eclipsed nova (UTM Feysand)

11: Rhysand's POV

A/N: You didn't think it would be that easy, did you?

Anywho, here's a Rhys POV chapter as a treat

I sat with my back against the headboard, watching her fragile chest rise and fall with each pass of breath she drew and exhaled. She slept with her mouth slightly open, the lightest snore I'd ever heard breaking the silence. The corner of my mouth quirked up slightly as I watched her. When she sleeps, she looks so peaceful that it nearly brings me relief just to watch. I'm sure she'd hate that I watched her sleep, but most nights my mind was too loud to sleep. So, she'd become my little pocket of light. A single beam cast into a bottomless pit of emptiness.

Amarantha had summoned me to her bedchamber tonight, but I allowed myself to steal this one quiet moment, staring down at Feyre as she rested. It'd become hard to find things to get me through my days. A man has hope, but only for so long. 50 years to break me, to shatter me irreparably.

Sometimes, when I watch Feyre's eyes as she looks at me, I wonder if she's right. I wonder if there's any goodness left in me at all. Once you pretend to be someone else for so long, at what point does that just become all you are? Sometimes she looks at me like she sees right through me, and it crafts a pit of ache in my stomach.

Showing her this violence, making her party to my sins. At what point is that just who I am now? Who I've morphed into to survive? I think that before she came Under the Mountain, I'd become numb to it all. But now, it's as though I'm watching it all over again through brand new eyes. Every day I watch more of her hope and confidence die. It's like watching a flower wilt and wanting to give it water and space to grow but knowing there's no such thing anymore.

My mother would be quite ashamed to see the man I'd turned into. I'd lost my fight and gone complacent. I committed atrocities daily and damned myself to whatever hell awaited me on the other side of death. She'd cry and mourn all her son could have been had he not been me. Cass and Azriel, she would be proud of at least.

The moment the ache registered in my chest, I forced it away as I always do when my fears dig into my chest with their unforgiving talons. I didn't allow myself to think of home. There was no home, not for me. Not anymore. I had to lock them away, convincing myself they didn't exist to keep myself from tumbling into a pit of grief I'm not sure I'd ever be able to crawl out of.

Feyre stirred slightly in her sleep and my eyes snapped back to her, shoulders tensing. I looked her over, making sure everything was okay. I rebandaged all of her cuts before she'd gone to bed, but part of me was still on edge. I'd wanted to drag myself over a glass shard parapet in her place when I saw how Amarantha had mutilated her. All for that gargantuan beast who'd dragged her into this nightmare to begin with. She didn't belong here. She held an innocence and sense of life that had long since been broken in the rest of us. She'd barely even lived. He brought her here and abandoned her. He watched her cry and bleed, begging and calling out for him, and still slept at night. Anger welled in my chest, a constantly bubbling fountain of rage building slowly and nearly overflowing these days.

She whined in her sleep, her legs jerking and body curling protectively in on itself. I watched, a line forming between my eyebrows as I warred with myself over whether I should wake her. She grimaced in her sleep, flinching away from something that wasn't there. My heart squeezed in my chest.

"You can't," she whispered. "No, please. Please! No, no, no-" She started shouting, thrashing under the blankets. My heart raced, and my breathing turned shallow. My hands found her shoulders, trying not to think about how small and delicate they felt in my hands.

"Feyre," I said gently, trying to drag her away from whatever was haunting her.

"Don't hurt him! Please, I'm begging you. Please don't hurt him," she sobbed in her sleep. She was so deep in her own head that she wasn't waking up. The sleep potion probably wasn't helping with that. Fuck- why hadn't I anticipated that this might happen?