Come Hel or High Lord: Ch 12
Chapter 12: Taste the Autumn Air
Words: 6900 (hehe nice)
Reminder: This is a crossover between all SJM series. So spoilers for TOG, ACOTAR, and CC
Summary:
Azriel and his boy problems. Featuring a flashback to the High Lord's meeting (what did he say and where did he disappear to that night?) and a flashback from when Azriel and Eris first met.
Snippet below the cut. Read on Ao3
Eris swallowed his unhinged laughter and Azriel watched, following the movement of his throat. His head spun when he felt that the air around them had changed, from ice cold to unbearably hot.
“Not up to killing in her name after all? Pity.” Eris clicked his tongue, his voice no more than crackling embers. He knew he was goading the animal but he wanted this finished once and for all. Let him get it out of his system and then maybe he will lay this obsession to rest.
Azriel’s face was screwed up in anger but he dropped his fist to his side. “It’s not about her. It’s never been about Mor. Ever.”
“You strangled me in front of everyone. Nearly killed me!” Eris scoffed and turned his face away. “Maybe you should have, then we could be done with this.” He finished a little quieter.
When Azriel didn’t answer him, Eris chanced meeting his eyes again, the black of his iris’ nearly swallowed the hazel completely and Azriel’s breathing was ragged. His wings flared and his shadows grew behind him, making him look like a true omen of death. Beautiful and terrible.
‘Do it.” Eris rasped as Azriel’s grip on him tightened, his anger reflected in the fires he could feel dancing in his eyes and shown back to him from the surface of Azriel’s obsidian ones. They breathed in one another’s ire, beat after infuriatingly slow beat, then without warning, Azriels lips were on his.
Eris was burning and he was going to die, he was sure of it. Azriel crashed into him, his teeth tearing at Eris’ mouth, his throat, his collarbone as he elicited sounds out of Eris that he had never heard himself make before. He returned all of it and more, their teeth clashing against each other in the fever of drinking each other up. Eris arched up to meet Azriel’s body as it pressed into him, their hands clawing over arms and chests and faces, trying to get closer.
Closer, he needed to get closer. He needed more.
As soon as the thought was out of his head Azriel stopped, seeming to come back into himself, realizing what he had done.
He took his trembling hands from Eris tunic and gripped the trunk of the tree behind Eris, placing their foreheads together. Eris was shaking, he wanted to scream, to sob, anything to compete with the dizziness from the abrupt loss of him. His hands fisted at his sides where they were trembling uncontrollably.
“Yeah,” Azriel’s voice was shredded, “Maybe I should have. Then at least we would be free.”
This is a cross over fic so a giant cast of characters and a big stupid storyline but Azris is my main bitch in this fic so ...
Holla at ya boi if you want on or off the Azris tag train : @talibunny30 @iftheshoef1tz @born-to-riot @pathfinderofnight @fell-in-luvs @fieldofdaisiies @aktrain @honeysuckle-daydreams13 @secret-third-thing @acourtofladydeath @pippsmcgee @youvereachedthenearest-lovergirl @baileybird71 @skyesayshi @yanny-77
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Excerpt: Old Vows
Sevika instigates an argument.
From ‘both sides of the moon,’ a oneshot exploring Silco and Sevika’s relationship through a series of business ventures.
cw: violence, manipulation, knives, implied past abuse
Full story on AO3
"Late night," he greets her. Hours of lost sleep gravel in his voice: pitch the words to a rougher lilt, lower than usual.
On any other night—bent over stacks of his shipping edicts, a fifth of whisky half-emptied and his fingers splayed about his temple; papers slipped and marked between them, weaving strategies to feed shimmer through Piltie supply chains—she may have found the sound familiar as anything: no different from the hum of music beneath their feet, or the lull of their city's racket past the panes. Comfortable, even.
Now, it strings tension through her metal joints, clear to the socket. Simmers and burns in her throat, in her teeth, in the clenching and unclenching of her fist.
"For all of us, seems like," she cuts back.
His head turns, marginally, like a cat crooking its ear. He knows her, enough. Knows exactly where this is going, without needing another word.
Slowly, he takes in a drag, huffing the smoke into their city's green. She hears his calluses grit across the parchment. Feels the way air sits in his throat, stifling about the room.
"You weren't there," he says eventually, tapping the spliff's ash into her littered tray on the railing.
Sevika shifts her jaw. "Neither were you."
"She's told me—"
"She?" Her boots thud across tiles capped with green and gold. "What about Dustin? Ran?" His spliff stills by his ear. "The little bitch blew that shit to pieces," she thunders on. "Just like old headquarters. Just like she'll do here, any damned day now—"
"I'd expect you to have more sense than this."
The words gut through her, quiet as they come—as though she's nothing more than a street-mutt that's gone off and disobeyed, refused to heel at his command.
It lights a fire in her chest, before she can care to douse it.
"To do what?" she growls, inches from his steel-straight shoulders, from the muscle flaring in his jaw. "Put my knife where it belongs?"
She's nose-to-nose with him, before she can blink. A tigress over a rabid wolf.
There's a tilt in Silco's head, to meet her eyes. She would take some sick shred of pride it in, were it any other man. But this is their nation's Eye, who stabbed Vander through the wall of meat at his back, and gutted him, belly to lung, without hesitation. Who caught wind of Ran's coin-sniffing brute of a brother, and shot the bastard, point-blank. Who once snapped Lock's bulging arm behind his back, manhandled him bodily down the floor during a scrap, and held him there, a snake's hiss at his ear: Try that again, and I'll take your hand, finger by finger—slower than you can dream, boy.
He'd survived an eternity in that coal-blackened hell—and he'd learned to fight dirty, to do it.
She'd learned to do the same, under countless men like him.
Smoke poisons the air between them. "To mind your mouth," Silco answers her, gristling off his cracked teeth, "before you find yourself without a tongue."
Sevika breathes smog and ash in. Breathes fire out.
Anger broils over the apprehension: burns spite in her blood.
"You'd put her before everything else," she blunders on. "The others—"
"You've yet to see her potential."
"—the damned cause—"
"You squash all that she can accomplish, now—feed those doubts back into her head, as much as her bloody sister had—"
"At least that hellbitch knew how to land a punch—"
And he devours her airspace, still as a cobra poised to strike: his eyes splicing into hers, that dead one red.
"How many times has she failed?" It comes as a whisper of a roar, the spliff crushed between his white-knuckled fingers. "How many?" Sevika fights the wrath in her throat: feels it slide past her teeth. She stands her ground. Drinks down the smoke on his breath, the heat of it simmering against her jaw. "How many times has she persevered, in the face of it?"
Sevika digs her claws into her palm: metal squeaking on metal. "She isn't you."
A spark in blood-blue: a twitch in the dark line of his lashes. Lowly, sharp as a blade, Silco hisses, "I know that."
"No, you don't." Because for all he may have reasoned it, claimed to see the girl as untapped strength on her own two legs, he saw too much of himself in her. Too much promise, where there was none. "She won't succeed, where you failed," she thunders on. "She's not a leader, Silco—she's just some scared little girl, looking for a fucking mother—"
In that teal eye, a spark of lightning. "Like yourself, then?"
Red snaps over her. Falls like a curtain-call to a black stage.
Distantly, there is fabric crumpling beneath the squeeze of her palm. Cool, silken: the crisp points of a collar. A pulse hammering against her thumb, her knuckles welding down through a slim shoulder, the doorframe rattling hard enough through his bones to ricochet back into her own.
Rage has her fingers a hair's breadth from his throat.
Curiosity has her captivated in the man she has stripped down, in the face of it.
Oh, she should fear this. Should turn tail and run, before he can bleed her where she stands. Not linger on the shadows of his skin, under raven-black fringe knocked out of place, where seaglass skews to midnight: on the swallow that shifts against her knuckles, his breath shivering into the heady heat of her own. Shouldn't dare to let her mind wander, thinking how he would look hauled back against that tattered old couch, her palm wrenched through the thick quills of his hair. Whether the creature she sees unearthed in him now would bare its teeth, twofold, or bury a husking breath into the cushions. Whether he'd snake that spindly hand around her wrist, a miner's strength still housed within it: let her fingertips drag over the thunder of his pulsepoint, and squeeze.
Jagged steel grazes the bared muscle at her waist, frigid in the cool air. It staggers breath back into her lungs, like the punch of a bullet. Metal kissing metal, ticking over the fastenings of her shirt: a deadly, leaden weight laid into the thick weave of her collar, easing her back on her heels, by fractions.
A dead man leers up at her. In his throat, the growl of a demon; in his eyes, hellfire blistering through the skin. Gooseflesh peppers down her nape.
"Are you sure you want to play this game?" he seethes—quietly, dangerously calm.
It's nothing near an invitation. But the fight in it's a threat as much as a vow. One he's given, countless times before—but never to her.
Sevika swallows liquid down a throat that burns.
"Is that what he'd say, to you?" she grits out, an implosion aimed and fired. And the man, the beast, stares back at her—and shutters closed. The fire dampened, the fight smothered. Buried four meters deep.
Vander's knife falls rigid against her clavicle. She uncoils her fingers from his collar, nail by nail.
In unison, the tether breaks.
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