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moiraineswife · 7 years

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>> Apocalypse!Au Nessian. (but only if you aren't being overwhelmed with a sea of requests...You're awesome!)

I do indeed have a sea of requests but you may have any flavour of Nessian you want, Nicole, yes you may. Okay. Let me see what I can do...

Apocalypse!AU Nessian: So I’m unoriginal and fall easily into tropes so this is indeed going down the zombie path but...I’m twisting the origins a bit to make it fit canon more. (This got kind of...half headcanony/half drabbley? I would like everyone to know that I have no idea what I’m doing or wtf this is. You are so patient. )

Nesta was right.

When the walls tumbled down and the drums of war beat once more the mortal queens abandoned them. Further twisted by the Cauldron’s influence they took their ships, their wealth, their estates and abandoned their people in Prythian. They argued that it was for the greater good. Better to lose these few than all of their realms. Nesta still cursed their names and swore damnation upon them.

She and Cassian were in the mortal realm together when the world ended.

Nesta had volunteered to liaise with the human realm on behalf of the Night Court and its allies. No. Nesta had demanded to liaise with the human realm. She wouldn’t forget where she had come from, what she had once been, what she had left behind. She would remember them. And she would fight for them.

Cassian went with her. He needed something to do, something to stop him from going out of his mind at the loss of his wings and commanding an aerial force was out of the question. He laid the groundwork of their strategy, discussed tactics with Rhys, helped him appoint the best replacements then went elsewhere to make himself useful. Because he was not going to sit back and let other people fight this war while he did nothing but ‘recover’ from the amputation. He needed purpose. And he had a promise to keep.

Neither of them could know what was happening a world away. The Wall had fallen long ago when Hybern’s troops had invaded and most of Prythian was an active war-zone. Communication was different and the plan that ruined everything was hasty, barely thought out. In an act of desperation words that should have been forgotten centuries ago were whispered in the heartbeats before devastation; two halves were once again made whole; and what she had hoped would be salvation had resulted in the destruction of all things instead.

The world ended and it made the war seem trivial. Boundaries were shattered. Uniforms and standards meant nothing. Hybern, or Prythian, Night Court or Spring Court, or Winter made no difference. In the face of what Feyre Cursemaker, Herald of Death, Princess of Carrion, unleashed upon them all.

All that mattered was whether you were alive or whether you were dead.

Feyre called for help. The dead answered. The dead rose. The dead sought to bring the peace of their own oblivion to the shattered, war-torn living world. She had summoned them but she couldn’t control them, couldn’t return them and the recently lost victims of this war were dragged back to fight again in an army of their own this time.

Cassian and Nesta had gone to the human world to help, to protect, to fulfil promises they had made to themselves and each other - to protect those who could not protect themselves. When the world ended that meant everyone. They tried, tried to organise, tried to help, tried to protect, but it soon became clear that this was beyond their ability to change - not even with Cassian’s burning gold heart or Nesta’s fiery steel will. All they could do was survive.

They began the long fight to return home. To find their families, their homes, their places in this broken world and see what remained of them. They’re stranded, isolated, alone, in a confused part of the world whose people never asked for any of this but are dying in droves for it with no way of contacting those they love and nothing to help them survive what should have been a simple, two day trip which has turned into a nightmare.

All they have is each other. That’s enough.

Humans, Cassian learns as he experiences this among them, are good at surviving. Surviving against all odds. Surviving in the face of things he would expect to destroy them, frail and mortal as they are. Surviving at any cost. He had thought the High Fae brutal and cut-throat. He had thought that, in all his years, in Illyrian war camps, on battlefields where thousands were slaughtered with a whisper of thought and a flicker of magic, through the bloody, tangled years of politics - assassinations, alliances and betrayals that he understood the will to survive, to thrive, to conquer. When the world ends in the mortal realms Cassian realises he knew nothing of it at all and that he and Nesta may well be in the most dangerous place in all of Prythian.

Trust becomes a far rarer and more valuable commodity than gold or jewels ever were and it’s in short supply in this raw, broken new world of theirs. Cassian and Nesta both soon realise that the only people they truly trust are each other, no-one else. Especially themselves.

Cassian teaches Nesta how to survive the way he learned how. (though he does admit she was doing a very good job herself) But wit and cunning and logic only get them so far now - they both sleep a lot better knowing she can correctly hold a knife and duck a punch. He shows her the things that were a mystery to her in the cabin - things that Feyre seemed to find so easy. He shows her how to start fire, how to track game- and other, more sinister things- how to hunt, how to fight, how to kill. The lessons that kept him alive all those years ago in those camps where they abandoned him - a bastard child without a home or a name or a family who gave a damn if he lived or died. he teaches her how to accept the parts of herself that seem so monstrous - because he was told he was filled with killing power but learned how to shape it into shields. She can too.

Nesta teaches Cassian how to survive the way she learned how. She teaches him how to live with himself when he feels like he’s failed everyone he loved - that he’s only destined to do nothing but fail them - as she felt. She teaches him how to survive when everything he had, everything he was, everything that felt real and right and made him him is taken from him - as it was taken from her. She teaches him that there is more to life than a pair of wings - the expectations others place upon you because of what you are. She was only a child when she lost everything, her mother, her life, her future, even herself, but she clawed her way out of that pit and found her purpose, found herself. He can too.

They drag each other kicking and screaming and stumbling through this mess because I am not losing you now, not after everything, don’t you dare die on me. Along the way they teach each other to live again as well - something they’d stopped doing that day in Hybern when he lost his wings and she lost her humanity and they both lost themselves. Ironic, they consider later, that neither of them were reborn until the world ended - that they too were dead and climbed out of their graves along with the others.

They learn how to laugh again, how to find meaning in the small moments, how to cherish the memories that are glazed with the sheen of tears of hysteria that line Nesta eyes, echoing with the boom of Cassian’s laughter. They learn how to feel again, how to open themselves up and hand another their broken hearts. They learn that when despair closes in the kiss of a lover can banish it. They learn that when death threatens the sound of their name upon another’s lips is sometimes all that’s needed to save lives and heal scars.

They learn the other’s taste and feel and scent and what it’s truly like to be joined as one a night when rain batters against the cave they’ve settled in on the border between courts and can no longer resist the song that hums in their blood and whispers mates to their hearts. They had been afraid, so afraid, of what it might be like to forge such an unbreakable bond only to feel it shatter in this fragile, perilous world that they’re slowly starting to call theirs. They learn that night that some things are worth the risk.

They already knew that some things were worth dying for - to protect, to save, to preserve. They learn that some things are worth living for too. That this is worth living for. That they would rather have one moment of this even if it’s snuffed out like a candle before a hurricane the next day than to never know what it is to be mated, to be joined, to belong. That the moment of life they snatch in one another’s arms is worth it all. If death thinks to take them now they’re joined it would be wiser to run.

As mates, as one, they learn how to hope, how to love, how to dream again. They live through death.

In the aftermath, when they look at one another, both knows that if they had been alone they would not have survived. If they had been with any other they would not have survived. But together....Together they made it. Together they survived. Together they lived.

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