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| Details |
| Author: | Athena |
| Summary: | Roper receives a warning that he's getting dangerously close to crossing the line from Knight of the Ebon Blade to Spy. 2300-ish words. |
| Rating: | M for Mature 17+ |
Arc: Death Knight PR
Stormwind this time of year made things almost too easy, taking all the challenge out of it all. Dark cloaks, dark gloves, dark shadows around him and no one even looked twice. But that was what a spy did, when he was good at his job – he made sure it was easy. Only in the storybooks did a spy do things the hard way – the convoluted way – because in real life, that was how a spy got caught. You kept things fucking simple. Simple missions, simple parameters, simple methods. And Roper had always been a good spy.
“Roper.”
There was a time in Roper’s life – the living one – where that voice would have evoked a dozen emotions, conflicting, clashing things that would have tangled it all, but fear would have been in there, fear of failure. It was interesting how much clarity there was in death. They said death was the great equalizer, and maybe it was fucking true, because all Roper felt in that moment was a brief surge of irritation that swept off like a puff of smoke in the relatively warm winter wind, as he kept his back to the man behind him, just turning his head to look over his shoulder enough to acknowledge where the man stood.
“Hey.”
Roper could have let the echo back into his voice, but he didn’t. It was getting more difficult these days to keep it out, ever since the wedding or maybe it was since Wrathgate, and he still didn’t know why. The cold went deeper. The force behind the frost was stronger. And his control over his voice took more effort. The memory of life was slipping further and further away, dark dreams that were fading, until what was real was this Roper, the dead one, the man he was now, not the man he had been.
There was a scoff of amusement, as if Roper had said something funny. “It still is you, isn’t it?”
Roper stared into the dark shadows all around them, the tall buildings of gray stone that pressed in on all sides, a carved out alley like a narrow spine, and their voices caught by enough of the soft cloths of the shuttered windows to not echo through.
“You really have to ask that?”
“No.” There was a pause in the silence, a slight movement of a shadow shifting at the corner of Roper’s eye. “That's why I’m here. I understood from previous intelligence that you were not a player any longer.”
The spy shrugged, a lost gesture he couldn’t place, unsure where it came from, a controlled up and down motion of both shoulders. “I’m not.”
“No? Recent activities would certainly suggest otherwise.” The voice hadn’t moved. Another shadow did, so slightly that a blink would have concealed it. They were good, whoever it was. Roper was just better. And he no longer needed to blink. “It’s becoming clear that you certainly remember some things.”
The cold went deeper, the ice in his mind creaking under the stress of a weighted foot as Roper pressed down on those memories, the ones that clawed at him, fingernails digging into the frozen sheet above them, trying to get to him. Roper shook his head, shook off the frost creeping over his skin. “Skills,” he specified. “I remember my skills, which you should well fucking know.”
“Yes. Skills.” That silence again, the silence of someone who knows how to not fidget, not move or shift around. “The sort of skills to put together a very interesting web, wouldn’t you say?”
Now it was Roper’s turn to scoff, as he tongued the tooth that had once been pulled out of his mouth, ripped free and then healed back on, over and over and over until he could handle the pain and remember the story he was supposed to tell, looking right into the face of the man at his back. “If you don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, what I’ve been doing, then either you’re trying to play me right now, or you’ve lost your touch and I should be talking to your successor.”
He didn’t deny his knowledge. Roper hadn’t expected him to. Roper knew a courtesy call when he was in one, had known when Mistake had sat down at that table a year ago and asked him who he was now that it had been that – courtesy, something leftover from before, when Roper’s loyalty had been unwavering and absolute.
“I have begun to wonder exactly that, Roper. You seemed to have moved on, but these days, I wouldn’t call what you are about as the work of a knight of the Ebon Blade.”
Anger surged through him, a cold so intense that it burned. “That’s exactly what it fucking is. That’s all it is, and all it’s going to be.”
“That is how you would describe it then. Because it looks to me like something else. It looks like what you would have done before. Tracing cannons back to the House of Nobles. Writing to another. Putting a tail on a member of Cobalt Company. Running surveillance on another. Those look like the actions of an agent.”
“Yeah, if only there was some sort of pattern of doing all that on behalf of another death knight, or something that could lead to an explanation for why I'd be doing all that," Roper drawled, letting the sarcasm ride his tone so that the echo wouldn't. "And, what, that’s not enough of a death knight for you? You want me to growl menacingly in between muttering curses about Arthas while shaking my swords at a Scourge ghoul?”
“What I want is to know why you are here, Roper. In my city.”
“This is where the fucking threat to us is," Roper hissed out in between his teeth, and caught it back, shoved it under the ice. "This happened under your fucking watch already. Three cultists in the gods damned Cathedral, and allowed to get to one of ours. If you were going to stop it, you would have. Someone’s gotta get it done. You gonna do it? You gonna step out of that shadow and come forward? Fix this before the mob forms up against us all? Don’t make me laugh – I’ll scare a fucking dog or something.”
There were no dogs nearby. There was someone though, someone moving very slightly in the shadows. Breathing. They had no particular feelings about Roper though, no pain, no fear. Roper crushed down the urge to change that, the Hunger’s icy talons slicing along the inside of his head, warring with the ghostly sensation of Sya’s hair sliding over his fingers.
“This is not your game to play, Roper. I’ve been watching you. An empty lock box, so you said to Mist. But all the tools to open a locked box are still in your pocket. You know I don’t tolerate independent agents in my territory.”
The ice floes in his mind slowed. Mistake. She’d stepped out on the ice for Roper, and Roper would not let it break under her feet. He tipped his head back, shrugging one of Mistake’s shrugs, knowing that it didn’t quite fit even as he did it. “I’m not an agent, independent or otherwise.”
“No. But you could be.” It was a threat and a warning all at once, and Roper fought back the continuing rising Hunger from it, the shadow inside him ready to meet a threat with his own. “You can choose.”
“Choose what? I told you, like I’ve been telling you. I’m not an agent. I’m a knight of the Ebon Blade now. That’s all I can be.”
“Perhaps that’s true for some of your compatriots, but I think we’ve seen that for you, that may not be entirely true any longer. For old time’s sake, I’ll give you this: if you want in, Roper, you can come back in, under some restrictions. But if you don’t, then." The shadows went darker around them, a slight shift in one of them. "Get. The. Fuck. Out.”
You can come back in.
If He’d spoken those words to Roper a year ago, there wouldn’t have been even a question, or a hesitation. But, it had been obvious to anyone with half a brain back then that the invitation wouldn’t have ever come up. A year ago, there wouldn’t have been anything he could have done even if he had been willing to beg for a place; there wouldn't have been a way to have an agent like him. A year ago, Roper couldn’t go most places, couldn’t hide what he was, couldn’t pass himself off as anything other than a dead man. The skills he possessed had been utterly useless to a place like SI:7 now that he was trapped inside this gods forsaken corpse.
But now?
It had been a year of building a web of assets, of reestablishing his identity, of pulling from the shadows harder and harder, and here he was, on the cusp of getting their foot enough in the door that a death knight could move in society. And anything, anyone, who could move in society could be a spy, if a specialized one.
Roper was a spy. He would always be a spy.
But he was no longer just a spy. He was a knight of the Ebon Blade. He was someone’s husband. No. Not just someone’s. Sya’s. He belonged to her, and she was his, and a spy didn’t have those things. A spouse was a liability. Leverage. A spy had to let go of everything he was, build himself into other people, had to be able to shift out of his own skin and into someone else’s, someone who didn’t belong to Sya, and whose mission would always come first. A spy had a spymaster. The ultimate fucking authority.
There will never be another above you.
He’d made his vows. He’d made his choice. In a way that had never been true in life, in death, there was someone who Roper would put before the mission, to whom he had willingly given power over him, and she was waiting for him to come back to her, to their mission.
Roper spread his hands in a false show of surrender, fingers splayed, feeling the tickle of his wrists where his spring sheaths would have once been ready to launch his knives into his open hands, and he shook his head.
“Then I guess I’m walking out. But I’ll be around. After all,” he drawled. “The Ebon Blade is an ally of Alliance.” Roper took the first few steps forward, in demonstration of his willingness to walk away, his leather boots moving silently on the winter chilled cobblestones grown colder for his pausing on them.
An exhale, a possible sign of disbelief, of someone who expected a very different answer behind him, closer than Roper had expected, as if He had stepped from one shadow to another, just an arm’s length away. “I see. Then we’re done here. Watch your step, Roper.”
Two could play at that game. He couldn’t walk in the shadows anymore, but Roper could control them. Roper made a sound, a tsk, as he reached out to the shadows and pulled on them, opening the death gate back to Acherus, speaking as he stepped through. “Why would I waste my energy on doing that, when I’ve got you watching it for me?”