Chapter Text
“Are you sure
That we are awake? It seems to me
That yet we sleep, we dream”
- Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream
Night in the spring court is a warm, fragrant darkness, alive with the steady sounds of crickets and the rustle of leaves no matter the hour. It took time to adjust to, after the whispery quiet of the Fall court, but Lucien scarcely notices it anymore. A different sound in the night, though, he is hyper-attuned to.
Elain, next to him, mumbles in her sleep.
She has been sleeping in his bed for thirteen days, ever since they accidentally slipped into a nap together under a tree in the garden, and she admitted afterwards it was the only time she’d slept without nightmares since Hybern—that it seemed to be Lucien’s presence that kept them at bay. There has, of course, been only sleeping happening in the bed. Elain has been in the spring court just two months, since the war ended. They spend much of their time roaming the considerable spring landscape together, talking softly, and more and more, she slips her hand in his as they walk, or will tuck herself into his side contently as they sit together. Occasionally, in moments that feel as fragile and as achingly lovely as the brush of a butterfly’s wing, her lips will find his, and he kisses her softly, heart soaring in his chest. She always pulls away furiously red, but with a smile so beautiful Lucien thinks it would be entirely possible to live on that alone.
“I’m not completely innocent,“ she offers on the day the subject tangentially comes up, avoiding his gaze as she fiddles with a piece of grass. “I was engaged, before.”
Lucien is certain that if he speaks, he will say something wrong, so he says nothing.
“We only…” she stops, and shakes her head, reconsidering something. “Anyway. I know things, though.”
There is the tiniest shade of smugness in it, like a child who has gotten away with something, and Lucien can’t help but raise a curious eyebrow at her.
An impish grin breaks across her face. “Promise you won’t tell?”
He returns it. “Promise.”
She bites her lip, a shade bashful, and leans in. “Nesta had a dirty book hidden under her mattress. She thought I didn’t know about it, but I would read it when she went out.”
Lucien laughs at that like he hasn’t laughed in months, until Elain grows good-naturedly embarrassed and playfully throws a fistful of grass at him. “Thank goodness for Nesta,” he says between laughs as he recovers, shaking the green out of his hair, and Elain giggles at that in return.
What they have is so delicate, so strange yet, like the first infant-green shoot of a flower: if he gets too close, he is certain he will crush it accidentally. It’s not him with the skill for gardening. But it is no loss—he wants her, of course he wants her, but he feels so overwhelmingly lucky when she does so much as rest her head on his shoulder that it strikes him as absurd to wish for anything else. He’d be happy to spend hundreds of years wooing Elain like this, bond or no bond, just holding her hand and watching the sunlight catch gold in her bronze hair. He makes sure to leave space between them every night as they lie in bed, tries to wordlessly make sure she knows he asks nothing of her.
But when they wake up entangled (which they often do, drawn like magnets to each other in the night), her scent heavy on the sunlight-kissed sheets and her cheek pressed warm against him, Lucien will indulge in a few selfish minutes of pretending to be asleep, just to hold her a little longer.
Tonight, though, he woke up in the pitch-dark, arms empty.
Elain mumbles again, and Lucien smiles sleepily at her. She is notably vocal in her sleep, and it doesn’t bother him, though it can be alarming: on her third night sleeping with him, she sat bolt up in the middle of the night and asked him very intently where Feyre was.
“She’s—“ He stifled a yawn. “she’s at the night court, dove. Why?”
“I have to tell her about the rabbits.”
“What about the rabbits?”
Elain’s expression went slack, and she fell back down, eyes closing again sluggishly. “They’re…mn… blue.”
She’d had no recollection of this, or any other of her instances of muttered sleep-speech, the day after the fact. Lucien mostly sleeps through it, so he is not sure why something has stirred him tonight, but he doesn’t mind. It’s such a happy shock to turn over and see her next to him that she could be summoning demons in her sleep and Lucien wouldn’t mind.
She makes another noise, something dissatisfied. Her brow creases slightly and she turns this way and that, as though unable to get comfortable, hair sticking to her dampened forehead. Lucien reaches out gently and brushes it back from her face, but she makes another sound, one that’s almost pained, followed by a long, half-suppressed groan. Lucien sits up, completely alert now as fear grips him. She hasn’t had a nightmare with him present yet, but he supposes it was only a matter of time.
“Elain,” he whispers. She doesn’t wake, but she turns over again with a small keening cry, gripping the sheets. “Elain,” He says a little lounder, putting a hand on her shoulder. “Elain, dove, wake up, you’re only dreaming.” She doesn’t wake, instead moaning, long and low, as she shifts under his hand. He scolds himself for even thinking it, but it sounds like—
Oh.
Lucien’s mouth goes dry as they all hit him at once: the realization that the noises she’s making are not ones of fear, the dull pulsating coming from the bond that makes his blood run warmer, and the scent of his mate’s arousal, sweet and heady.
Elain is not having a nightmare.
She moans again and he barely catches himself, pulls back his hand, maintains that all-important space between them. He might once have thought to sustain himself on her chaste kisses, but any hope of that crumbles as he listens to her whimpers, drinks the sounds, memorizes them. Cauldron, the scent of her arousal alone is enough to send him reeling. He can feel himself growing hard, thoughts narrowing to how he might get her to make those sounds again, the way her nightgown has ridden up, revealing the smooth pale expanses of her legs against the wine-dark sheets, wondering if she tastes the way she smells, wondering what she feels like—
Belated shame breaks through the haze his mind is becoming like fingers of ice, and he stands, quickly, tearing his gaze away from her form. He shouldn’t be seeing, hearing this, he has no right. Elain would be mortified. Should he wake her, pretend he still thinks she’s in the throes of a nightmare?
He takes a shuddering breath, trying to calm himself, and risks another glance at her. It is a mistake, she’s barely dressed and practically writhing and fuck, he’s hard. No, what he needs to do is remove himself from the situation entirely. Urgently. He forces himself not to look at her, to move towards the door. He’ll find a guest bedroom to sleep in; if she asks, he’ll say he was called away on early-morning business.
His hand is inches from the door handle when she mumbles again.
“Lu…cien.”
He freezes.
He is certain he must have misheard, that his heart is hammering so loudly the roar of blood in his ears is playing tricks on him.
But she speaks again, louder, more clearly, more desperately. “Mm…Lucien, please.” An ache washes over him, robs the breath from his lungs; desire and something else, something raw and ancient that reacts bodily to hearing his mate say his name with desire in her voice. He steps back towards her, silently, slowly. He has no idea what he intends to do, there is no thought in his head but that he needs to be near her, that his mate is calling his name, wanting him, and he is powerless to resist.
Around her whimpers, she breathes unevenly, open-mouthed and almost panting. The sheets are twisted around her legs as she sleeps, indecently flushed and shifting as her hips grapple for some imaginary purchase. Lucien sinks fluidly to sit on the edge of the bed next to her, putting a hand out as though he might rest it on her thigh, but she mutters something unintelligible and he thinks better of it.
Lucien does not know what it is that wakes her, if his earlier attempts did not, but with a startled gasp, her eyes fly open, landing on him, disoriented. She looks at him, at the bed, at the space next to her, back at him—as though looking for something. Or perhaps confused about where they are. Her breathing is rapid and shallow, like a frightened bird’s, and she extends a hand towards him half-blindly, whimpering.
“Lucien, please… I’m…” Her face is pained, words getting lost in the sleepiness and want. Her legs move aimlessly in the sheets as though of their own volition, as when she was sleeping. “I don’t… I need…”
He takes her hand in both of his, shushing her softly. “You’re alright, dove, I’m here. What do you need?”
She sits up suddenly, face close to his. Her eyes are roaming his body, and she wets her lips as she brings her gaze up to look him in the eyes. “Touch me.” It comes out almost as a question, as though even through the fog of want she is afraid he’ll deny her.
Lucien is fairly certain his heart misses a beat. “Elain,” He breathes, and he hopes desperately she’ll understand what he means by it, because he seems to have forgotten every other word in existence. Half of her face is caught by silvery moonlight that lovingly traces down her neck and shoulder, where her nightgown has slipped off. The fabric of it is thin, and her nipples make peaks of it—it would be so, so easy to ease the garment the rest of the way off, to run his hands, his mouth, down the same path of soft skin—
But her eyes are so glazed with sleep and lust in equal measures, and the moonlight makes the room look like another world—something must be wrong, she cannot possibly want this, want him, this is some illusion that will vanish in the sunlight, or worse, a rash request she will regret. The thought of Elain regretting anything they do together is enough to make his blood run cold.
She feels it, through the bond, the trepidation and the want mingled together, paralyzing, and she rises up on her knees in front of him, taking his face between her hands. “Please, please Lucien.” It’s barely even a whisper, such an insubstantial thing, but he clings to it like a rock in a storm. “You got me so close in the dream; I’m so wet I can’t stand it. Please, I need you.” There’s that strain of heady desperation to it, like she might cry, and it cuts straight through him—he wouldn’t deny her anything she asked for in that voice, but sheer shock holds him in place as she lowers her mouth to his.
It’s nothing like the delicate kisses they have shared in the past. It’s openmouthed and sloppy, wanting, fraught with need. Elain moans into his mouth and it breaks whatever spell had been holding him; he kisses her back ferociously, hands going to grip her waist. She shifts, not breaking their connection, and Lucien realizes with a rush she is pulling her panties down—they linger around her knees, as far as they can go with her kneeling up like this, and she shifts to spread her legs further apart. He pulls away from the kiss, panting.
“Elain,” he says, voice rough, “Are you sure—“
She kisses him again, hard, like she is trying to bruise his lips, and guides his hand under the hem of her nightgown, up to the lips of her pussy.
He makes contact with a hiss—she’s soaking wet; it’s impossible not to think about how easily he’d slide into her like this, slick and hot. His cock throbs with the thought and he strokes her, long and languid, and is rewarded with a low groan from deep in Elain’s throat. Bringing his other hand up, underneath her nightgown, to brush one of those pert nipples with his thumb, he laves at the other with his tongue, through the thin fabric.
He is gentle above all, touching her like she is made of spun glass. Half because Elain deserves nothing less than worship, than all the tenderness he can possibly summon, and half because he is still afraid to touch her at all—that he will do something wrong and frighten her away. But there is another, wickeder part of him that has a question to ask, and try as he might to keep a grip on it, to not risk this moonlit dream of a moment, it slips its leash for just a moment as he raises his head to her ear.
“What was I doing to you in your dream, Elain?” His voice is so guttural he barely recognizes it, and he brings his mouth to nip at a spot on her neck as she whimpers.
“You were—“ She gasps as he slips a finger into her, bucks against him begging for more. “You were fucking me,” Her voice breaks, and it takes her a moment to recover. “F-from behind.”
Lucien snarls into her shoulder, free hand digging into her hip possessively as the image flashes through him—sent down the bond or just his own imagination, he doesn’t know, but in it, he is being anything but gentle. He slides a second finger in with the first as he thrusts and she lets out an obscene cry as she rides his hand, gripping at his shoulders.
“And you…” She breaks off with a strangled moan as he angles his hand to hit her clit, but he relents, slowing to let her speak and pulling back to look her in the eyes. “You…” She is panting, some shade of shyness coming over her features as her eyes flicker between his brown and metal one.
“Yes?” He strokes her gently, and she can’t help writhe a little bit with it as she hesitates.
“…You were pulling my hair. In the dream.” she says softly, neediness warring with an abstract embarrassment in her voice. The wicked part of him, the part that wants to devour her, gentleness be damned, surges in response, the admission like fire in his blood and he kisses her fiercely, all teeth. He slips his tongue in her mouth as he resumes rubbing her clit in earnest, swallowing her groans. The sounds his hand makes against her are slick, satisfying in the most primal way as she grinds into his ministrations and her legs start to shake.
Lucien’s free hand trails up her back, drawing a gentle line to the nape of her neck. In one swift move, he take a fistful of her bronze-gold hair, fingers winding in at the roots, and he pulls—her head is forced back, breaking their kiss and tilting her chin to expose a column of beautiful pale throat to him as Elain gives a sharp cry. The sound sinks into his bones, affects him like a caress, and he shudders as he feels the echo of it down the bond— the surprise and sudden, white-hot pain; the pleasure it becomes.
Breathing heavily, but with a satisfied smile he can’t suppress, he lowers his mouth to her ear. “Was it like this?”
“Yes,” She moans, hips canting. “Just like this, Lucien, fuck.” Her body is suspended, trembling, between his hands, and he kisses her mouth, her cheeks, down her neck, her collarbone, letting the fistful of hair go slack as he alternates between teasing her clit and plunging his fingers inside her, relishing, cataloguing every sound he pulls from her.
“Elain,” He groans into her neck, “Elain, you’re so beautiful,” She says something that might be his name in response, a broken collection of syllables around the desperate noises timed to his touches. “Are you going to come for me?” He asks, nuzzling the spot below her ear, and he can feel her nod feverishly.
“Yes, yes,” She whimpers, high-pitched, almost begging. “Fuck, Lucien—“
“Come for me then, dove.” He murmurs, increasing the pressure of his fingers just slightly and at the same time, giving another fierce pull on her hair.
She falls apart with a strangled cry, undulating shamelessly on his hand, hers clutching at the thin fabric of his shirt for support. Lucien drinks in the sight, the feel of her, and it’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen; he slowly releases the grip on her hair, smoothing it out of her flushed face as he strokes her through her orgasm. “Elain,” He murmurs again, reverently, praise and prayer and disbelief: that this stunning, gentle, kind creature is in his bed, in his arms, letting him do this to her. He never wants to stop; if he could spend the rest of immortality just making Elain come, he would.
“Lucien,” she says weakly, heavy-lidded as he withdraws his hand at last. He kisses her softly, soothingly, as he wraps an arm around her back and lowers her to lie on the bed. She looks up at him, dazed, as though not quite sure what has just passed. And then, just as his heart seizes with worry, her face breaks into a smile, and she giggles at him, nose crinkling in that way he loves.
He thinks that surely, after so long, he ought to be used to the strange effects of the nascent bond they share, but it knocks the air from his lungs now, the sheer primal satisfaction that rushes through him at his mate’s obvious happiness. At the fact that he is the cause of his mate’s happiness. As she draws him into a deep kiss, fingers tangling in his long red hair, it feels like flying, and he grins stupidly into her mouth. He breaks it eventually to return to her neck, lips tracing the spot her pulse flutters.
“I think maybe I’m still dreaming,” Elain says with a breathless laugh, half-embarrassed, and Lucien smiles into her skin. His fingers run up and down her thigh almost teasingly; he does not want to stop touching her.
“Is it a good dream?” He tilts his head just slightly until his breath catches the shell of her ear, and she shivers.
“It’s a very good dream,” she murmurs, as his fingers trace slowly up her thigh, across her hips, her stomach, her ribcage, and stop, just brushing the underside of her breast.
Lucien knows he should leave well enough alone, should let her sleep, should take this one step at a time—and cauldron knows they have already taken several tonight—but her smiles settle into his blood like a drug, emboldening him, making him greedy.
Slowly, he brings his fingers up, up, to trace up the swell of the breast and across the nipple so lightly that she arches into it seeking contact, making the tiniest sound. He repeats it on the other side, and Elain is looking at him with parted lips and dark eyes, and Lucien feels for what must be the thousandth time, but no less deeply for it, the extent to which this woman is his undoing. He wants her, every part of her, so badly it is as though he has never had any other purpose in life.
“Elain,” He says, voice grown husky again, “Can I taste you?”
Her eyes widen at that. Lucien feels a shadow of surprise through the bond, and there is something like hesitation with it. Sure enough, a moment passes and she doesn’t respond, and me makes to draw away, to apologize—
“Yes,” she says quickly, holding him in place, close to her, as though instinctively.
He shakes his head, searching her gaze intently. “We don’t have to, Elain. You are never obligated to say yes to me. Do you understand that?”
“No, I—“ She is flustered, but still clinging to him, so Lucien holds still. “I mean yes, I understand that. And I do want you to. I just—“ She falters, face violently red, “No one’s… ever…”
Lucien kisses her on the forehead before she can finish the statement, stifling the instinct that rears in him to tear Elain’s ex-fiance into small pieces. “Then it will be my pleasure to introduce you to it,” He says gently, tucking her mussed hair behind one of her pointed ears, “Tonight, or any other night. Whatever you want.”
“Tonight,” she blurts, embarrassment only a suggestion in it. A bashful afterthought occurs to her. “Please.”
He can’t help but smile at that, at how very Elain that breathy little please is, and he kisses her leisurely, hands sliding up her body and taking her nightgown with it until she raises her arms and he slips it off. Her already half-discarded panties follow. His mate is wholly naked underneath him, and he takes a selfish moment to just admire her, eyes dragging over every curve, something deep in him responding to the sight with a surge of admiration.
“You’re incredible, Elain,” he tells her, unrestrained awe in his voice, before he lowers his head to her chest and takes a nipple in his mouth, and any answer she might have given him is lost to a whimper. He teases and laves with his tongue, his hand playing with the other, and he tries pinching it just a bit—she jerks slightly, with a muffled yelp that inspires him to leave a bite mark on the side of one breast. It gets a moan as much as a cry, and he smiles as he kisses downward, across the flat expanse of Elain’s stomach, trailing fingers up her thigh at the same time. He kisses her hip bone, and stops to look up—she is watching him raptly, face flushed.
“You can tell me to stop at any moment, for any reason,” he says softly, the hand on her thigh stilling.
She nods, and he resumes his path—down to one inner thigh, then across to the other, getting close enough that his breath ghosts the most sensitive part of her, but never touching it as he presses chaste kisses all around it. He can feel her shifting with frustration as he holds her thighs in place, stroking them.
“Lucien…” she whimpers finally, trying to tilt her hips towards his mouth.
“Do you recall what they say about patience?” He asks, nose brushing the inside of her thigh teasingly. He can see her slickness glistening on her folds, and everything in him is desperate to taste it.
“The cauldron rewards those who wai—ah!” Her hips jerk as he interrupts her with a wide, slow lick up the entire length of her slit. The taste makes him give a sound of his own: she is everything, the honeysuckle salt-sweet musk of her on his tongue like ambrosia.
The very tip of his tongue goes to circle and lick her clit mercilessly, interspersing it with broad, flat strokes, and Elain’s moans devolve into a litany of his name, hips convulsing beyond her control. Lucien slides a hand up to her abdomen, holding her in place, and when his tongue dips to her entrance, lightly, teasingly, her hands fly to his head, fingers winding in his long red hair. He smiles into her—it makes her twitch—and turns his head slightly back to her thigh, teasing a spot there with his lips. Elain makes a whimper of protest that turns to a sharp cry as at the same moment, he bites down hard on her thigh and slips two fingers into her, pumping in and out slowly.
“Fuck, Lucien,” she stammers, returning his thrusts with her own.
He soothes the red bite mark with kisses. “Do you like that, dove?”
“Yes, yes, I like this, Lucien, yes.” She is almost babbling, eyes screwed shut as though in pain, hands gripping at his hair, at the bedsheets.
He returns to her clit, motions stronger and sloppier as his fingers and tongue work her. Her legs are trembling and her breath is shallow as her runs his lips back and forth over her, and hooks the fingers inside her just slightly as he fucks her with them. Elain swears and writhes against him, and he increases the pressure, the pace—
“Lucien,” it’s a broken plea, “Lucien, I—I’m—“
His mouth is occupied, so he tries to send warmth, approval, comfort, love through the bond, and he doesn’t know if it’s received, but he sucks on her clit and she shatters around him, crying his name again and again. He strokes her, feeling her clench, hot and wet, around his fingers, his other hand still holding her hips from moving too far off the bed. The aftershocks begin to subside and her cries give way to breathy shudders, Lucien’s tongue guiding her through it.
He has half a mind to keep going, to see how many times he can make her come in one night, but she tugs on his hair until she has summoned him back up and kissed him senseless, gasping through the taste of her on his lips. His arms go around her and he rests his head on her chest with a groan, her own thin arms holding him there. For several moments, they don’t speak, Lucien listening intently to the frantic beat of Elain’s heart. Eventually, he shifts them, lying on his side and nestling her back against him, pulling a sheet over them both. He realizes only belatedly that in this position she can feel him against her—still hard—when she twists to face him, placing a hand on his chest.
“Oh, Lucien, I’m sorry,” she’s embarrassed again. “I didn’t even think—do you want me to—?” She reaches to touch him but shakes his head as he intercepts her hand, entwining his fingers with hers.
“We have all the time in the world for that later,” he says gently, smiling as he pulls her in for another kiss. That he gets to touch her is enough, it’s more than enough, it’s everything, but moreover, he doesn’t intend to come for Elain until he’s properly bedding her—and there are too many scars he has yet to show her, too many unspoken questions, too many things not understood between them yet.
“Are you sure?” Elain asks, although she stifles a yawn around it. He laughs.
“Very. You’re exquisite, dove,” he kisses the top of her head, “but I’ve kept you up long enough.”
“If sleep is the trade-off, I never need to sleep again,” She mumbles, tucking her head against his chest contently.
Lucien makes a hm-ing sound, and begins stroking her hair. “That would be a pity. If you never slept, you’d never have interesting dreams about me.”
She smiles sleepily into his skin. “Maybe that would be for the best. I’m sure your ego doesn’t need it.”
He gives a small laugh and kisses her again just because he can, before she slips back into sleep and he follows her, seduced by the blissful dark of silken sheets and her scent mingled with his.
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