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kingofsummer93 · 6 months

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Once Cursed, Twice Shy

Part 1 of my gift to @velidewrites for @acotargiftexchange!

Summary:

Don't mix vodka and magic, they said. It will end badly, they said.

Elain's never been particularly superstitious, but when a ghost from her past comes crashing back into her life, she realizes that the old saying might have been true after all.

And that she might have (accidentally and definitely not on purpose) cursed her ex-boyfriend.

Inspired by the Ex Hex by Rachel Hawkins.

Chapter 1: A Fateful Spark, an Ill-Timed Blaze

Ao3

Ten years previously

A clap of thunder rang out over the town of Maple Glen, followed by a torrential downpour so sudden it seemed as though the sky had singled out their little village to bear the brunt of its ire.

Elain sighed, burrowing further into the couch under her nest of blankets and pillows. She envied the storm, at that moment. What she wouldn’t give to be able to dump her hurt and anger into the world for a couple hours before being reborn, fresh and dewy, her broken heart melded back together by sunshine as her memories faded like a clearing sky.

She sighed, and the storm raged on as if in answer.

“Do you ever wish you were born as something else?” she asked, swirling the dregs of her bright blue cocktail around in her glass. “Like, a bird, or a tree, or, or…”

Vassa let out a noise that was halfway between a snort and a hiccup. “There it is.”

“There is what?”

“The philosophical stage of your drunk journey. I thought we passed it two drinks ago. First we have affectionate Elain, then loud Elain, followed with a brief appearance by pensive Elain, and then-”

Elain grabbed a throw pillow and chucked it at her friend, who nearly toppled off her end of the couch as she ducked to avoid it. Perhaps they were a bit drunk.

“I mean it,” Elain pressed, draining her glass. “Trees don’t have to worry about dumb boys, or school, or finding a job. They just…” She held out her arms and lifted her head to the ceiling, wriggling her fingers around like leaves in the wind. “Hang out and bask in the sunshine.”

“Babe,” Vassa said drily, “trees get cut down and then get sawed up into building materials or burned or whatever. Dumb boys are the least of their worries.”

Perhaps it was the vodka’s fault, but for some reason this seemed incredibly sad to Elain. Her throat closed up, her eyes suddenly burning with unshed tears.

“Oh no.” Vassa flapped her hands around in a panic, her mirth gone. “Oh shit, what did I say?”

“Lucien had a tree house growing up.” The words bubbled out of her mouth before she could stop them. “He told me his oldest brother helped him build it. And then one day he went out to the forest and discovered that the section of the woods with his tree house had been cut down. Something about tree rot.”

“See,” Vassa said wisely as she refilled both their glasses from a pitcher. “And that’s why you don’t want to be a tree.”

Elain snorted, wiping the tears from her face with an already damp corner of her blanket. She’d shed so many tears in the past two days that she was shocked she hadn’t dried up like a raisin yet.

“Fuck him,” Vassa continued. “He doesn’t deserve a treehouse- or any house, for that matter. He can live on the streets for all I care.”

Elain pictured it for a moment; Lucien’s long fiery hair grown even longer from years of living as a vagabond, a scraggly beard not quite covering his devilish grin. Perhaps he’d live in the woods, in a little cave with a mattress made of leaves and moss. The image didn’t repulse her as much as it should have.

Suddenly she was enraged.

This had been her refrain for the past three days, ever since she had so unceremoniously thrown him out of her apartment. Moments of deep grief when it seemed like she’d never stop crying were followed by rage so intense it felt like her blood was on fire.

The same fire that ran through his veins, the flame that she had found so utterly irresistible.

Her gaze moved against her will, landing on the box sitting in a corner near the door. She’d been studiously avoiding it, torn between the satisfaction she’d get at throwing it out, and the desire to keep a piece of him close, if only for a little while longer.

It was irrational, but that box of stuff had somehow become a physical reminder of him, and getting rid of it would be like cutting the final thread that tethered him to her. Not to mention that a small part of her brain still hoped that he would come back, that somehow it would turn out to all be a misunderstanding.

That he would choose her, against all odds, in defiance of the path that had been laid out for him.

Perhaps even more humiliating than the rejection itself had been the deception. Because he had known- for the entirety of the summer he had spent tangled up in bed with her, whispering that she was the one, making her burn in a way she had never even dreamed possible, he had known it wouldn’t last. It couldn’t last, because by the end of the summer he was due back in England, where his betrothed waited for him.

The fucker had been engaged the entire time and hadn’t bothered sharing that information with her.

But the worst thing of all had been the way she’d so thoroughly fallen for him. Every touch, every whispered word had seemed so sincere that she’d never once questioned his devotion. What a fool she’d been. Perhaps if he had been honest with her from the start she would have allowed him to fall into her bed, but not into her heart.

Or better yet, she would have steered clear of Lucien Vanserra altogether.

Elain could still picture the moment she’d first laid eyes on him during the Summer Solstice festival. Vassa had bullied her into setting up a kissing booth (a venture that had turned out to be quite lucrative) and they’d had a steady stream of customers all morning. Around midday the energy in the crowd had shifted, like a ripple in a pond. And then the crowd had shifted, parting like the sea.

And he had appeared. Tall, his golden skin practically glowing in the summer sun, his shoulder-length hair so vividly red she immediately knew he was a witch. No human could ever look like that. He had locked eyes with her from a distance, and it had felt to Elain like she was being set on fire.

“Who is that?” she stage-whispered to Vassa, who had just given their elementary school math teacher a wholesome peck on the cheek for the sum of five dollars.

“Who?” Vassa followed her gaze, and her eyes went wide, her hand clamping painfully around Elain’s wrist.

“Ow!”

“I think he’s one of the Vanserras,” Vassa whispered, slightly awed. “He’s got to be, look at that hair.”

A smile quirked up the corner of the handsome stranger’s mouth, and Elain wondered absurdly if he had somehow heard. The Vanserras were a powerful magical family, and nobody knew the true depth of their power. She wouldn’t be surprised if they had unnaturally powerful hearing.

“I’ve never seen him before,” Elain said, stupidly. She felt slightly dazed as she continued to stare into his eyes, as if she was physically incapable of looking away.

In truth she had never seen any of them before.

Hundreds of years ago, a man called Thelor Vanserra had founded Maple Glen and tied his magic to the village. Magic ran strong here- for those who knew where to look, that is. Tourists simply assumed they had stumbled upon a particularly charming village, where commerce always boomed and disaster never struck.

But the truly odd thing about Maple Glen was the fact that it never snowed, despite being far enough north that it should by all reason get buried under snow every winter. It was like the town was stuck in perpetual autumn, with only a few weeks of balmier weather in the spring and summer. Nobody questioned it, assuming Maple Glen simply existed in a peculiar micro-climate.

It was a wonder how far people would go to avoid seeing magic, even when it existed right under their noses.

Twice a year, on Summer Solstice and Winter Solstice, a member of the Vanserra bloodline would come to town in order to regenerate the magic for the coming season before disappearing back to England. They were notoriously reclusive and haughty, and were rarely seen around town- much less strolling through a crowded festival.

“I always pictured them scrawny and inbred,” Vassa had said, surreptitiously fixing her hair.

The crooked grin on the stranger’s face widened, and Elain’s stomach dropped. He had definitely heard that.

And then he started walking towards them.

Elain froze, her stomach roiling with equal parts thrill and fear. Would he curse them? It didn’t seem likely, judging from the amusement on his face, but she squirmed nonetheless.

When he was a few paces away from their booth he paused, his eyes still fixed on her. From this close Elain could make out the color of his eyes- a warm brown, tinged russet, as if kissed by the flame his bloodline was rumored to wield. His features were sharp and elegant, his wide jaw covered with the barest hint of auburn stubble. There was a thin, crooked scar running down the left side of his face that, combined with the devilish gleam in his eyes, gave him an aura of danger. It sent a shiver down Elain’s spine, and she felt momentarily struck dumb, as if by magic.

“My lady,” he said, inclining his head. The motion made a strand of his vibrant hair fall over his face, and Elain’s fingers itched to brush it back.

Vassa giggled beside her. Elain had never, in her nineteen years of life, heard her friend make such a sound. She bit her lip hard to prevent herself from doing the same.

“If I walked through fire for you, could I get a kiss too?”

Vassa made a choked sound that sounded as though she was holding in another giggle. Elain could only stare for a moment, before realizing that she was staring at him with her mouth hanging wide open.

“I- sorry, what?”

With a casual wave of his hand a wall of flame had burst to life out of thin air. Elain jumped to her feet, scanning the crowd for signs of anyone having noticed the blatant display of magic. But oddly enough, nobody at all was looking at them. It was almost as if some force was making the crowd look away.

She glanced back at the flames just in time to see him walk through them. Surrounded by flames, with that troublesome grin on his face and his eyes twinkling with mirth, it almost seemed like she was being bewitched by the devil himself.

In the end it turned out to be not too far from the truth.

The summer romance that had followed had completely knocked her off her feet. Lucien was nothing like the boys she’d dated before. There was something charmingly old-fashioned about the way he spoke, his impeccable manners and posh accent so at odds with his serpentine tongue and devilish humour. He had felt like a drug, something decadent and rare that left her buoyant and giddy. She’d been hooked from her first taste, her fate sealed the moment he’d walked through those flames and pressed a feather-soft kiss directly to her lips. She’d let those flames consume her.

But the thing with fire, she’d learned, was that it could be doused in an instant.

Elain wondered if he ever would have said anything at all, had that vision not infiltrated her dreams. Would he simply have left her apartment and gotten on a plane back to Yorkshire without so much as a goodbye, never to be heard from again?

They had been lying in bed when the vision had swarmed her senses, limbs tangled together, a lazily swirling fan doing little to cool their heated skin. There was never any logic or reason to what triggered her visions, but something about that hazy veil between consciousness and sleep seemed to make her prone to them. One unclear reality being replaced by another, images fogging her mind so that sometimes she wasn’t sure if they were visions, dreams, or nothing at all.

But that night, as she’d laid there happy and content, blissfully uncaring about anything but the present, the future had decided to make itself known to her anyway. At first she thought she was simply drifting off into dreams of him, and she had sighed, grateful to be with him even in sleep.

Her blood had grown cold as she’d realized the Lucien in her mind was not alone, and nor was his soft smile aimed at her. There was someone else, someone with long rosewood-colored tresses and hazel eyes that shone almost golden, like a cat’s. Someone who was wearing a white dress, wrapped in the arms of the man currently in her bed.

Someone who was decidedly not her.

At first she’d chosen to ignore it. Perhaps it wasn’t a vision at all, but simply her lust-addled brain playing tricks on her. But then Lucien had announced that he needed to fly back home for a while, to take care of some business.

“I’ll be back before you notice I’m gone,” he assured her, his mouth pressed to her ear. “You won’t even miss me.”

In the span of a few seconds he had managed to rip her heart out and rip it to shreds. She’d been so stunned that at first she didn’t know how ro react.

“I’m sorry, Love,” he murmured, misunderstanding her shock as displeasure. “There’s some things with…my family, that I need to handle in person.”

Something about his choice of words had made Elain want to laugh, even as she was fighting rising tides of panic and heartbreak.

“Who is she?” had been the only words she’d been able to formulate.

Lucien stared at her in shock, the color draining from his skin until she knew for certain she hadn’t miscalculated.

Then had come the accusations, the excuses, the explanations, followed by more accusations.

He was engaged.

Betrothed had been the word he’d used, like something out of those romance novels her sister liked. He was betrothed to a stranger he’d never even met, someone he allegedly had no intention of marrying. He was going back to end it, he claimed. He wanted her, he assured.

“I didn’t want to say anything at first because I didn’t know what this thing was between us, and then when it became serious it felt like it was too late, and I didn’t know what to do, and please, Elain, just look at me…”

She had, and something about seeing him like this, his usual smooth exterior replaced by rambling words and eyes wide with panic, almost made her break. But then she’d remembered the woman in her vision, the one with such unusual colouring that she could only be a witch- and a powerful one, if she had been betrothed to a Vanserra. And most of all, she remembered the joy on Lucien’s face in that vision, the way his eyes had crinkled around the edges like they did when he was happy.

In retrospect, throwing his clothes out the window had perhaps been a tad immature, but it had been effective in getting him to shut up and leave her apartment.

Elain shook her head, clearing away the memories that refused to leave her alone.

“You know what,” she declared, slamming her glass on the coffee table with a clang, “let’s burn his stuff.”

Vassa whooped, jumping to her feet before Elain could second guess her decision. Fuck him. Fuck him and his beautiful fiancé (bethrothed) who no doubt had the perfect pedigree and wielded some powerful brand of magic to match the Vanserra’s. Something respectable, like elemental magic, or a knack for spell work. Not something weird and impossible to understand like her Sight.

“Fuck him,” she said again, getting to her feet. “Fuck her!”

“That’s the spirit!”

Vassa upended the box into their fireplace, lifting up a cloud of dust, ash, and various herbs from an ill-advised cleaning spell they’d tried to cast the week before. “Care to do the honors?” she asked, extending a box of matches towards Elain.

Elain took a shuddering breath as she looked at the sad little pile of ashy belongings. Clothes, a few books, thin leather straps Lucien had used to tie his hair back. Straps he’d once used to bind her wrists together as he-

Elain struck the match so aggressively that it snapped clean in half. The second one lit, the little flame seeming to mock her as it danced near the tips of her fingers.

The fire was slow to catch, smoking pathetically as it tried to crawl along the pile of fabric and books. And then it grew, until their faces warmed by the heat of the flames. Elain very pointedly ignored the fact that Lucien could summon flames ten times this size without so much as blinking.

“We curse you, Lucien Vanserra!” Vassa declared, stirring the flames with a poker.

“I hope you burn in hell,” Elain mumbled.

Vassa cackled. “He’d probably be happy there. Let him rot somewhere his flame can’t catch.”

Elain might have imagined it, but just for a moment the fire seemed to grow brighter in the hearth.

“And may his betrothed be frigid in bed!” Vassa added with another cackling laugh. Once again the flames flashed hotter, almost blue.

“And may she break his heart, just like he did mine,” Elain added sadly.

It seemed like she was speaking directly to the flames themselves, and for a second they appeared to wink in response. She blinked, and shook her head against a wave of disorientation. Merlin, she was drunk.

A flash of lightning lit up the night sky outside, followed by another rumble of thunder that made them both jump. With a mechanical groaning the lights inside the apartment blinked off, leaving them sitting there in the dark.

Vassa groaned. “Damn it, power’s out again.”

But Elain’s attention was still on the fire- or, more accurately, on the space where it should have been. In the space where moments before flames had danced merrily, there was now only a fine layer of ash, all traces of Lucien’s belongings having vanished, like the flames, into thin air.

Elain gulped. “Vassa? I think we might have done something bad.”

#elucien #elucien fanfic #acotar gift exchange #it's a holiday romcom folks #low plot heavy shenanigans #Lucien VanCursed

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