Chapter Text
I said to the the sun
“Tell me about the big bang”
The sun said
“it hurts to become”
- Andrea Gibson, I Sing the Body Electric, Especially When My Power is Out
I.
Nesta does not have pointed ears.
It takes her weeks to notice it. The aftermath of Hybern’s castle was a horrifying blur of blood and terror and the light being too bright, much too bright, all the time; she stumbled everywhere on too-long limbs, winced at every sound, too rich and magnified, as she caught Elain’s face in her hands and wept, smoothed her hair, refused to let anyone else near them.
Elain was as pale and silent as a statue for days. Nesta worked herself into tears trying to get her to eat at first, Elain blanching at every little thing. She wondered how much of it was the fault of the man with red hair—You’re my mate, he’d said, like he could just claim Elain like that. She swore dozens of times over, every time Elain looked listless, she’d kill him, as soon as she finished dismantling the king, and every person who’d ever obeyed him, one agonizing piece of flesh at a time. Nesta had always been angry, vindictive, confrontational, but this was something else, a fury so deep it was too big to be contained in her skin. If things like vases, and windows, and fine china started cracking unprovoked in her presence, well, that was what happened when you forced someone into a skin they didn’t want. Bill the king of Hybern for it, she snarled at Rhys after a glass chandelier shattered with a surge in her mood, not caring that he was undeserving of her vitriol. The whole world deserved it.
So it is not until two weeks into their stay—Elain is no better, but there is less and less to be gained by hovering over her every moment—that she stills, just for a moment, and looks in the long mirror in her room. Until now, she has been avoiding it. She does not want to see the long limbs she is still not accustomed to, or the face that isn’t hers, prettier and smoother and wrong. It does not wear expressions correctly, Nesta thinks with a shiver; it falls too still if she is not actively fighting against it.
She tucks her hair behind her ears, and realizes only then, slowly, that they are not pointed, like Elain’s or Feyre’s, whose she has spent so much time looking at and recoiling from. But it is an unsettled kind of relief as she runs a finger across the rounded edge—why aren’t they?
II.
The night court is at war. Rhys and his friends—although that is not the right word for them now, now they are his army—winnow in and out feverishly, making plans in hushed, hard voices, conferring about war camps and extra wards on the city and no, the priestess in the winter court is being unreasonable—
Nesta does not care.
She knows, there is no pretending otherwise, that she will eventually join them, that she will learn to fight and to disappear and to make something useful out of this body that she hates, and she will tear holes in the world for what it has done to her and Elain. Every bone in her body wants it, like a starving wolf who has scented blood.
But there is something else in her that comes first, a hot, all-encompassing rush of petulance and selfishness and mourning that wants to scream fuck you to this entire war and everyone involved in it, indiscriminately. Perhaps it is childish, perhaps she is wasting time, but Nesta indulges it all the same—she locks herself and Elain away from everything, in the rooms Rhys has given them in the House of Air. When the self-pity burns itself out, and it will, she’ll come out, and ask these monsters her sister has made friends of to teach her. But until then, she doesn’t owe anyone anything.
If she is excluding herself by choice, Cassian is excluded by circumstance.
Cassian will not lose his wings, Mor tells her, but they are not pretty. It took three healers and days of nonstop effort to have them resembling wings again, and Nesta doesn’t think she’ll ever forget the sounds of Cassian’s cries that rang through the House as they sewed tissue rife with nerve endings back together like a quilt. It’s left him weak, as all his powers go towards knitting himself back together, and he won’t be able to fly for months. Rhys insisting on his resting has kept him well out of any of the dangerous proceedings—or any proceedings at all, to hear Mor tell it.
“He’s relieved to keep his wings, of course,” She says, twisting her necklace in her hands, “but it’s been… hard.” Nesta wants to scream at that—this is hard too—but she is trying to, grudgingly, befriend Mor, so she just nods. “It might help if you visited him,” She says, a touch of slyness to her voice that says she knows exactly how Nesta might help him. But if the entire war can wait for Nesta, so can Cassian. She does not visit him, has not seen him at all since that first day they all winnowed back together in a puddle of blood, and when she happens upon him in the library a week later, she curses herself for feeling unprepared for it.
She stills when she sees him, sitting at the table with a book of military strategy, wings bandaged to all hell. He catches the move just before she recovers, and she adds extra venom to her greeting to compensate. “Looks like they managed to stitch you at least halfway back together.” She emphatically takes a seat at the opposite end of the table—she won’t back off just because he’s wounded—dropping her armful of books onto it (fae myths and history. She wants to know, at least, what she’s become).
He looks up from his book with a condescending smile. “Looks like the cauldron didn’t make you any more palatable.”
“Why Cassian,” Nesta coos, “were you thinking about eating me?”
He gestures broadly at the table in front of him. “If you’re offering, hop on up.”
“You’re disgusting.”
“I think you meant ‘horribly handsome, please take me now, Cassian,”
He is smirking at her, but after all that has happened, there is a tremor to it, some conviction lost. Nesta’s combativeness refocuses immediately from Cassian in general to it—this trauma that has made him less than what he was when he made that promise to her. Some unexpected possessiveness takes hold of her, like she wants to take him back from the shadows in his eyes and the bandages on his wings.
So she says the first words she can think of that will galvanize him to action. “How about you teach me to fight instead?”
III.
Nesta’s back is sore. All of her is sore, though, so that isn’t surprising. Cassian is a relentless teacher—perhaps more than he otherwise would be, she thinks, suspecting he is channelling his frustration at being left behind into drilling her again and again, faster this time. But she is doing nothing if not the same thing; it’s Hybern’s repulsive face she sees with every punch, how it’s going to feel to rip his throat out forefront in her mind.
The tension between her and Cassian is a different beast than before Hybern. They still snap and insult, he still flirts and she repeatedly threatens to knee him in the balls again, but their angst is directed outward, at their circumstances, and not at each other. There is an unspoken camaraderie to it.
At the end of each session, Cassian lingers oddly, as though waiting for an opportunity to say something—but he never does.
IV.
The rest of her adapts, almost alarmingly quickly, but Nesta’s back aches. She fights to keep from wincing when certain moves Cas is teaching her force her to twist a certain way, but he watches her face with a closeness that suggest he senses something wrong anyway. She throws extra force behind her punches, and he says nothing.
One morning, she peels off her nightgown and twists to look over her shoulder in the mirror, stomach gripped with something a little like fear. This body is strange enough without whatever is happening to it now: her back seems swollen, either side of her spine raised in a smooth lump that feels horribly inflamed, as she presses it at it with her fingers and grimaces. She sucks a breath in through her teeth and dresses in something drapey that will hide it, and tells Cassian she won’t be having lessons today. Nesta doesn’t doubt that Cassian could have one summoned to the House of Air, but some stubbornness keeps her from asking, or saying anything at all to him, before she descends to Velaris to see a healer. The woman seems at a loss when she reveals her back; she uses magic for driving out of infection and for reduction of swelling, but tells Nesta her abilities sense nothing wrong, despite obvious evidence otherwise. Nesta’s hair is styled to hide her ears, and she chooses not to bring them up, not to disclose that she is anything other than an average citizen of Velaris. Perhaps this is a mistake, but she is grasping so desperately for anything resembling control over the situation that it is some small comfort to this to her chest.
She sends a note to Cassian informing him that her training is postponed indefinitely.
Day by day, it grows worse, so that she cannot lie on her back at all without shooting pains. She scarcely leaves her room, wearing only backless tops, and sometimes loose capes over them when she goes to see Elain. Cerridwen and Nuala bring her food. They are vaguely sympathetic, but of no help.
“Perhaps,” Nuala says slowly, in her paper-thin voice, “The High Lord would know—“
“Rhysand is busy,” Nesta says bitterly. She hasn’t seen her sister’s mate in weeks, and even so hates the thought of having to ask him for help with something that seems so silly, so inconsequential in compared to the war he is fighting. Even if her throat nearly closes when she lets herself think about how terrified she is.
Cerridwen gives pause before saying, “Then perhaps Lord Cassian—“
Nesta’s answering snarl—and a lamp that breaks across the room— is enough to shut down that line of thought and usher them from the room with haste.
Either the two snitched, or Cassian has impeccable sense of timing, because not an hour later he is knocking on her door. “Nesta, are you in there?” She doesn’t answer him. “Nesta, I know you’re there. If you don’t want to train, that’s fine, but please come talk to me.”
There is a long pause, and she holds her breath and prays that he has gone away.
“Nesta, I swear I will stand out here all night and narrate every stupid thing I’ve ever done until you can’t resist coming out here and insulting me for it.”
She curses under her breath, puts on a cape, and throws open the door just as he is starting to speak again. “What. Is it. Cassian.” She says flatly. The wing bandages are gone, she notes, and with them, a patchwork of thick scars are revealed, along with some still-ragged spots near the bottoms of them. She holds back a cringe.
“I thought I’d ask you that,” He says softly. His eyes flicker up and down her body, but not lasciviously—more like he is checking her for injury. Somehow, that is worse. She clutches at the sides of the cape.
“I don’t want to train any more. That’s all,” She grits out. “Unless Rhysand orders me to, and I would like to see him try, I will not require your tutelage for the foreseeable future.” She tries to slam the door on him, but he wedges his foot in, forcing a gap to remain as she glares at him.
“Nesta,” his voice is low and serious, imploring her. “Please. Whatever it is that’s wrong, whatever you’re going through, you can tell me. I know that I—“ he breaks off, throat moving like he wants to speak, but doesn’t know how. Nesta opens the door a little wider as he shakes his head, just a fraction. “You’re not alone anymore, Nesta. Please, let me in. Let me help you.”
Nesta opens the door fully, and takes a half-step towards him. “Do you really want to know what’s wrong?”
“Yes, Nesta. Of course.”
“What’s wrong,” She says faux-gently, drawing near until she is close enough to kiss him, “Is that I hate this place, and I hate this body, and I hate this war, and I hate you.” Venom is dripping from her mouth, carved into a vicious snarl, and she sees hurt cross his face with satisfaction.
It is not just hurt, though, there is a tenseness there, a disappointment—he knows it is a lie, or at least, that there is something she’s not telling him. That doesn’t surprise Nesta; he has always seen right through her. But a defense mechanism doesn’t have to be invisible, it just has to be effective, and this one is.
“I’m sorry I bothered you, then.” He searches her eyes one last time, and turns to leave her. She watches him walk away, too-sharp eyes catching on every detail of him, and is hit with a realization that makes her heart lurch like a spooked horse, back throbbing painfully in answer.
Cassian’s ears are not pointed either.
She looks at the black, leathery wings that bloom from his upper back and has to clamp a hand across her mouth to keep from screaming.
The Cauldron did not make her high Fae. It made her Illyrian. And she is growing her wings.