more than the death it consumes. One day, they'll all explode. All the rage they keep inside themselves will come hurtling out and they will hurt the ones they love the most.
The cauldron may have created magic, but it will not stop them from pillaging it. Like her dreams, they fight without rest or lie there with no choice. She thinks they've forgotten they've been born with wings. Not the ones straggling about like living appendages, but the ones hidden deep in their souls, that call out for freedom and flight, and possibility.
But they look at her, like she looks at them, like she looks at herself, like she looks at that little girl.
Maybe she is not the only one trapped in a war that will never end.
Cassian leaves for three days. She tracks each minute by the amount of times she looks out the window or opens the door. Every small noise sounding like Cassian's heavy footsteps moving with the full weight of his armor. Nesta can't say he's ever been quiet.
The house stays silent, bare, and empty. The house so empty that the silence echoes and so do her thoughts. Her mind fills with 1000 pages of worry and 200 more of blame. Of words she can't remember and words she wishes she could forget, all the reasons she did this to herself splayed out in paragraphs.
She reads each book with an eye to the door. Paces the living room long enough to number the exact amount of cracks in the wood, or the six different shades of grey in the worn rug she leaves trails against. The one she turns her nose to when Cassian asks her to sit next to him. Every shade reminding her of every reason she's incapable of love or compassion.
The way she scorns him is the reason why he isn't here or why her sisters don't want her.
She understands why the shadows ask for her name. She is not Nesta. Her name is bitterness or fury or ugly hatred. They want to know what to call her, because they can't call her beautiful or lovely or soft. They can't call her an Archeron when her family doesn't want her.
They can't call her anything. Maybe, that's why they all leave. Even Cassian giving up on her melancholy woes, when she refuses to stop dancing in its rain. The house blurring in weary blue with every question no one answers.
She doesn't even notice him enter the room. With the closing of a door, the house is bathed in indigo.
Nesta is quiet the entire time he goes to the kitchen, as he takes out bread. Plans her words carefully as he slices meat, waits for his explanation while he piles it together, controls her breathing as he lays it on the plate she wants to grab from his hands and smash on the wall.
He sits at the table with the cracks that she has counted 86 times and says nothing. Nesta counts every shade of control, forcing the words out when all she sees is burnt oranges and red.
"Where did you go?"
He flicks his eyes up to meet hers, dismisses the question like he dismisses her feelings.
"Have you eaten today?"
Her eyes sting and she thinks he can see past her wide, blood-shot eyes, but all he sees is the fire. All she can see is flames.
"Where did you go?" She spits.
Hazel moves from blue to white, perhaps coming to the obvious conclusion that its winter and cold. He gets up, moves the plate to the sink, and walks past her question.
"Velaris." He goes to the fireplace and the weary blues drop in her stomach. "Have you eaten, today?
"Why?" She gasps, not even sure what she is asking. If its towards his indifference or his incessant need to know if she's eating. Like he cares at all about her or well-being.
Cassian looks at her as he grabs the match, strikes it against cold, grey stone. Watches her as if he knows she can't stand him or what he is doing to her. He lights the match anyways, even as angry tears well up in her eyes. His eyes as bare as his walls, and just as cruel as the shadows he paints. He raises mocking eyebrow at her clenched fists.
"To give reports. Have you eaten?"
She nods her head and asks another, entranced by dancing color along his ugly face. At the crackling, she closes her eyes and breathes the bitter words. "Reports about what?"
"Just training." Casual. Nonchalant and aggravating.
She hears the fire roar, words and intentions blurring into background noise, shadowed by bones and fear.
"That's it?" She whispers, tired.
"Why are you asking, Nesta?"
She hears his wings, her father's neck, her sisters' innocence, her hope. All broken, lying dead as the blood pools from the bricks. Sees the murder of her love in the foundation of wood.
"Is that it?" She asks, dazed.
"Why don't you say what you really want to say, Nesta?"
The fire laughs at her, mocks her, shames her. Leaves limp bodies out for her to see, for every last bit of her and her incessant need to want. Calls her ugly, unloved, and unwanted as she sees his head sever from his body. Nesta wonders what lies he spouts to her sisters.
"Is that it?" She says quietly.
"Yes." He promises.
The fire roars louder, drowns her in its flames. Nesta bathes in it, soaks it into her skin, its red crawling up her chest until it reaches her face. Her hatred burns, it rips, and it roars, and it wants to tear her apart to get out of her body. It spits out of her mouth instead, and she burns them both to save herself.
"We're both liars then."
Nesta trails her fingers along crystalline fabric, the same color of the veins on her pale skin. Like branches they trail up her arms, blooming outwards when they reach the top of her wrists. A book sleeping steadily in her hands.
In the twilight, Nesta grasps each word as if they are stars and they pool around her. They make wishes come true as she catches them. Through the window, she sees the ardent embrace of a woman and her lover, watches as they dance on top of the snow and mud, through trees and fading dark. Their voices careening into each other, writing their harmony on each page.
The two do not stop as the book ends. They merely begin as someone else.
When she opens the door to her room, another book is nestled on the ground. A slumbering dragon that spews promises instead of fire.
Today, the dragon is green. Yesterday, it was purple. Tomorrow, it might be as red as his siphon's glow. Like yesterday, she cradles it gently, scratches behind its ears, and lets it tell its story. The couple once again beginning their sacred dance.
The chair is soft, the window in her room is wide. Along with the woman and her lover, the words fly off like a green dragon into promised light. The book never ending, even as she reaches the last page.
Cassian is a creature of routine. Every day as the sun washes the world in subtle light, Cassian rises. A beast ready for war, training, and dutiful vengeance. She is forced to hear the sharp whistle of steam and the grinding of coffee beans every morning. Mother forbid he leave without drinking a cup.
If she is looking for any reason to hate him, she doesn't have to go too far. The amount of noise Cassian manages to make gives Nesta a headache. His addiction to sweetened dirt wrenching her from the little sleep she manages to get.
She isn't sure when the noise stops being the villain she needs to best. The sounds becoming a constant reminder that someone is here in this house with her. That she is not alone. After weeks and weeks, the whistling kettle sounds more like bells that wake her from nightmares than screeching demons.
But, sometimes Cassian sleeps. The house holding its breath as to not make a sound.
The first time it happens, Nesta thinks that her body must know the world is ending, because she still wakes up at sunrise. Waiting for his presence of muffled screams as he bumps into tables and his silent curses as he tries to be quiet but fails. The part of her that worries for him, the part she ignores frequently, silences at the soft snores she hears as she listens through the door.
Nesta can't say why she starts, only knows that even the birds are silent outside. Almost as if they know he gets as little sleep as she does. It is the books that are left outside her door every morning that have her padding through the living room. Softly, so her footsteps can't be recognized by his light sleeping habits.
Cassian never acknowledges that he leaves the books there, doesn't hint that he knows she had wanted them since the first day, and was too afraid to ask.
She takes down the grinder, for those books, and tries with all her might not to gag at the smell. Nesta fills the kettle in water, watches it turn to steam and lifts it off the stove just before it whistles. She counts the number of drips it takes to fill the cup, the one she knows Mor had given him eons ago.
When her actions begin to settle, and the doubt wells up inside of her, she tells herself she makes it out of spite, the feeling warming her hands with the heat of the cup. Nesta thinks she'll spit in it, just to be safe, just to remind herself where they stand in the grand scheme of her agony. She doesn't, the idea too juvenile even to her.
When she hears his rustling, she panics. Nesta places the cup down, runs quickly to her room, and closes the door behind her. Any evidence of her existence gone, except for the steaming cup of surrender. If he asks, she'll deny it.
He never does.
At first, she is afraid he won't drink it. The anger that alights in her at the thought, makes her want to go back out and smash the glass. But, when she sees the newly cleaned cup in the cabinet, hanging upside down by a nail, she knows. The satisfaction is enough to make her do it again the next time he sleeps in, as rare as that might be.
The coffee is a truce, for him and for her. As long as they are going to be stuck in the same small cabin, breathing the same wild air, she'll be civil. She'll try—whatever that means to them, to her. She'll try for her sisters, for her life after, for him.
Because, Nesta finds that the warmth of fresh coffee is a more pleasant feeling than the burning flames of her regret.
I'm working on the second part. It's almost finished, I'm just a horrible perfectionist and nothing ever sounds right to me. So that should be coming up eventually. Cross-posted on tumblr and AO3. Hope you like it!