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| Details |
| Author: | Athena |
| Summary: | After the Nightmare leaves Alaisa still jumbled up, Roper stops by to see his friend/asset, to see if she's got the right metaphor. 4k~ words. |
| Rating: | M for Mature 17+ |
You know what's great about January in Stormwind? How absolutely normal a person looks walking around in an all black outfit with a hood drawn low over his face, gloves covering his hands, and walking like he's got a place to be and do you really feel like paying that much attention to some random guy, anyway?
Roper probably could have used the front door, sent ahead a calling card, played out the part, during a period of time when Lord Lysander was out. But that wouldn't have been any fun.
Instead, it is in the deeper darkness of the evening — still relatively early, but the winter sun has long since set — when there's a scratching at Alaisa's window, like a cat wanting in. Which would be less strange if she was not on the second floor, the window not accessible to anyone who doesn't feel like risking death-by-trellis. But for the death knight outside her window, eyes glowing faintly in the gloom, it's not like the fall would actually kill him. Again.
A young woman pushes back the curtains and looks out at Roper. She is dressed in a warm burgundy nightgown with a plain brown shawl around her shoulders, her pink house slippers on her feet, and her hair a mess of curls around her face. For a moment she stares at him with a horrible blankness. There is no life or personality to her movements, just a puppet holding a curtain. The resemblance to what Roper saw in the Nightmare is very obvious.
Two entire seconds pass by, and then Mistake breaks into a smile, flicking the latches to unlock the window and pushing it open. "Hey," she says. "Get inside, you're letting all the cold air in."
"That's gonna be true even when I get inside," Roper drawls out, but he slips into the room like a cold shadow. He does, indeed, bring the cold in with him, a chill around his body that lingers. But he flows into place in the room, looking it over as he moves through the space, reaching to touch her things as if confirming that things are in their places.
Mistake shuts the window behind him. "Yeah, I know." She doesn't seem bothered by this.
The snowglobe he gave her is still on display on the vanity. There's a book about the Discs of Norgannon with a bookmark in it on her bed, which she might have been reading when Roper knocked.
Roper lays a hand briefly on the desk, and then turns, flicking his hood off his face. The intensity of the stare he levels at Mistake would be disconcerting even without the cold blue flames of them. There's a little more white in his hair since she last saw him, the blue of his eyes brighter.
The body language he picks up though, to wear, is not his own — he's a mirror of Alaisa's with him, down to small details of her shoulders and the angle of her head, like he's giving it to her to copy from his own work.
"It's still happening," he says. It isn't a question.
"It's still fucking happening," Mistake agrees. She sits down at the window seat, on the half that isn't usually Roper's. "You sent Theris, didn't you? Thanks for that."
"Yeah. I'd have come myself, but it took Syarra. When it first started happening, before we knew not to sleep." The rage in his voice makes the echo rise up in it, the temperature of the room dip a degree or two before he twitches his head and dissipates both. "I went into it, the dream war, for both of you. There were echoes in there, where the Nightmare used sleepers against us to fuck with us, psychologically. It had you, like that — " He blanks out, that strange mannequin like emptiness, and then he picks his Mistake Mirror back up in a beat. "I destroyed them as soon as I fucking saw them." It's almost like a reassurance the way he says it.
"Thanks." Mistake leans forward. "Syarra's better now, I hope? My mother recovered pretty much instantly, so I know not everyone's like me."
Roper makes an ambiguous sort of movement with his head, a touch of a shrug. "I've got her back," he says. He doesn't elaborate, and there's that look in his eyes that he won't. Syarra, if she has any lingering effects from the Nightmare, is still off limits. His eyes are unblinking on her, watching for every nuance. "Theris tell you about the fucking shadows in there, how they knew things?"
Mistake smiles fondly with a bit of a knowing look. Yes, Roper, good job protecting your wife's secrets, Mistake doesn't take it personally.
"No," she says in response to the question. "He didn't say much at all about it, and I haven't quite gotten myself back together enough to ask." She groans, frustrated. "Did the shadows reveal anything they shouldn't have?" she asks. Was there a security breach?
Roper shakes his head. "No, I didn't hear anything, not even a one-off that could be even a little credible." And she knows he was listening, probably paying more attention to what the shadows revealed than the state of the fight at that point. "It was psychological warfare, aimed at the army, looking for weak points, using taunts and fears, not facts. Wasn't trying to reveal anything from the sleepers, really, just get under the army's skin. And it didn't know anything that it wasn't given. No ghosts came at me that I didn't recognize, no shadows that knew things about me that I didn't know already." He moves a hand, sweeping two fingers up and down at Mistake's body. "I didn't know what the fuck yours was about, not until I got out and got your note about this. I didn't think it was meant for me, but it was aimed at someone in there for you, something that was meant to make 'em hesitate or fuck up. If it was for me, it got it out of your head, for something it picked up that you thought would fuck me up."
"My nightmare," Mistake says. "My nightmare was that nothing I had was mine. That I lost everything I got from other people, the voices, the posture, the gestures, the mannerisms, the habits, all of it. And all that was left was just…"
The woman seated at the window seat goes very blank again. It's incredibly creepy. "This. And it remained. When I woke up."
As Mistake, she says, "I've been trying to piece myself back together again, but it's… Nothing really feels right like it used to. I feel like the Nightmare damaged the core and I don't know what it took from me. This," and she gestures at Roper. "This helps, actually. A lot. It's embarrassing."
Roper isn't easily creeped out, and there's no flinch or distaste at the sudden blank doll. Then again, he also married Syarra, who goes blank when she's just in her powered down state.
Roper gives Mistake a mirrored echo of her grin, and the mirrored easier movement of her own idle shifts. "You think I don't know what it's fucking like waking up and having something torn right through your entire core, your identity, leaving you scrambling on the ice trying to claw your way out, gaps where things used to be, and not sure what's fucking missing until you reach for it and fall through again? Come on, Mistake. Fucking embarrassing is when you can't remember shit until someone says something, and then you're standing there suddenly crashing inside your own head trying not to fall apart. This? This is just showing up with your sweater on backwards, bedhead and two different shoes on."
Mistake winces and flashes him a sympathetic grimace. "That's worse, yeah. You had a hell of a time of it, Roper. Does it still happen? Memories getting triggered all of a sudden?"
Roper mirrors the wince, a subtlety in it. "Sometimes. I'm just saying, keep it in perspective. You've got a… what gnomes call it. A glitch. You'll track it down. Things like this always leave a fucking trace. Paper shuffles just a little off, dust trails too clean, the air too warm or cold. You'll catch what it did, if anything." Roper glances away from Mistake to look at her room, as if testing it against his own memory briefly.
"Okay." Mistake runs a hand through her hair. "Okay. I think I'm stable, now, if you wanna just be yourself. Appreciate it."
Roper slides the meter of self closer to his own, but keeps little bits and pieces of Mistake's mirror, as he spreads his hands out in that open gesture of his. "Hey, of the two of us, I can be myself any time I want, easily. Fucked up as it is, shredded up, I still know which parts is the core, even if it's not what it was when I learned it the first time." He tilts his head towards Alaisa, his eyes burning intense on her now. "You could use this to separate it out, see what's really yours, and hold it separate from the mirrors."
"I don't know if there's anything original about me," Mistake says. "Ugh, this is hard to articulate." She stands up and moves to the space directly in between her desk and her vanity table, looking at herself in the array of mirrors - physical mirrors she has set up on both surfaces to give her a good angle of the entire room.
Mistake does the courtesy of looking directly at Roper as she admits, "What if I'm just boring?" Her eyes flick downward, and she forces herself to look back up. "What if I'm a boring person underneath everything I've picked up over the years? That's the fear the Nightmare was preying on."
It is clear that it wasn't easy for her to admit that out loud. The embarrassed blush is impossible for her to hide, even if she were trying to, the one tell she can't cover. She twists her hands together in front of her, more in line with Lady Alaisa admitting something humiliating rather than Mistake. She has just handed her friend a knife to stab her with, the sort of deeply private fear she might have otherwise taken to her grave.
If she wants it taken to the grave, she's definitely talking to the right guy.
It might be oddly reassuring or it might a reminder of the twisted relationship Roper has with feelings that for several seconds while she talks, reveals this information, that there's a sense that he's waiting — you know, for the real thing, the way that the Nightmare took a seed of a fear and made it so much worse. When it's just that — what if I am boring — he inhales, a deep pull of air like he's scenting something faint on the wind, the brightness of his eyes a touch higher, the verification of true fear, a touch of pain in the admitting, and he's startled by it, the tiniest movements around his eyes, a twitch of his shoulders.
When he laughs, it's not the cruel, sharp blade of the knife turned onto Mistake; it's a memory, a remnant, some ghost of a man who called himself Tibault that lurks within the death knight Roper. He's already stepping to her as he laughs, quick movements, reaching out to touch her to hold her by her shoulders and keep looking at herself in the careful positionings of the mirrors, with Roper as a shadow behind her.
Mistake sets a hand on one of Roper's. "I'm supposed to be fun," she says with a wry smile, looking into the mirrors.
"And you are." Roper, nearly of an exact height with Mistake, blends in behind her, the edges of his broader shoulders, his larger arms, creating a dark outline to her paler contrast. "You're thinking of yourself like you're some, what, blank ball of void, and that you've just stuck on mirrors to glitz and glitter, right? You've got it wrong, the wrong metaphor. If you were fucking like that, someone boring, someone deep down just a blank fucking thing, you know what you'd do when you came out and realized you could take someone and put them over you? You'd have found the easiest, most fucking socially expected person you could, the first one or the one that got you through shit. You'd be your mom, your brother, your fucking dad. You'd put it on and call it a day, because you got what you fucking needed, and you'd hide the blank behind it. A boring lump of nothingness that needed to hide its ugliness behind a personality it stole."
There's a sinking temperature around them both, a creeping glitter of frost that spreads across the edges of the mirrors in the room.
"You're not that. The metaphor you are is that you are the mirrored ball. You've got the thousand facets. You're the quicksilver and the mercury, the frame and the capturer, the shadows and the silhouettes. You've got the mind that sits behind the glass, and reaches for more and more, the curiosity and the skill and the need to know and do more, combine it, use it, twist it to your purposes. You've got that kind of ravenous hunger that you can't ever fully satiate, and you can't leave idle." Which might be part of what makes them such good friends. "That's not emptiness, like the ocean isn't fucking empty for being that vast, and it's not a void of nothing filled by 'real' people hiding some dull center. The center is power and it's potential, and it's inherently fucking fascinating."
Mistake closes her eyes as she listens, and it seems like she really is listening and considering what he's saying. A more recognizable smile comes to her face, and there's that confident smirk back, that slightly defiant raising of her chin.
She opens her eyes. "I'm sold," she says. "I'll buy that. Love you too." Mistake grins. Get perceived, friend.
Roper makes a sound not unlike a feral cat that's been suddenly given affection — a tch and fftt combination, as he abruptly lets her go, turning away from her to take what appears to be a little walk around the room that he just needed to suddenly survey, for some reason. Intel, maybe. He's a spy, u kno.
But he doesn't deny it.
"Yeah, well. You still gotta get your house in fucking order," Roper tells the desk he's staring at, running a gloved finger over the edge of the chair paired with it. "You know what good a library is on its own? Fucking none at all. You can't read the books, or you can't find 'em, then you can't use it, and it's just a fucking building full of dead wood wrapped in dead skin waiting to be burned." He looks half over his shoulder, staring Mistake down from the corner of his eye. "So get it done." Aww, it's almost…sweet. In a weird kind of way.
Mistake laughs. "I'll get it done." She sits down at the stool on her vanity, facing in towards Roper. Better check if he's tying strings to her chairs again. "I heard the Morningdew trial went well."
"Not guilty," Roper confirms. "But that's not what matters. It's what we got out of it, and how we got it. Fallon got involved, and legitimized it, and he's still going. Didn't wash his hands when it got messy, and now we're coming out the other side with the Admiralty and the House with a foot in the door that we couldn't have gotten without him. Mourn is probably fucked, personally, but the Ebon Blade benefitted from it." He turns on his heel, leaning back against the desk, as he palms a coin into his left hand, flipping it in the air to catch it with his right, between his forefinger and middle finger. It's an old Stormwind coin, from before the Alliance, that someone ground down an edge on, disturbing the weight of it. It's also from his Winterveil Gift from Ally. "I gave Fallon a favor to call in. We'll see if he does it."
Mistake nods. "Theris looking after us while we were asleep actually worked out well when we woke up. My mother handled it very well, no pitchforks, got my father to agree not to harm him. It's slow progress, but it's more than I had."
Roper's smirk edges across his face, as he walks the coin across his right hand, flicks it hard back into his left hand, plucking it out of the air and changing it with another, a coin that circulated in Theramore when Roper was undercover as Roger Reynolds. "That's what it takes. It's movement at least, and in the right direction. Theris got plans to stick around, or he headed back to Duskwood?"
Mistake reaches behind her on the vanity for a thing to fidget with and ends up picking the snowglobe. She shakes it, flipping it upside-down. "He's gone back. I think he's been trying to fix up Raven Hill a little."
The significance of this is missed on this version of Roper. He doesn't know, and so he shrugs, an echo of mimicry of Theris' own shrug. "There's enough undead and worgen there to keep him sane and buying goodwill from the locals. It's good. When we destroy the Bitch King, we'll need a way to move forward, and prove that we can be more than just an army against the Scourge in Northrend. Theris is doing us all a long term favor, showing how useful we can be."
Mistake watches the little snowflakes swirling around in the snowglobe. "I don't think the buildings are structurally sound. Father saw no point in trying to make repairs with the proximity to the graveyard overrun by unfriendly undead. Theris said he was roommates with a banshee when he first went down to Duskwood. 'Blind Mary', he called her. But now he's gone to Raven Hill." She peers at the rendition of Acherus in the snowglobe. "Do you have any memories of Duskwood?"
Roper considers it, like he's trying to run a search in a database with a lot of faulty card catalog issues. He shakes his head, like he's shaking his own snow globe inside his mind. "I know things about it. Information. Like a dossier of the location." He shrugs again, a quick jerk of his right shoulder. "But not really anything else, not from before I died. A lot of blank spots, some fucking burned, some just…gone. Why?" He tilts his head a little forward. "Something of yours, your family's? Summer house? The trees and graveyard are very aesthetic."
"Yeah," Mistake says. "Something like that. My uncle's family used to live there, back when it was Brightwood. Raven Hill is Lysander land." She sounds nostalgic, but there's no pain there, just a little wistfulness. She reaches up to twist a curl of hair around her finger and then looks at her own hand with surprised recognition. "This comes from my cousin Rue," she says. "She's always playing with her hair. Ally and Mistake and Lace all kept it."
Roper's eyes narrow into sharp slits, the tilt of his head a twitch. "'Lace.'" It isn't really spoken with the cadence of a question, but it probably is one, because Roper doesn't recognize the name, and she can see it in the way she's caught his attention on Unknown Information.
"New," Mistake confirms. "She's not yours. Mistake is yours." She's friendly about it, because this is the first time, but there's a familiar sort of warning there. This is someone else's Exclusive Nickname for her, and it isn't for Roper to use. They have an understanding. He should get it.
Roper gets it. He's also generally opposed to using other people's things, including nicknames. She already knows, if he's how he was, he'll never use it again. He considers Mistake, and he lowers his left hand to rest against the desk, tapping slow beats. "New," he repeats. "Not an identity, a new name." By that he means a facet of the core, rather than an assignment from Him. Another tap. "Sintha?" It's a guess, a leap of consideration of what he knows.
Mistake blushes, which is as good as a yes. She nods, out of courtesy.
Roper's lopsided grin tugs up his face, and he's either happy for her, or happy he got the right answer on the first try. Could be both. "Nice," he says. And then there's something colder that creeps into his expression, a flat look of consideration and possessive jealousy, before he turns again, deliberately hiding his face from her as he rotates his body — too perfectly, the angle just so that the mirrors of the room can't get the angle she'd need to see him.
"I gotta get back. Argents have fucking clawed us out a little spot into Icecrown and we're working with them. A couple of them in particular: Confessor Etone Green and Brother Vond Satterly, priest and paladin, started up an initiative to get Ebons and Argents to stop fucking twitching at each other. Still working well with Briellen Clay. Another, Tabiana Lynds, is the sister of one of that fucking bitch Kaela's squad, Taya, we've been working with her to keep her from getting killed by her death knight sister." He lifts his left hand, pulling on the shadows of the room to him. "And we've got Aze in there with the Argents now, connected to fucking paladin Kitharian Du Lac and some others." It's a little cache of names, connections, information, maybe the spy equivalent of a courtesy gift of a bouquet for visiting.
The death gate that opens is not to Acherus — there's something colder, darker and more unstable to this one, like something wants to drag dark shadow fingers of frozen death out to this side, and Roper's holding it back from doing it.
Mistake grins back, but the expression fades as he looks away. "Thanks for dropping by. It really helped." She looks at the death gate, narrowing her eyes. "That one feels different. You can open them to Northrend now?"
"Not for long, and not well. Probably going to dump me somewhere random in the valley. It's anchored to somewhere around Mograine, and it's fucking finicky as shit," he rasps. "Last time I tried this I dropped forty feet onto a tree, impaled me right through my left leg. It was real fucking annoying to fix." He starts stepping through, but stops at the touch of the gate's darkness. "And Mistake?"
Mistake winces in sympathy. "Oof. You need a parachute." The smile creeps back onto her face. Look at Roper, trying to get the last word in again. "Yeah?"
"Remember: you call for me, I will come for you. You don't call, you end up in trouble that I find out about, and I'll still fucking come for you, but I'll be annoyed about it," he tells her, and steps through, the Death Gate snapping shut behind him.
Mistake laughs. The room climbs slowly back up in temperature once Roper is gone. She turns the snowglobe over in her hands, and the optical illusion flips the visible text back to the words WISH YOU WERE HERE. She carefully sets it back in its place on the vanity and begins searching the room just in case Roper left anything behind. Spies are like that sometimes.