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| Details |
| Author: | Athena |
| Summary: | Roper attempts to sort out his feelings for Syarra, which he wants to be one thing, but might be something else. 3k-ish words. |
| Rating: | M for Mature 17+ |
The bed was in the cage before he got there, that was the only reason it was still there. He could have removed it when he finally took the manacles out, but for some reason it felt wrong, as though by removing the bed he would make the room more of a cage and less of a –
”You've nearly made it a home.”
Roper shoved the memory back under the ice. What the fuck was wrong with him. What was he even fucking doing? He should just move the fucking thing out. This wasn’t a bedroom. It was an office, if it was fucking anything at all.
So why was he wondering if he should move it again, if he should push the chairs far away from it, perch himself on it like it was a bench, and see what she did with that.
Roper sighed and leaned back onto the chair, feeling the pleasant familiar sense of engaging the balance of it as he tipped it off the floor. The coin felt good rolling over his fingers, his fucked up fingers with their fucked up fingernail beds.
His hands over hers and it feels good – he can feel the pain under her skin and there’s that wicked temptation to press down into it, to inhale the dark light of her, that bonfire at midnight that has lingered on the edges of the dark shadows in his mind since Corin’s Crossing, since knowing – but he knows he isn’t going to hurt her, it isn’t like with Mistake where the Monster is the one craving it. This is something in him and he controls himself. And he looks at them together, her fingers pale and pretty, and it hits him all at once what this looks like: the beauty and the fucking tragedy. The wave of hate hits him somewhere in his mind, and he knows he needs to pull away. He needs to stop touching her, stop testing this, and instead all he can do is reach out and give in to the voice screaming at him to know what it feels like, to not have it happen again where he dies just fucking wondering what it would be like, let him touch her hair with his hand.
Her hair was so soft. Roper stared down at his palm like it betrayed him, as if he wasn’t the one who decided to do it. Who knows what she got from it, with those eyes watching him like she’s looking through him, asking questions in her gaze that she doesn’t voice, doesn’t give away. He didn’t want to see it, didn’t want to look for that flash of something on her face after the surprise lifted, before she would go back to that impassive expression she does as if he doesn’t already know to watch the rest that she doesn’t control as well, her hands giving her away when her face shows nothing at all.
Like him.
Syarra wasn’t anything like Colson. Not really. What he wouldn’t give to see them both in that room together, though, each of them looking at an impassive wall giving nothing away, born poker players who would be more dangerous if not for their strange commitment to honesty. That flash again, of something that Roper hated admitting was jealousy, and it was mixed up, jumbled because he wasn’t jealous about Colson, no. The thought that Syarra would meet with Colson and be caught by that perfection, the sheer beauty of him, remembering that not everyone looked like a Death Knight, with something to come back and compare to Roper’s ruined face, the darker, deader corpse, that was what bothered him. And that he didn’t want to examine at all, but he had to because he was being fucking stupid.
Was it just the leftover remnants of the body? He hadn’t felt the urge to fuck since he woke up. Nothing at all. The thought of wanting something arose from time to time, but no matter how much he looked at people, anyone, anything, there was no reaction from the body, no sense of desire at all, of wanting to fuck them. It was only the dark desire to hurt them, to drink that down, chew them up and crush them into his veins to take away the pain for the pleasure of it all. The body was dead.
So, why the fuck did he feel something when she took off the cloak, in that slip of a dress, dark with those bright silver threads, pinpricks of light in a sea of darkness, a star at the edge of twilight. He had said it as Tibault, so she wouldn’t see the truth in the lie, how something in him wanted to do something, reaching for her with something that Roper would call desire except he couldn’t fucking feel it in a way that made sense. His heart wasn’t racing, his blood wasn’t hot in his veins, his breath didn’t catch, but he’d felt that urge to stand up and plunge his hands into her hair just to feel it, to stand closer to her and look at her without the armor, something she wore for him this, that no one else in Acherus got to see. It was so fucking enticing, and that cold, hard wind howled at him that she could be doing it on purpose, knowing what to say, what to mirror, tell him what he wants to hear –
”You look like Roper. And this Roper is the one that matters to me, not any of the people you might have been before.”
He couldn’t hear a lie in it. Nothing.
But she was a paladin before, her words chosen so carefully. He matters, not that she wants him, not that she cares, only that he is important. He knew that already though. He made himself valuable.
"You're not the only one who's fucking dangerous. If you're compromised, she gets what she wants, and she's insincere…you're not in it alone.”
No lies in the words. Not alone. A partner, one he has made it clear he will allow to use him as she wants as they pursue their goal. She didn’t want him dead, Roper knew that, and had concrete proof.
Syarra lets out a sigh, an unusual mixture of relief and disappointment, as Roper's pain fades.
That sense of wondering if she would stop, and hearing the mix that she wanted to stop…and that she didn’t. Something in him hadn’t felt fear that she wouldn’t, that she was enjoying it. He didn’t look at that one too closely at all.
"There you are," she says, a note of relief in her shaking voice.
Relief. He heard it. That he came back to himself, that he wasn’t gone forever. Yet it had been ambiguous. What had she feared losing? The tactician? Or the man?
Roper inhaled and exhaled just to feel the breath move in his lungs, staring at the coin on his hand, feeling the urge to flip it and allowing it, flicking it upwards to catch it. Heads. Flick. Heads. Flick. Heads.
He cared about her. He knew that. There was something incredibly appealing about her – everything about her. Even now, that he didn’t know where he stood, couldn’t tell how well she was playing this game with him, how carefully she was letting him hear what she wanted him to hear in those selectively chosen words. That part of her that even when she was alive saw the calculations, and knew how to make them.
“But I had other interests. Only glitter and glitz enough to not draw attention by the lack of it.”
Fuck, but it was hot, thinking of her with those serious eyes, weighing it in front of her vanity, picking out the right amount, deliberately shifting the public to see what she wanted them to see. A paladin even before she fucked with the naaru for those powers, finding a way to manipulate with a pure hand, living in technicalities and vagaries, seeing the nets and webs she wanted to traverse and doing it, weighing the costs and judging them accordingly.
Flick. Heads.
She could keep up with him, asking the right questions, ignoring the useless ones.
“I need you to hold on for that, and then for us to get out of Acherus.”
The relief he’d felt, that he’d chosen right, that he wasn’t going to waste his breath trying to lead her where he needed her to go. Not a puppet, Syarra. A born fucking leader, and that someone hadn’t seen it infuriated him. What kind of fucking idiots were in charge of the Sin’dorei military, that she hadn’t been leading that squad out in the Plaguelands. Good that she hadn’t been.
And that was an ugly thought – that strange coldness in his mind to think of what if she had been leading. Because if it had been a success? She wouldn’t be here with him. She would be another fucking paladin looking at the corpse, her hands bright with the Light, ready to destroy him for daring to exist as the monster he was. And only something so dark, so disgusting, would think that, would wish this existence on anyone. That wasn’t even the fucking Monster inside him, that was just Roper, cruel and selfish, another type of monster now that he didn’t want to be alone in the shadows of his fucking hell of existence.
Roper stood up, crossing the room to the bed, staring down at it, wondering if he should just burn it. Take a candle to it, and remove it entirely. Remove the temptation of what it could be.
Syarra steps over as if to join Roper in his corner, but then smoothly shifts to sit in front of him, angled so she can see both him and the entrance. She rests on her heels, posture upright, ready to stand if needed.
Would she choose to sit further away in a chair, to avoid being closer, if he moved them there? Would she sit beside him, risking the connotations of what it might mean to meet him here? Would she move the chairs, alter his layout, or refuse to play the game entirely, sitting on the floor to avoid saying what he was trying to get her to say? Every time, altering the game, adding the pieces and moving them around, seeing what she does with it, learning another part of her. Testing everything, watching her watch him, to get more from her.
Roper turned his hands inward, rotating the wrists to hide his scars, palming the coin.
“I can see that, juggling so many identities with distinguishing marks that exist between all of them.”
He couldn’t even fucking remember the people, and yet he knew, it was there, layers of remembered ways to explain to people why he couldn’t just “accept” his hands, why they weren’t some cute metaphor for fucking self-love and acceptance. They were distinguishing marks. They were something that made him go from a man with dark hair and dark eyes to a man with dark hair, dark eyes, and really fucked up, scarred hands. No need to explain it. She understood, without that pity he hated.
No matter how horrifying he became, she was right there with him, reveling in what he did as she matched it with him, and when he tucked it back away, she did as well, perfectly in step together.
"Have you ever flayed anyone before? I haven't, but I've seen… I feel like the idea should bother me, but it sounds fun."
"Yes. If you do it in pieces, like you're skinning a rabbit, you can make it last long enough before they die. Start on the back. It can take more punishment. Shallow…Slow cuts. Sharp knife. Let the air hit the wound."
"Poor little rabbit."
Dancing with her to lead her where he wanted her to be was exciting, an intrigue of navigating a partner who watched him so closely that he had to be so very careful, so exacting. She hadn’t caught him slipping past her defenses a few times, and it had been a dark, twisted sort of thrill wondering how long he could keep it balanced, keeping the lies out of Himself while avoiding those guards of her mind.
"I told you what mattered. Whatever she told you, she wouldn't have told it right."
The rush of it through his mind, that he’d caught her somehow, in this one place she hadn’t thought to conceal. The almost intoxication of it, waiting for her to step into his hands, as he walked that tightrope to not give away that he was the only one who didn’t know who the fuck they were talking about, and to wait it out long enough to let that final piece drop – the name of the one who killed the Other Syarra. Enaliya. Fucking finally.
The rage had been a surprise. The Other Syarra had nothing to do with him. But his this Syarra wanted to hurt Enaliya, wanted something more than death for her vengeance, and Roper wanted it for her. And he had almost fucked it up for her, almost led the others to what belonged to her and now it was his problem to solve. He would fix it. No one was ever fucking taking something from her again that he could stop.
It was a warning though, of what he risked, playing this game with her. That what she chose to keep from him she did for a fucking reason, even if he couldn’t stop prying at it, wanting to know. Gods, but it was incredible how often he had no choice at all but to meet her at the gate between what he wanted to know and what she wanted to tell him, bargaining with pieces of himself for hers, because he knew he wouldn’t be able to make it past that fortress of her without getting caught.
It was the same as Mistake, wasn’t it? Mistake had that same intrigue, that sense of enjoying dancing with something dangerous, of watching her watch him and look into the layers to play a deeper game, to have her sneak the pieces out of his hands to pull them into a puzzle and flip it to him. Roper knew he liked it, the back and forth of playing with someone who knew the same game. It was the entertainment of something half-remembered, a life of intrigue and subtlety, of skills that would have once placed him among the elite, and that were now fucking useless most of the time among the Knights who needed more than someone who could forge documents and trace maps within seconds.
Except that with Mistake, he wasn’t wondering at how soft her hair would feel in his hands, wasn’t caught in something in his head seeing her in her pretty clothes. When Mistake took his hand, or touched him, it was that same odd curiosity of wondering if it was a remnant of before – had he let her touch him like that in the past? Touch him with a lover’s hand, even though she said they hadn’t been.
Mistake was warm, her skin filled with life that reached out to him, that made it fun again, and something in him craved that, he knew. There was that part of him that wasn’t the Monster that wanted to feel it, wanted that warmth, that light, wanted to dig in deeper and inhale that sunwarmed library in the darkest corners where no one would see him, where someone loved him and wanted him, laughing in the shadows with her. But the fucking Monster wanted the pain under it, and touching her tempted It every time, the voice in his head screaming not her against a building dark, howling wind saying take it.
So, no, it wasn’t the same, and he could admit that in his own fucking head. Something in him wanted something else from Syarra, and he didn’t know what it fucking was. And he kept pushing it, kept placing the pieces around it to form the shape of it, and then being a fucking coward with doing anything that might truly fill in the center.
Her hand coming up to smooth the collar of his suit, no hesitation in it, as though she’s following a simple desire to do something and doing it, touching the corpse as though it doesn’t matter at all what he is, and there’s something hot in his mind, a flash of something he can’t catch long enough to identify before the ice douses it when she drops her hand as she seems to realize what she’s done – maybe some echo from life of seeing someone dressed this way momentarily making her forget it’s him in front of her, and she turns away from him.
Roper flung the coin into the corner with the armor, the gold coin hitting the saronite in the center, leaving a faint scuff behind, the metal on metal letting out a ringing sound that echoed around the cage, caught by the curtains.
What the fuck was wrong with him. Was this fucking loneliness? Something weak and pathetic in him that wanted someone to care about him, to see him as more than what he was, who could see it all and not turn away because she was right there at his side, that dark blaze alongside him? What did he even fucking want from her.
Friendship. Comradeship. Partnership. That was all it was. That was all it better fucking be.