#the contrast between different parts of the timeline is agonzing

[flowerflamestars]

Timeloop au snippet

“Honestly,” Lucien murmured, soft bird song painting the air like colors existed that weren’t silver, like he’d been thinking about beauty or wonder or anything but her living, this glorious, quiet place he’d brought her, “I have nowhere to go.”   No point in lying to her.   No doubt she’d see through him.   Even wet, even rasped from her throat, Nesta’s laugh had a sting to it. “Bullshit. You’re heir to three Courts. You’re the only faery of any rank the humans will treat with.”   Just Lucien and Jurian, trying to help with what had only been harm for so long Lucien let every insult, every horror, slide right off him.   “Not so much,” Lucien admitted. “Not anymore.”   “Anymore what, Vanserra?” She’d gone sharp, suddenly, stillness a razor edge.   “They tried to kill me,” Lucien sighed. Breathed. How could he blame them? Who was he to say that a thousand years of slavery didn’t deserve recompense? That Hyberns machinations had been repaid? Lucien was High Fae. It wasn’t the fault of mortals he’d tried to bury his own losses in a quest to help them. “A few times. I’m no longer welcome on the continent.”   “I’m not a project,” Nesta hissed, deathly. “Because you need something to do with your bleeding goddamn heart. I’m not going to fuck you. I’m not an Archeron you can have.”   You had to be a body, to bleed.   Lucien felt like more magic than person, most of the time. Caged in useless goddamn bones, had been so useless-   “Funny,” he admitted, hollow, honest heart pounding away, because he was just flesh and blood, fire and fervor, and he wasn’t ashamed but he was so, so, so tired, “I can’t fuck anyone.”   It unwound her, just a little.   “There’s potions for that.”   And just as sudden as she’d taken him off guard the first time, every time, forty eight insane hours and her devastating, endangered delight- Lucien laughed. “Not for losing your mind every time someone touches you.”   Nesta’s grip on his wrist disappeared so quickly it might not have existed at all. Might never had been, had Lucien not turned, looked up from the floor to her white, furious face, shadows beneath her eyes deeper than bruises.   “You’re fine,” Lucien murmured. “I”- he had to swallow. Stop. Breathe as he’d been teaching himself just to fucking breathe. Stop himself from saying something as deranged as the fact that a woman who’d drowned in his arms less than two nights ago felt absolutely safe, to him.   Lucien was a very fine liar, could manage most of the time, but Nesta- whirling in his arms, dying in his arms, stopping his fucking heart, all silver fire-   Nesta Archeron was something else entirely, and it was not the time or the place to even think it.   “I’ll tell you,” Lucien said, slowly. “And you tell me. Please.”