ACOTAR One~shots [Discontinued, Will be deleted]

Quiet

It’s just a nightmare, he just need to wake up.  Confusion set in as he scented Mor and Feyre, why would they be in his room? His eyes fluttered open, and he knew why as he looked out the window to the garden of the townhouse. He was in Feyre’s old room. Even before his eyes confirmed, the tenderness of his wings told him that it wasn’t a nightmare.

He was whole, his wings were tender, but whole. His tongue felt like sandpaper, “How bad?”

Mor’s normally chipper voice was raw, “Everyone is alive.”

Alive is better than prisoner. Alive is better than dead. But alive is just another way of saying fine. That’s when he notices that one scent is stale. He taught her to always have a second exit plan, always. In all their planning, they had failed. Instead of giving the King a new piece of cookware, Hybern had handed their asses to them on a platter and Feyre, Feyre had gotten them out. She sacrificed herself, their bond for their exit. She had saved them.

He was not sure he was breathing. He had promised, he had sworn to Rhys that he would protect her. They had failed both of them. They had days, only days to enjoy the bond, and that was even irrupted by this stupid war. He did not want to know, he wanted to go back in the depth of the blackness that he awoken from.

“I’m not sure what you remember in those final moments. Feyre got us out, she broke the wards and passed the magic expelled as her breaking the mind control that Rhys had over her. She played just as Rhys does into what they think we are, to what they see. They bought it. She pleaded for them to break the bond and let us go.”

He could feel his heart breaking. He watched Mor, the sadness in her eyes told me that there was more. The look on her face was too similar to the moment it all went quiet fifty years ago. He braced himself, remembered that they were all alive. Feyre was alive.

“We returned and you were in bad shape, we have kept you asleep for a fortnight. I thought that the bond was broken, he pleaded and crawled. When we returned Rhys told us that  Hybern only broke the bargain between them, not the mating bond. So Feyre returned to the Spring Court as a spy. She promised to bring Tamlin down from the inside. Amren was as close to killing Rhys as I have ever seen her.”

If we had ever doubted that they were mates, their self sacrificing bullshit would prove us otherwise.

“I don’t give a shit if Rhys is not going to go in and get her, I will.”

Mor squared her shoulders,  “We have a direct order from our High Lady not to intervene.”

High Lady

High Lady

Quiet, his world had gone quiet.

He grunted as he pulled himself out of bed, grimacing at the bones cracking as he moved. Before he the chance to find him, he entered the entryway. An anger he had held onto for fifty years resurfaced.

“GO. GET. HER.”

“No, it is her choice to stay.”

“Like it was your choice to bind us to this city for forty-nine years. To sacrifice yourself until all that was left was a shadow of a broken soul. We stayed behind these walls listening to the rumors from Az’s shadows. We know what it cost you, but you have no idea what it cost us to feel helpless, betrayed and utterly worthless like the bastards and chattel that the world has told us we are.”

His chest rose and fell with every angry breath he took. He wanted to beat him across Velaris and back. That was how they had always resolved their frustration. He cursed as every bone in his body ached. So he would fight Rhys with words.

“You were not here when we learned that there was a human in Tamlin’s lands. You were not here to see that hope break every day for months and months. Because that curse was cruel, but it gave us a sliver of hope.”

“And when you finally did return, you were broken. Once again you locked us out, you did not lean on any of us because you felt that was a burden you should shoulder yourself. You were so broken that you would let your mate marry another male. You sat by and let another male break your mate!”

“We helped you put those pieces together. That first day, that first dinner, we knew you were in love with her. We knew she would be the only one that could reached you. She was our only hope for you to return to us. During that time, we embraced and loved her. Mother’s tits Rhys, she got Amren to laugh for the first time in two centuries. We love her as a sister and you are just sitting back letting her go back to the male that broke her.”

“You made her our sister and our High Lady, she is not just yours now, she belongs to every one of us. So, tell me Rhys, what happens when she returns broken or worse? What happens when she returns to us dead?”

He watched as his brother slipped on a cool mask, “I am very aware of that risk.”

That is when he noticed it, there was panic under that mask and he did not give a flying fuck.

“What do I need to do, what do I need to prove that you can trust me, to trust us?”

His brother just looked at him, watched as the shock turned to anger.

Rhys responded, in that familiar low male voice that told the world that they were on the verge of violence, “I did trust you! I trusted when you said ‘With my life, High Lord. I’ll protect her with my life.’ I trusted you to bring her home to me.”

He sunk to his knees as the smoke and shadows winnowed his brother away.