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| Details |
| Author: | Athena |
| Summary: | On a scouting mission for Dinner Reservations for the undead Sunstrikes, Aze and Roper play out an Ask and Answer Game. Roper explains his nicknames thing, complete with a demonstration of what happens when someone uses one of his for someone. 7100~ words. |
| Rating: | M for Mature 17+ |
Arc: Death Knight PR
It's a quiet peaceful day on the edges of Icecrown, which means that the eternal unsleeping warmachines of the undead are still churning along, and the Lich King is still yelling somewhere, but in this corner of the universe it's all only deep, hard packed snow over harder mountain rock, the soft fall of drifting snow in the cold air gentle floating snowflakes in the air, and the uncanny silence of late winter.
Standing next to a boulder with his left leg propped back against it is a death knight. This particular one is affiliated with the Ebon Blade, but there's no way to know that only by looking at him there, no tabard speaking of affiliation, not even the saronite armor they're known for; he's wearing leathers, better for scouting and silence, maneuverability over pure protection. He has a hood drawn over his face, and enough of a dusting of snow on him to suggest he's been standing out there for at least a few minutes.
His attitude suggests he's been waiting for hours. His left hand is tapping rapidly against his left leg, in a near blur of motion of impatience, even if the rest of him is eerily still and motionless. He's not playing at being a living person at the moment, and even if someone wasn't sure what was missing, there might still be something inherently unsettling about him that would prickle the senses.
Before long, another cloaked and hooded figure approaches, also in dark leather. This one is not a death knight, and one might deduce from the way she moves and the slighter build that she is both elvish and a woman. She pauses a few feet away and pushes back her own hood, revealing her blindfolded face and loose, dark hair - a little past shoulder length by now, since she hasn't had it cut recently. Then, she reaches into a pocket in her cloak and pulls out a watch, running her fingers along the face of it briefly.
"I'm not actually late this time, so you can't complain," she says by way of greeting.
Roper's tapping hand stops so he can put it dramatically to his chest, drawing back as if stung. "I'm hurt that you think that I'm that much of an amateur that if I wanted to complain that I couldn't find something to do it about," he says, so primly with enough of a noble polished accent that he sounds like an askew version of the Aspenwoods, or Alaisa when she's Lady Alaisa.
Aze laughs. "That's a good one, bet it goes over well with all the nobles." She's clearly talking about the voice, not his capacity to complain. Or is she? "You weren't waiting long, were you?"
"Does it matter?" Roper asks back as he straightens up from his boulder, moving in a manner more like someone alive, little touches like he's warming up muscles gone stiff with cold or non-movement — they are all a lie, as neither had any effect on him, but his show of it is impeccable. Someone has been practicing his living mannerisms lately, getting those nuances down. It seems to be a rhetorical question because he continues, "I hate waiting. Always did."
Which is kinda interesting if you think about how much of real spywork must just be a bunch of waiting.
"Maybe only if I want to get here before you next time," Aze shrugs, moving closer. She doesn't seem uncomfortable, so maybe the mannerisms are working. "Got any ideas for where we're headed specifically, or just scouting out the area?"
"Little bit of both." Roper nods in the general direction of the north. "No one's got decent maps of the place yet, just preliminary scouting at best, and some of the shit's already too old now that the Bitch King's taking an interest in the Argents here. And we're looking for something specific that they don't usually bother marking." He starts stalking through the snow, giving zero consideration into whether Aze is following him or not; he's just assuming she's keeping up.
"We want the living, if we can get 'em," he continues. "Cultists. Those fuckers willingly sitting in line ready to die like fucking morons. The undead is like…conjured food. Shitty bread or fucking…broth. You can exist off it, but you're constantly Hungry, and on edge because of it. The living," he says, inhaling deeply like he scents something delicious on the cold air. "Those that can really feel suffering still, those can keep you going for days at a time. We don't need as many, and bonus, every necromancer shithead we take out cuts down how many undead keep fucking rising. Everyone wins."
Aze does keep pace - she follows Roper through the snow, stepping in his footprints in a habitual method of hiding numbers. There's a faint look of annoyance, or maybe distaste, on her face as he compares the quality of suffering of different creatures, but she doesn't balk at the task.
"Just make sure you do kill them in the end," Aze says, her voice cold and unsympathetic. "Back in the war, we targeted those first, took them out as quickly as we could. At the border, our people learned that quickly."
Roper scoffs, turning his head over his shoulder in what's probably just reflex. "What do you take us for, fucking amateurs? We know what to do with necromancers. They die screaming, but they do fucking die, and their bodies get turned into fucking paste, before they get a chance to find out what it's like on this side of the undead aisle." He turns his head back to the landscape, moving overland by foot — the deathcharger is nowhere to be found, not for this terrain. "That was one of the first things we did when we took back Acherus. Made sure the necromancers that raised us had just enough time to regret their life decisions before they never felt anything again."
"I never get the reasoning behind that," Aze murmurs, but it's probably loud enough for Roper to hear. "Put somebody through hell to make them strong, and then act so surprised when they turn on you later."
She follows in silence for a while, and then says, "I take it we're just going to like… fucking spy on them if we find them, and leave them alive? So you and Yara can come back later and they'll be surprised."
"Yeah, and get a good look at their numbers, what they're doing, and how they're moving or if they're setting up more of those fucking ziggurats. If there might be some hint of if they're mobilizing, reinforcing, or just spread out and possibly easy pickings. That's information for the Argents, so they know we're working with them, not keeping secrets from them. We are on the same side, and they can't do their fucking job if we don't do ours right. We see shit, we tell them what we saw. We'll just get our dinner first, so everyone's happy."
"Except the necromancers," Aze says lightly, but she doesn't seem particularly concerned. "And you know, I am an Argent, so you're working with them right now. I'm pretty fucking interested in not having to cut down more people wearing faces I know, so I'm all in. And I can keep a lower profile, with you, because you're not going to care if I do some things that happen to be a little demonic. Or, you know, mention it to the other Argents. Like I won't go into detail about your fucking dinner."
Roper gives a ha of a laugh. "You won't have the details," he drawls, spreading his hands out. "Sorry, I get shy when people watch me eat." Is he serious? Kinda hard to tell with this guy. He sounds like he's joking, but also, for a Liar, he doesn't actually lie directly all that often it would seem. "But, all I mean is, you're free to tell any higher ups you want about the rest, and who was there with you. I'm not interested in hiding anything from the Argents that could be useful."
The further he walks, the worse the terrain gets. He is clearly taking a route of a guy who probably saw a map, and just made a straight line across to where he was considering going — which means, in this case, going up and over dangerous mountains, while the air grows colder and colder, and the wind grows strong enough that someone weaker than a demon hunter or a death knight would be struggling to keep their balance.
The demon hunter might be keeping her balance, but she is starting to shiver from the cold. It's one of the weaknesses of being a living person and letting the undead pick your route. Still she mostly keeps up, tucking her hands under her arms for warmth.
"I could imagine," Aze says, falling in a little closer behind Roper. "I won't, but I could. Let's do something. It's fucking cold, and I want to get my mind off it. Question game?"
She can't see Roper's grin, but she can hear it in his voice. "Three passes, third one calls the game," he offers back. "I'd say flip a coin to decide who starts, but you'd have to trust me on the calling of it."
"Yeah, we'll just have to pick," Aze says, shivering again. "Doesn't really matter. You go first."
"Fine." Roper continues his path, ignoring the shivering. "How do you cut your hair?"
"I get someone else to do it," Aze says immediately. "I'm not going to cut my own fucking hair and ruin it. Unless you mean, do I take off the blindfold. No. I hold it on in front till I can tie it back. What happens if you cut your hair - is it forever?"
"Don't know yet. Not really willing to try, in case it is," Roper says, and he seems to weigh the answer a little before he adds, "I got stubble on my face, from how the identity I had when I died was meant to look. When I try to shave it, my skin comes off on the razor because it's dead flesh, and so, yeah, the hair comes off. But when my flesh heals back, the stubble is back with it. For what's that's worth."
"How many blindfolds do you have?"
"That sucks, the stubble," Aze says, with a touch more sympathy than she had for the prospect of necromancers being tortured to death. She doesn't comment on the razor-stripped flesh. "And now I wonder if I'm gonna wake up one day to find all my blindfolds mysteriously gone. They're just cloth, they're not fucking magic. I don't know, maybe half a dozen. Haven't counted lately."
Aze picks her way through the path, stumbling a little and catching her balance before she goes for her next question. "What did the Nightmare use to try to get into your head?"
There's a pause. He's definitely weighing his answer. "Syarra and Alaisa. Syarra tried to taunt me that she'd left me, and I'd lost her. I cut the shadow down. I know a Liar when I hear one. Alaisa, she was just…empty. Like a shell. So I knew it wasn't her. The Nightmare was good at its games. But I'm fucking better." There's that edge between confidence and arrogance in his voice. "You really think I'd steal from you?"
"Not for no reason," Aze says, as if that much was obvious. "I don't know what reason you'd have to take my blindfolds, except to fuck with me, and I don't think you'd do that out of nowhere. And yeah, Yara's always sucked at lying, and I don't think Alaisa's empty." She shivers again, and then moves to her next question. "Why didn't you wait, when you woke up? I would've untied you. I just wanted to know it was you, first."
Roper snorts. "I'd ask you how I've ever given you the impression that I'm a patient man, but I don't wanna burn a question on a stupid question. I wanted out, and I could get out. I told you, I was good at getting out of ropes. You can get out of just about any situation, only depends on what you're willing to sacrifice or lose to do it. A few broken pieces means fuck all to me now." A beat. Considering something, and offered, "And I wanted to be able to touch her sooner, make sure she was back, and that if she was starving, she'd go for me, not you, because I was the one already in pain."
He picks up the pace slightly, maybe he's being considerate of Aze's chill. Or, more likely, he's just impatient to get over this stretch of mountain so he can see where they are better. "What were you dreaming about in the Nightmare?"
"Hadn't thought of that angle," Aze admits, skipping a little as she changes pace to keep up. "I don't think she'd go for me, as long as she's still her. She'd lose me, one way or another, and she doesn't want that."
The silence stretches for a while, maybe long enough to assume she's going to pass, before she answers Roper's. "Different things. There's not like one recurring nightmare, it was… the usual ones, just more vivid. There's a few… themes. I'll give you the one about Yara, maybe you care more about that one. It's back in the Third War, and I'm not fast enough, and the Scourge gets her. You'd think it happening in reality would rob the dream of its power, but… I guess brains are stupid sometimes. Anyway, it's not exactly the same. She's not a death knight, in the dream. And she doesn't get free."
Aze falls behind a few steps, then rushes to catch up and says, in a lighter tone. "I think that's a fair answer. If you want more, you have to ask. What will you and Yara do, if the Horde and Alliance go to war?"
"What we have to in order to survive. Right now, the better option looks like Alliance. The Horde had already established some sort of sense of personhood through the fucking Forsaken, but I don't gotta tell you what those fuckers just did to make it so we can't set a foot on their ice without being dragged under with them with their fucking evil cackling bullshit." The echo comes into his voice, strong and reverberating, rage building. "And now with the orcs pulling the same stupid shit, different gate? Doing the Lich King's bidding in action like they're on his fucking side? No. The Ebon Blade is better than that. We're better than that."
The air grows colder, and the rage hotter, before he seems to subdue it again, his voice dropping back down to something that sounds human.
"So, yeah, if it comes to it, we'll step a foot Alliance, and keep our other just Ebon Blade, and the Horde doing the work of the fucking Scourge can get fucked until they learn to do better." Roper hoists himself up and over a larger impediment in his way, and stands at the peak, looking down at the forested, rocky path towards smaller Scourge encampments. Some of them might even be visible to him, with their telltale greenish, sickly glows, but this far away, the only possible other suggestion of their existence is that scent of death wafting through the air on the wind. "If we step that way, which way you going — Horde or Alliance?"
"I have no loyalty to the Horde," Aze says simply, pulling herself up next to him. Maybe she's gazing down at the encampments as well, in her way. "Joining the Horde was just a thing other people decided to do while I was on another fucking world. You know I can't afford to stand out, so it's not like I protested or anything. Still, I haven't taken any oaths. I haven't served any warchiefs. I'm Argent Crusade. But… if I ask for asylum from the Alliance, they're gonna notice a few things about me. So I'll just… be alone. I guess."
Aze shakes her head, shivering again, though maybe not from the cold this time. She takes a breath, and in a lighter tone, asks her next question. "Would you help me sneak into Stormwind, if I asked you?"
Roper's silence for several long beats speaks of something. He's weighing it. This is no immediate loyalty to either Aze or Stormwind that drives a quick answer. "It would depend on your reason, and what you were gonna do while you were there, but if it was something that I thought was worth the cost if you were caught, and if you'd give them my name or lead them back to me if you were, yeah, I would." Roper takes out a spyglass from a bag, lifting it carefully as he moves his other arm in counter point, gesturing up and out. "There's a camp that way. We're too far to tell what they've got, but that's definitely fucking Scourge." He holds the glass up to his right eye. "They've got plague wagons going. Cauldrons. Can't tell if they're loaded up or not."
He sets the spyglass back into his bag, and starts moving down the slope, with no regard for an easy route. He's going the fastest, and he doesn't seem to care if it's dangerous or not. "Would you stay with the Argent Crusade if they decided their newest target of undead to take out was the Ebon Blade?"
"They wouldn't," Aze says immediately, skidding down the slope behind him. "It's a fake fucking question, they made the Ebon Blade, pretty much." That doesn't really answer the question, and she seems to know it. This one she's weighing carefully, more carefully than maybe she's weighed questions of loyalty in the past. "No. It would mean I chose wrong. Again."
There's another pause, as she watches her step on the sharp incline, before she asks, "Why'd you call her Sya, back in the Nightmare? You've never used a nickname before."
It comes out of nowhere — one moment he's stepping down onto a rock, and the next he's launched himself at Aze with all the force and speed of an unholy, undead creature.
There's enough some ambiguity in it for a fraction of a second, that perhaps he's diving for her to protect her from some unseen attack, but that impression does not last long, as the death knight drives the demon hunter into the frozen ground, his right hand wrapped hard around her throat, squeezing with dangerous pressure, as his left turns her body to pin her painfully to the side.
The wind whips around them in furious stings, a howling blast of ice, as he exerts a wave of pressure against her neck, a threat if not a full action to kill her. His voice has echoes inside it, shadow warping it into something almost unrecognizable.
"You don't call her that," he says in dangerously soft tones, but the echoes shout it, over and over around them. "That's mine." There's no mistaking the rage in him, and the wind howls louder, an icy touch of black, deadly ice spreading from his hand onto Aze that halts only just before it would pierce her skin, his fingers trembling as he resists an urge to do worse harm.
Aze hits the rocky ground hard, genuinely not expecting a mid-conversation attack from someone she'd considered an ally. There's a flash of pain at the impact, and then a continuing ache from the jagged rocks pinned beneath her body. Aze doesn't cry out, though, or even struggle.
"Get off me," she says, in a low, quiet rasp of a voice that might be all she can manage with his hand around her throat. "Now."
There's a bad moment where it seems like maybe he won't — maybe he will close his hand harder, let the ice pierce her skin, that this will escalate beyond a point of no return — but it passes, and he does release her, moving off her with the fluid agility he does not possess in his saronite armor, silent as death.
He is much too still, the cold so deep around them that it feels brittle, and there is a sense of a ripped away illusion to him: that is not a living man. That is a corpse, animated by some dark void, his soul tethered to it by uneven stitches, and there are parts of him that will never truly be alive ever again.
Aze is, however, definitely still a living woman, whatever's happened to her soul. She gets back to her feet with a muttered fuck, feeling out the minor injuries from the fall while keeping her face and body oriented towards Roper. There's definitely a tension in her that wasn't there before, an awareness of present danger.
"If you do that again," Aze says, raising a hand to her neck, where it's reddened from the cold or pressure, possibly bruised. "I will fight back."
He's so still that he gives the impression of a doll, or an inanimate corpse, propped up there in rigor mortis.
"You don't use that name again. It's mine," Roper repeats, echoes and echoes in his voice, lips barely moving enough to justify how he's speaking. "You have 'Yara.' That's yours."
His head moves in stiff, strange jerks, like someone's trying to move a marionette, or untangle the strings. "I don't…like when people take what's mine," he says for some reason, and it still doesn't really sound like the Roper she knows, but it's closer, like he's trying to follow a tether back. "I never did. My names for my people…they're mine. I don't share them." Wait, he isn't just randomly speaking — that sounds like he's trying to answer her question from the game.
"You can call her Yara in front of me if you want," Aze says, wincing as she takes a step towards the weird undead marionette creature. She's definitely still in some pain, but at this point the wincing is probably an act. "I don't own it. I just name people. Her, and Liv and… I don't know, Lady Bri. If it matters that fucking much, then maybe you should've been more careful. But whatever, fine, I won't."
The weird marionette's head tilts. "People can't take what you don't give them," he says in a strangely disconnected voice, as if more to himself than her. His hands twitch up, and his head tips down, like he's studying his hands in his gloves. And she can practically see the moment it happens, when Roper does something to pull on someone over himself, like he's pulled a skin from the air and slid it over him like a jacket, because his actions suddenly smooth out again, his attitude returning to something like an amused swagger. How much that's true is difficult to tell — she can't see his expression on his face.
"Yeah," he says, the echoes hidden, his voice in a lazy drawl. "That's on me. I slipped." Does he mean in Syarra's name, or just now? "Sorry." He shrugs in a rolling motion, and moves forward back on their path, as if nothing unusual had just happened. "I don't use other people's names when I've got my own." Another shrug of his right shoulder. "So, who used to cook for the family, back when you were a kid, and everyone in your family was still alive?"
Aze follows, a step further behind now, and that tension still hasn't left. It's clear her focus is on Roper now, not the path or the distant Scourge. Still, if he slipped, for once she didn't. There's no signs of fel fire, no hints of the demonic about her other than the usual. It takes a moment for her to realize he's just continuing the game, like nothing happened. Then another moment while maybe she considers whether she is. Then she shivers, as the rush of adrenaline fades, the bruises begin to set. It seems the end result here is that she's colder… death knights and their ice.
"My mom, mostly. Sometimes S… my sister," Aze says, picking through the words as carefully as she picks through the landscape. "When our parents were busy. Any other words I should know not to say? As interesting as that was, just now, I'm really not into choking."
Roper makes a tch sound. "Well, that'll teach me to put money against Alaisa on what's on your Kink List," he drawls. He spreads his hands out in an open gesture as he skips a few rocks down by virtue of not caring whether his knees can handle the impact. "Never been a real fan of 'moist.' Or the phrase 'penetrating gaze.' Gives a visual of someone sinking their eyeballs into you. You start saying 'moist penetrating gaze,' and we're really getting into the silence you with shadow territory for the good of society." His tone makes it sound like he's joking, but also…hm.
"What's your favorite dance to do, regardless if there are people there or not?"
Aze picks her way down behind him. Maybe she does care if her knees can handle it. "I like dancing with people. It's less fun alone. If we're literally talking about dancing, then Amar'uel. There's a reason I usually pick that one, when there's a choice to be made."
She drops down from the last rock and hurries to keep up. "What's something you still like now, that you liked when you were alive?"
Roper laughs, although it has an echo to it that his voice doesn't have. "Getting information on people. That sounds like a dodge, because it sounds like I'm talking about work, but no. It was fucking everyone, any time. I know it about myself, even if I can't remember the people anymore. I liked knowing shit about people." There's a pause, and he drops down another bit of rock. "When I was alive, I cared. At least a little, about everyone I met, even people I must have just been using for a job. Some part of me, the me under the identity, gave a fuck, probably because I knew things about them, and they weren't just a number to me. They were a person."
Roper tips his head to look back at Aze. "If you had to kill Mordecai to survive, would you?"
Aze almost misses a step on that one, but the imbalance is only for a fraction of a second before she recovers. Her usually expressive face is blank for a moment. Still, it's not quite the blankness of careful control, but more of surprise, of someone who hasn't quite figured out what she should feel yet.
"Pass," Aze says, turning away, as if to look at something behind her. Even though she probably doesn't have to turn her head for that. "What would you do, if Alaisa hurt Yara?"
"For one, wonder what the fuck Alaisa was doing hurting Syarra. I hear pillow fights can get rough, but, you'd need a pillow filled with rocks to actually damage Syarra," Roper says, and he sounds softly amused, or possibly weirdly turned on in a death knight kind of way. Really difficult to tell. "I'd step in, if I could, defend Syarra. If it was after the fact, I'd find out fucking why. What I'd do then depends on that why. Alsias knows me. Syarra's mine to protect. If Alaisa attacked her anyway for a shitty reason, or none at all, then she did it knowing what's coming."
Roper halts, staring off in the direction they're aiming for. "Those look like cultists. They're moving like the living." He inhales, like he's scenting something on the wind. "If Syarra was starving on the edge of the Hunger but couldn't hunt for herself, and you had to bring her someone to kill who you couldn't be 100% was evil, would you do it anyway?"
"I wo…" Aze starts to answer, and then reconsiders. "I don't really know, not a scenario I've put a lot of thought into. I might just let her kill me. Or maybe? I've definitely killed people I wasn't 100% sure were evil, but it's not really the same. I wouldn't leave her starving, anyway."
She comes up next to Roper, and then takes a step away. "We could get a little closer, to see. What would you do if my sister fucked up and killed Alaisa?"
"Pass," Roper says, with such little hesitation that it's obvious he had no intention of answering it the moment he heard it. "There's enough trees on the other side to hide our approach, we'll go in that way, get a better sense of numbers and what they're doing. Tell me if you see someone I obviously haven't." A beat. "Please." Such manners! "What's your stance on warlocks working on our side of things?"
"No demons so far, but I'll let you know," Aze says with a nod, but it's an answer to his polite request, not his question. She starts heading towards the trees before she says, "That'd be pretty fucking bold of me to judge warlocks on the magic they use. Might get confused and kill their demons, but mostly I can tell them apart. In case you hadn't noticed, I'm fine using demons to fight… well, undead in this case, but I was going to say demons. Any type of person on our side you can't stand?"
"Yeah, but probably not the ones you'd expect. Of the living, I got no problem with anyone just for what they are. And not because I've got no legs to stand on against moral shit — I don't believe you're naive enough to think people don't love to judge other people for the shit they do themselves. Righteous people get off on that all the time, condemning someone else for what they're doing. Me? I just…don't care enough really. The fucking Forsaken make things harder, but honestly, I don't give enough of a shit about them to hate them if they started minding their fucking manners." He shrugs, a strange lift, hold, and release, almost like an exaggerated shrug, but it doesn't seem intentionally theatrical.
"No. The ones I can't fucking stand are the death knights doing stupid, short-sighted petty shit at the living, the evil cackling reveling in filth bullshit. That's the kind of stuff that could get any one of us destroyed because they pushed the wrong fucking button on the wrong fucking person on the wrong fucking day. And I get a bit miffed when someone's decision fucks up my own existence," he says. Yeah. Miffed is the right word for it. "Though, right now, because of what they're doing, the orcs of the Horde are on that same shit list, but that's more targeted for these fuckers in particular out here who could trip us up at the finish line." For a moment, the mask of amusement slips again, and rage boils out in an echo and rattling wind around them.
And then he tucks it back and away. Ha ha, he's just amused now. Maybe.
"What about you, you got any type of person on our side that you'd soon as see 6 feet under than 6 feet across you shoulder-to-shoulder?"
Aze shifts away from him slightly at the anger in his voice, but makes no other sign of alarm.
"Yeah, sure, people can be self-righteous assholes, but that doesn't mean I want to be one too. And there's lots of types of people that piss me off, like the kaldorei, but I wouldn't say I'd want to bury them." Aze considers. "And I'm not sure I'd say the orcs are on our side, after the shit they just pulled. Hm. Yeah, no, anybody I'd want dead is somebody I've already stopped thinking of as an ally. And there's none of those lurking in the Argent Crusade, at least. Maybe in the Horde." Aze shrugs, tilting her head at Roper. "If that whole citizen thing works out, you're gonna file your marriage with Stormwind?"
Roper tips his head back and forth. If he's noticed her wariness, he isn't escalating it at least. It's hard to tell if his attention on her is sharper than it was a moment before. His voice sounds the same.
"Depends on if it gives us more than it'd cost us. Legal shit like that doesn't matter except when it benefits us. We don't need it to be registered for it to be true. The entirety of civilization could fall, and I'd still be married to her." Aw, that's almost romantic. It's probably not as romantic as it sounds, but Aze knows that by now. "You ever think about if you can even still have kids like you are now?"
Aze's shoulders twitch at the sudden change of topic, and she turns as if to survey the distant necromancers. "Yeah. That was a yes or no question, so yeah." She pauses to see if that passes the rules of the game.
Roper laughs, a low chuckle. It was a yes or no question, and that might have been a deliberate choice, to avoid a pass, and set up another for later in a long game. "Your question," he reminds her, as he slips into the trees. He's quiet, but it's also obvious that he was not a forest scout in his life — he makes noise here and there at underestimating the foliage under his feet, and doesn't know all the little tricks of the trade to cushion his footfalls.
Aze moves to follow him, and she clearly does have experience in moving quietly through forests. She shadows his path, avoiding any significant sound, except when she asks, in a low voice, "Which of your people do you trust, besides Yara? The ones that aren't short-sighted and petty."
"For working closely with the living, our team. Theris. Mourn. Forge. Kiekel. They're the ones looking far enough ahead to know how to work with the living. There's some who are probably fine, they just avoid people, like Fionette or some of the weirder draenei. There's a few more maybes, but they're so focused on the Lich King that it's hard to tell if they'll always be like that or not. Vengeance can be a hell of a drug," Roper drawls, hushing his sibilants. "If you could have only one of them back, who'd you bring back — your mother, or your father?"
Aze nods, her lips forming the names for memory. She hasn't met all of those death knights yet. At Roper's question, she can't help a brief exhale of a laugh. "Just out of the two, okay. I guess it gets messy when you start adding everyone in." There's only a quick beat before she answers, "My mother. If you could genuinely resurrect yourself or any other death knight, who would you pick?"
Roper halts in place, and there's a soft, almost scoff of a sound, that sounds all too human. "Pass," he says, and there is a potentially disturbing amount of something like wistfulness in his voice. You could almost believe, in just hearing him, that he's just a 31-year-old or so human man.
But it doesn't stand up to the cold that grows around him, gathering up. "We got at least six necromancers. They're starting up the wagons…look, that way." He points the direction he means. Sure enough, there's a smaller gathering of living, around what might seem to Aze only physical objects heaped up on each other. Closer inspection would pick up the little give-aways of what those things are — fingers here, toes there, a mouth still stretched open and tipped up at the sky.
"Looks like we've found dinner."
Aze's expression goes hard and cold as she notices the necromancers and their meat wagons. Her hand shifts towards the hilt of a sword almost without volition, but then she closes it into a fist.
"You won't leave them alive," she mutters, turning back toward Roper. "Let's circle around. I don't want to send you and Yara somewhere riddled with Nerubian tunnels. Also, your turn."
Roper clicks his tongue at Aze. "We appreciate that. The venom doesn't do fuck all to us, but you know I hate having to repair the armor after I just fucking did it." He does start circling around the perceived edge of the camp. He might not have full control over his sound, but he doesn't seem to have the visual edge — based on the carefully halting motions he makes, he must be taking the shadowed path, staying out of line of sight. Either that or he's playing the weirdest game of don't step on a crack out in the middle of a forest.
"How much shit do you have to take of something to actually get you high enough to feel it?"
"That's… a complicated question," Aze says, her face downturned. In this case, it might actually just be because she's focusing on the ground, and not a sign of shame or reticence. "Before the war, I was high on the Sunwell like… continuously. I don't think anyone would've called it that, at the time. It was just being normal, and then you could do whatever on top of it. It was just after it was gone that people realized… and now, for me, it's fel. I guess it fucks up my tolerance a little? Maybe I have to take… two or three times more than I used to? I can definitely still get wasted, though, on top of the fel, if I try hard enough. But then, lately, I've been more responsible, as weird as that sounds. The early days, I started losing time, and I figured, you know… have to be in control."
Aze shakes her head, and continues circling around. "Have you tried drinking? Or drugs? Since you died, I mean."
"Drinking, yeah. It's pointless mostly. I can hardly taste it, and to even get the barest sense of feeling something from it, I'm basically drinking an entire fucking shipload." That doesn't seem to be a euphemism or a mispronunciation of shit — he really means an entire ship load of alcohol. "That's two different questions though, tsk tsk." The sounds of the scolding are hushed little clicks, but they are clicks, and there's an answering odd chittering from the camp.
"You ever find out exactly what type of Scourge thing killed your mother?"
Aze is distracted by the answering chitter, and then the question raises a nice little flicker of pain for the death knight. It fades quickly, though.
"Can't blame me for trying," she murmurs, tapping her foot on the ground. "Nothing under here, but… that sounded like…" she continues moving through the forest, almost like she didn't hear the question, but then she says, "Yeah. Wasn't a Scourge thing, not directly. Building collapse, in the siege. I just blame all of them." She taps her foot on the ground again, experimentally. "Think you'll ever give me a nickname?"
"Yeah, I might. I've got it picked out already," Roper says softly, and it sounds distracted, as he leans back against a tree, tilting his head towards the camp. "I heard it, too. Nerubian maybe. Either that or a geist. They make the weirdest fucking noises." He's still being very quiet, but now he's waiting for something maybe. "What'd you do with your mother's body?"
Aze turns toward him at his answer, a faint twitch of surprise. Then another flicker of pain, a moment for it to be set aside, and she nods. "Might be a geist, or a Nerubian visitor. I'd like to get around to the other side, though, to make sure." She steps a little closer, pitches her voice lower, to answer, "They burned it. It was far enough from the lines that the Scourge didn't get to her before." Aze takes a breath, leaning back against the side of Roper's tree. "What do you think will happen to all the undead, if we kill the Lich King?"
"I think anything that was still under him'll get free will, of some sort or another. Some of them will probably go insane, or already are. We'll cull those. That's what the Ebon Blade is good for. The rest'll join up with the fucking Forsaken, or the Ebon Blade. He's a controller, and a necromancer, but he isn't the source of undeath enough that it'll end it all. That's the Legion's doing, if we wanna point a finger. Might be that if we destroyed the Legion, it'd end undeath, but I doubt it. Death magic's a part of shit now, as much anything," Roper says, his voice still softened, weirdly gentle, and the amount he's talking seems to be proportionate to how distracted he is on something else — he's focused in on the camp, and he waits a long time for something, before he starts moving again, drawing them around the edges of the camp's other side, slowly.
He waits until they're nearly opposite from where they were before he asks, "Would you fuck someone you don't really give a shit about if you knew it would make it easier for you to use them for something you wanted after?"
"The Ebon Blade and the Argent Crusade, too, then," Aze says, stepping silently through the underbrush as she keeps pace with Roper. "Our work wouldn't end. Not for a long while. And to answer, it depends. I don't see why feelings really need to be connected to fucking. But at the same time, using it deliberately to try to control people…" Aze shakes her head. "I don't like it. Feels wrong. Would you? I mean, not fucking, but use that sort of persuasion on someone, if you and Yara both decided it would be useful"
The other side of the camp reveals that there is, in fact, a nerubian there; small, not likely particularly high ranking, but the sense of shadow weaving is thick in the air around it, a darkness that's visible in energy, if not entirely by eyesight alone. There's no actual other undead, however. This camp is just getting started, and would be easy to uproot.
Roper laughs quietly, an echo in it. "Pass." There's something about the way he says it that makes it sound like he knows that by not saying no, he's sorta saying yes, but that he's also deliberately keeping the information one way or another from her, for his own reasons, an intentional withholding. "Good game. Now we get to play another one. This one's called 'how to get a nerubian to leave its post and follow a sound in the woods without getting any necromancers to come with.'" He pauses for a beat. "It's a working title."