Contrasts
Azris Week - Day One: Contrasts
~~~ Hello hello! I found the Azris ship and the community this year and have absolutely been consumed by it. I love this idea, I love these two characters, and I love that there's so much potential between them and for them to feed and inspire such a wonderful community. I've never participated in the acotar fandom apart from this, and I'm so excited! Thank you so much to @azrisweek for putting together this event, I have had so much fun letting my brain run free like a dog off a leash with these prompts :D ~~~
Azriel calls him tatlım, and Eris doesn’t know what it means.
It’s a secret, he supposes he can accept it—relate to it. Nooks and hidden corners itch and snarl with the weight of his own. An enchanted drawer he keeps in the washroom holds his greatest wonder and his greatest shame.
The journal weighs heavy in Eris’s mind. He traces back the parchment pages with intangible fingers during lulls in his father’s council meetings. The drone of bees, lazy and fat in the afternoon sun becomes the hushed whisper of a canyon gale through dried grass. The lines he inks, stroke by stroke, Azriel matches in full, thrumming strides. Words next to his are clean, unbroken, while Azriel’s remain thick, written in charcoal with smudges at the corners from where his fist has run over the line.
When it’s dark, a time when even shadows cannot creep and loom larger, Eris presses his own fingertips to those words. The smears of charcoal because Azriel had told him early on in their budding friendship when they were young that he can’t use quills.
“They're too thin, my hands shake too much.” A smaller version of Azriel speaks the memory into his mind. The whorls and pockmarks on his hands hidden between the gap of his thighs.
Eris had taken it as a challenge—and now he revels in it. Azriel is messy with his charcoal pencil, too free with his mistakes and smudges and it leaves Eris half a country away and entirely breathless.
‘Tell me what bothers you, tatlım.’ Azriel had written him earlier, the familiar scrawl of his heavy hand appearing stroke by stroke in the filled pages of Eris’s enchanted journal.
Two were made, Eris gave one away. He could not bring himself to regret it even if his life were on the line.
‘Tatlım?’ Eris had asked, his letters looped and coiled together in the way they get when he rushes, when he needs answers.
There was no sound save for Eris’s own steady pulse, the whistle of air through his nose as he waited for a response. And yet he could’ve swore he heard Azriel’s laugh, the breathy one, brush against the point of his ear.
The words appear in the space between one breath and the next: ‘Maybe one day, gach’lilit, I will tell you. For now, stop avoiding my prying.’
Eris places a hand on the rise of his chest. Holding in something that seems to be rising from his stomach to his throat and lands gently on his tongue like the orange and black patterned butterflies in the garden.
‘Tell me now,’ he begs, ‘and I will tell you whatever you wish, Azriel.’
‘Come back to visit me, sweetheart. That’s all I ask.’
It had formed a pause in their effortless back and forth. Eris wanted to—Azriel knew that. No, the issue wasn’t in Azriel’s plea, he knew just how much Eris longed for the little village in the Illyrian steppes. The stable in the field and the small, knobby kneed, black lamb that follows Azriel around like ducklings in the Forest House pond in spring. He misses the creeping, ruby red moss and the yellow and sage aspens that crop up from out of the golden plains like the jagged teeth of a cliff.
Most of all, most desperately of all, he misses Azriel. There is not one inch of his soul that doesn’t.
The inked tip of his quill hangs over the page, a knife poised for the final push. Through skin, muscle, bone, to the heart of everything—the rot that waits, festering under the floorboards of his adamant desire to run. It is one thing; it is also a collection of things Eris has stored like the most gruesome of trinkets, the most harrowing of trophies.
Because Azriel calls him sweetheart. He writes in his tongue letters of longing and punctuates them with words like tatlım, and gach’lilit. As much as Eris wants to stitch those given titles to his chest, he already has one.
Eris Vanserra. Heir of Fire. Son of Autumn.
Sweetheart. Tatlım. Gach’lilit.
He cannot have both. The heir who wears the crown, who feels it’s golden spiked thorns pierce the thin skin of his head knows this. Eris Vanserra was not born with room on his chest for titles other than this: his father’s son.
When his quill meets the page, a heaviness in his hand that wasn’t previously there, he knows Azriel already knows what he will write.
‘Soon,’ he lies, ‘when the festival of the summer sun comes, I’ll visit.' Eris Vanserra cannot flaunt about the wilds of the Night Court without purpose or reason. Even less if the hint of the reason is his desire to see an Illyrian male—but he can set out on inter-court business to strengthen alliances, break down information, and gather intel. Eris Vanserra cannot winnow straight from the quilts of his bed into the hay-strewn floor of Azriel’s stable.
No matter how much he wants to.
His chest pinches, a sharp point digging into the sensitive skin between his ribs when Azriel takes a minute longer to reply. The page remaining horribly empty with their spare words, their delicate dance.
‘Then I will just have to hold onto these words a little longer, besheirt. I wish for you to hear them in person, for they are as sacred to me as you are.’
Something cracks, folds then splinters and out pours a smile like evening sunlight through the painted colors of autumn leaves in the canopy. The tension building in his shoulders leaks down and pools around his feet, an unwanted puddle he completely forgets about Eris may be an heir, a son of autumn, and child of a loveless, forced marriage; but he is also sacred. Something holy and divine by only the rights of Azriel, and Azriel alone.
Eris has his titles. The stitched corners of his heart taken up piece by piece, but he will forever play the game of keeping himself in between the two if it will let him keep Azriel.
He has his own titles to give him.
Besheirt - ‘Notion of a soul mate, but mostly means Intended in terms of spouse’
aH. Alright okay cool I'm so normal about them. This is a short little thing, and it doesn't follow canon lore lol sorry about that. I really loved the idea of contrasts because for me it's what first drew me to this pairing. At first it seemed like there were too many contrasts for them to even be compatible, and then through softening my perspective of both of these characters and their flaws (and no small amount of delusion in which we merely squint from afar at SJMs portrayal of these characters) I found that maybe these contrasts actually enhance their chemistry. what crazy imagine that.
