Chapter 41: Scene 1
The scent of honey and damp earth was stronger inside the cottage, woven through with the crisp, clean aroma of sun-warmed linen. After the vastness of the observatory, Rowan and Lysander’s dorm felt like a sanctuary, a nest lined with tapestries whose silver threads caught the afternoon light and glimmered with half-seen movement.
Elara perched on the edge of a large, overstuffed armchair, her feet not quite touching the floor. She was trying to concentrate on a textbook open in her lap, but her attention was fractured. Lysander was attempting to make tea. It was not a quiet process.
“Where’s the damn strainer? Is this it? This looks like a tiny, malicious birdcage.” Clatter. “Rowan, did you use my last chamomile for that hex-bag thing? You said you wouldn’t!”
“I didn’t,” Rowan said, not looking up from the worn leather grimoire he was annotating. He was sprawled on a rug by the perpetually crackling hearth, the shadows in the room leaning gently toward him as if listening. “You ate it. You said it looked like ‘sunshine flakes’ and sprinkled it on your toast.”
Lysander paused, a jar of loose leaves in hand. “Oh. Right. That was a bad Tuesday.” He turned his lavender eyes to Elara. “Regular black tea okay, moonbeam? It’s basically just caffeinated dirt. Very robust.”
“Black tea is perfect,” Elara said immediately, her voice soft. It was. She liked black tea. But even if she hadn’t, she would have said the same thing.
The moment the words left her mouth, she felt Rowan’s gaze lift from his book. It was a physical weight. She kept her eyes fixed on a tapestry depicting a forest of crystal trees.
“See? Easy,” Lysander said, triumphant, dumping leaves into the small pot. Steam began to whistle. “You’re the easiest person to please, Elara. It’s kinda freaky. Do you have, like, a secret hate for porcelain? A deep-seated vendetta against spoons? Unleash it. We can handle it.”
He was joking, his tone light and dancing. But it landed in the pit of her stomach like a cold stone. She gave a small, tight smile, a flawless imitation of amusement. “No vendettas. Spoils are… fine. Spoons are fine.”
Lysander’s brows knitted together briefly as he poured the boiling water. “Spoons are fine,” he repeated, a flicker of something uncharacteristically serious crossing his face. It was gone in a second, replaced by his usual grin as he sloshed tea into three mismatched mugs. “Well, that’s a glowing endorsement for cutlery everywhere.”
He brought her mug over, setting it on the low table beside her. “Careful, it’s hotter than a dragon’s sin.” He flopped onto the rug next to Rowan, his back against his boyfriend’s side. Rowan’s arm came up automatically, resting around Lysander’s shoulders, his fingers absently tracing patterns on his arm.
The casual intimacy of it was a beautiful, painful thing to watch. It was so effortless. A language spoken in touches and shared space. Elara wrapped her hands around her mug, letting the heat sear her palms. She focused on that sensation, anchoring herself.
A comfortable silence settled, broken only by the crackle of the fire and the turning of Rowan’s page. Then Lysander, who could never abide silence for long, sighed. “Okay, real talk. Grimsby’s midterm project. Partners or solo? What’s the move?”
“Solo,” Rowan said without hesitation. “Fewer variables for you to accidentally ignite.”
“Partners,” Lysander countered, nudging him. “More fun. Divide the labor. Share the pain.” He looked over at Elara. “What do you think? Partner up, misery loves company?”
Her mind raced. Rowan preferred solo. Lysander wanted partners. To agree with Rowan would be to disagree with Lysander, to potentially disappoint him. To agree with Lysander would be to contradict Rowan’s practical suggestion. A familiar, icy panic began to creep up her spine. The correct answer was the one that caused no conflict, that kept them both happy with her.
“Whichever you think is best,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “I’m happy to do either. Really.”
The room went still.
Rowan closed his grimoire with a soft, definitive thud. He looked at her, his dark eyes unreadable. “Elara.”
That one word, her name, spoken in that calm, low tone, was worse than shouting. It felt like a verdict.
“You don’t have an opinion on a major project that will dictate your workload for the next three weeks?” Rowan asked, his voice even.
“I… I trust your judgment.” She could hear the pleading in her own voice. Please, just accept this. Don’t make me choose.
“That’s not what I asked.”
Lysander sat up, turning to look at her fully. The cheerful mask was gone, replaced by a quiet, focused attention. “Hey. No wrong answers here. I swear. Do you want to work alone or with someone?”
She felt cornered. The walls of the cozy cottage seemed to press in. Their expectations were a labyrinth, and she was lost. “I just… I want to do what you two are doing. So we can… be together.” It was a half-truth, twisted from a real desire.
“So if we decided to work alone, you’d want to work alone,” Rowan stated.
“Yes.”
“And if we partnered, you’d want to partner.”
“Yes.”
“Even if, secretly, you desperately wanted the opposite?” Lysander’s question was soft, but it pierced through her like a needle.
The mug was burning her hands. She couldn’t feel it. “My wanting doesn’t matter,” she blurted out, the words tumbling free before she could cage them. “It doesn’t. As long as you let me stay. As long as you keep me.”
The silence that followed was absolute, suffocating. The fire popped.
Lysander just stared at her, his lips slightly parted. The vibrant light in his lavender eyes dimmed, clouded by a dawning, heartbreaking understanding. His jaw went slack, not in comic surprise, but in a kind of grief. He looked at her as if she’d just shown him a hidden, festering wound.
“Elara,” he breathed, the word full of pain.
Rowan moved. In one fluid motion, he untangled himself from Lysander and stood, crossing the space between them. He didn’t touch her. He simply went down on one knee before her chair, putting himself at her eye level. His presence was immense, but not threatening. It was an anchor.
“Look at me,” he said, his voice a low rumble.
She forced her eyes up from her lap, meeting his dark gaze. It was steady, relentless in its compassion.
“Your wants are the only thing about you that matters to us,” he said, each word deliberate. “Not your obedience. Not your agreement. Your desires. Your no. Your I hate fruit tarts and lattice floors. That is the price of admission here. You have to be here.” He tapped a finger gently against her chest, over her heart. “All of you. Especially the parts that think they’re too much, or too difficult, or too broken to be wanted.”
Lysander found his voice, but it was rough, stripped of its usual brightness. “You think we’d ditch you because you wanted to study alone? Or because you liked a different kind of tea? What the fuck kind of monsters do you think we are?”
It wasn’t anger. It was devastation. He was devastated that she believed that of them.
The dam inside her cracked. “My last family did,” she whispered, the confession slicing her throat raw. “If I wanted the wrong thing. If I said the wrong thing. If my wings… if I was too much. They’d lock me in the dark. They’d tell me I was lucky to be kept at all.” A hot tear escaped, tracing a path down her cheek. She didn’t wipe it away. “So please. Just tell me what to want. And I’ll want it. And then you’ll keep me. It’s simple. It’s easy. I can be so easy.”
Rowan’s face hardened, a flash of something dangerously cold moving in his eyes. Not at her. At the ghosts she’d just given shape to. He leaned forward, resting his forehead gently against her knees, a posture of strange fealty. “Never again,” he vowed into the fabric of her dress, his voice thick.
Lysander was there too, sliding off the rug to kneel beside Rowan. He didn’t try to hug her; he seemed afraid his touch might shatter her completely. Instead, he reached out and carefully, so carefully, took the scalding mug from her numb hands and set it aside. He then placed his own hands, palms up, on his knees. An offering.
“Here’s what I want,” Lysander said, his eyes swimming. “I want to know what tea you actually like. I want to hear you tell Rowan his brooding is aesthetically overrated. I want you to get fucking annoyed with me when I’m talking too much and tell me to shut up. I want to see you get excited about a project you chose for yourself. I want your hard. I want your complicated.” A tear dripped off his chin. “That’s what I want to keep. The real you. Not some… reflection.”
Elara stared at their bowed heads, at Lysander’s offered hands. The ache in her bound wings was a dull throb in time with her heartbeat. For years, her survival had been a sculpture of subtraction—carving away wants, opinions, needs, until only a smooth, inoffensive shape remained.
They were asking her to rebuild from the rubble she’d buried.
She lifted a trembling hand. Hesitated. Then, she placed it in Lysander’s. His fingers closed around hers, warm and solid.
“I,” she started, her voice breaking. She swallowed. “I want to work… with a partner. I think it would be less lonely. And I’m… I’m scared I’ll do it wrong alone.”
Lysander squeezed his eyes shut, a new tear escaping. He brought her knuckles to his lips, pressing a fervent kiss there. “Okay,” he whispered. “Okay. Thank you.”
Rowan lifted his head. The cold rage was gone, replaced by a profound tenderness. He reached up and, with a thumb so gentle it made her breath catch, wiped the tear from her cheek.
“Then we partner,” he said, as if it were the simplest edict in the world. “All three of us. We’ll tell Grimsby it’s non-negotiable.”
The illusion of the simple, easy girl fractured a little more. And for the first time, watching the raw, loving honesty on their faces, Elara wondered if what lay beneath the plaster might not be a monster, after all.
It might just be a person, waiting to be seen.