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| Details |
| Author: | Athena |
| Summary: | After a seven-month separation, Natalyah and Lathrik are finally reunited. Natalyah shows off new tricks and abilities she's been working on, and Lathrik reveals that some things still haven't been resolved. Romance RP. 4200~ words. |
| Rating: | T for Teen |
The sun nears its peak in the sky, erasing the shadows of morning as it ascends, and bringing with it the fragile warmth of early spring. Lathrik stands waiting on the Summer Terrace, a massive balcony extending from the Shrine of Seven Stars in a half circular shape, looking out over the golden vale beyond. There is a perfectly serviceable bench behind him, yet he leans with his elbows on the railing, his expression disinterested, maybe even bored. The observant might note, however, that while his eyes seem to roam aimlessly, they do roam, taking in any and all potential activity below. Those especially familiar with him might even accuse him of being on duty.
One such is on her way. She's been technically "on her way" since somewhere around 9:30am, having intended to arrive at the Shrine at 10am, but various circumstances have made her late.
(It's Natalyah. Natalyah is the circumstances.)
Natalyah is dressed in her expensive, enchanted-to-the-teeth priestess Scientist of the Light robes, gold and teal, in her human form, clinging doggedly to the flying kite that she's seated in the middle of with an air of someone who dares anyone to suggest that she can't ride a flying kite with one leg. Her hair is a wild chaos of windblown layers, but not even a single strand has been singed or cut to hide a singe.
She spots Lathrik from the air as the kite circles in for landing, which means that the entire Summer Terrace hears the shout of, "Lathrik!"
The call has him blink out of whatever focus holds him, his expression shifting from mask to startled, to desperate longing, to panic, then back to mask, his posture straightening in spite of himself. He looks up, but the sun forces him into a squint and he pushes away from the railing, moving instead to the center of the terrace to await the landing of the kite.
Natalyah leaps from the kite in a way that would be alarming except that she lands on pure air, floating above the platform. She's electric with energy, a pure, intense sort of peace of one single expression of happiness evident on her face.
Her arms are already out for Lathrik, but where she would have once run to him, there is instead a powerful force of the Light that reaches out to Lathrik and pulls him towards her through the air so she can have him that much sooner, landing him mere inches from her, as she throws herself the rest of the way to him, dropping the levitate, to depend on his balance instead.
Lathrik lets out a sound of strangled startlement as he is yanked through the air only to be met with the full force of Natalyah launched into his arms. Fortunately for him, he is more agile than he lets on, and he recovers in time to not send them both crashing to the ground, though there is a moment of dangerous teetering. He does not voice a word of complaint, however, grasping her to him like to let go means she’ll vanish into a dream.
“’Talyah,” he says, his voice a bit rough. “Welcome to Pandaria.”
Natalyah is wholeheartedly solid. Even the winds from the kite couldn't steal away the scent of her jasmine perfume, or the warmth of her, as she nuzzles her face into her favorite spot against his neck, breathing him in audibly.
She's still for only a second or two, before she draws back just enough to give her room to plant a forceful, joyful kiss directly on his mouth, absolutely uncaring for the audience they may have.
Lathrik returns her kiss, though for perhaps reason of said public, does not escalate. But neither does he make any move to release her. It is still too much of a display for one particular blonde engineer, who steps out onto the terrace possibly to test a device, spots them, and immediately turns back around to re-enter the shrine.
Meanwhile, Pera Firestone, local pandaren fireworks lover, takes this opportunity to set off a celebratory explosion as both exuberant joy and simultaneous advertisement of her wares.
The whiz and explosion startles Natalyah out of the kiss, eyes wide, until she recognizes the sound, and she lets out an unfettered cackle of delight, pressing herself tightly against Lathrik, and grinning at him.
The sound startles Lathrik, too, but his reaction is to reach for his sword, which means shifting Natalyah to one arm while he awkwardly reaches around her for the hilt. When he realizes it’s just a pandaren he gives her a flat stare.
“Ye come alone?” he asks Natalyah, already telegraphing the path to the inn with his eyes.
Natalyah's expression clashes between prideful arrogance and irritated defensiveness, all without losing the glowing happiness. It's complicated. "Really? Did you think I'd need an entire escort just to go through a portal and then immediately get on a kite to an embassy? I can handle myself. That's part of why I'm through ahead of the others, because between my healing abilities and Siamus' pull, I got my passport or whatever second only to Aszera," she says tartly, mere seconds before she darts in again to kiss his cheek with another swift devious smile.
"I missed you so much. Take me upstairs or downstairs, or whatever a room here is," she orders, levitating herself up a scant inch or so in Lathrik's hold.
“Aye, I wasn’t doubting ye,” Lathrik says lightly, keeping hold of her hand, at least, as he starts towards the inn. “Just looking to know if I’m to expect my brother to come crashin’ out of the sky in short order. Believe I’m a bit behind on everything you’ve been up to.”
He pauses before the entryway, peeking inside from an edge to confirm something. “If we’re quiet, we can make it past without Ren takin’ notice.”
Natalyah bites back a smug laugh as she holds up a finger to his mouth, allowing him to tug her along like a balloon. "I'll do you one better," she whispers. It still takes her an extra second where nothing happens.
And then, it's like something tells him that he should forget that she's there, or never mind her presence — not just him, but everyone around them, as people find reasons to no longer pay any attention to the floating woman. But one of the things, beyond his own personal feelings, lessening the effect of the Fade on Lathrik is the way she keeps hold of his hand, squeezing onto to it so tightly that he couldn't ignore her even if he wanted to.
"Go," she orders. As two feathers of Light hit first him, then her, making them both unnaturally speedy.
It takes a second or two for Lathrik to adjust to the new speed, but soon they are moving swiftly through the inn, and if a sudden glint of light off Lathrik’s armor obscures any vision of his features as they pass the table Reniya sits at with a rough, brown haired woman, it’s surely just a convenient ray of sunlight.
He does not stop moving until they are safely tucked away in a small room with a single pandaren styled bed and some decorative shelving. On the floor beside the bed, a small mat and some blankets are laid out, and that is probably where Lathrik slept the previous night. The shelf contains a book on the ancient dynasties of Pandaria, though it doesn’t appear to have any sort of placeholder in it; his other book is probably hidden somewhere in his belongings, most of which rest at the foot of the bed.
It's only obvious that Natalyah was actually practicing a great deal of restraint — for her — out of some consideration for Lathrik's general preferences regarding the public sphere, because the restraint ends the moment there's both inside the room. She doesn't entirely wait for the door to be closed — details, details — before she's kissing him. It's an aggressive sort of kissing, alternating between his lips and just about everywhere else on his face, both hands trapping him there, their heights nearly perfectly even with the levitate.
But underneath is a high pitched whine of strong emotion she can't fully subdue, and there's a tremor in her lips, like she might cry and desperately doesn't want to.
Lathrik folds her back into his arms, responding to her passion in kind, seeking kisses of his own until the whine gives him pause and he pulls back, one hand beginning to smooth over her hair. “’Talyah?” His gaze on her is intense and concerned.
Natalyah is obviously fighting back tears, which might easily launch her into a shift, and she shoves ineffectually at Lathrik's shoulder with a hand when he pulls away, which mostly only accomplishes making her drift around in his embrace.
"It's just that you're — still very — stupidly good looking," she gets out in between hitching breaths, and a wobbly smile underneath pinched eyebrows that don't accurately read as annoyed at all. "And better — than Dream Lathrik."
Warm fondness fills Lathrik’s eyes. “Aye, well, a painting could never do ye justice,” he says, cupping her cheek in his hand. “And a book is a poor substitute.” He spares a glance at the lone book on his shelf.
Natalyah presses her face into the crook of his neck again, breathing deeply to steady herself, trapping his hand for good measure. "Well of course it is. You'd have to find a cursed tome and make it fall in love with you," she says tartly. "And then you'd have to register it as a soldier in your unit and they'd have to invent an entirely new paperwork for it, and by the time they did, I would eat it.. You're not allowed to have any book lovers."
“Ye sound like Ren,” Lathrik grumbles, with no real irritation. “There was no love, it was only t’help me sleep. I got used to a certain… weight on my chest. Couldn’t sleep without it. And even then, every morning I woke up was a sore reminder that you weren’t there. I missed you, ‘Talyah, more than I could ever say in a letter.”
At the mention of the weight on his chest, she softens, and drops the levitate once more, so that her weight against him becomes palpable again, that awareness that she's balancing because she's holding onto him.
He can feel the moisture where some tears have managed to escape, but she remains human in his arms. "I know. I always knew," she tells him. "Because you'll always talk about what you do, what you can say of it, but never about how you feel. You don't ever talk about what's wrong, because you don't ever complain when it's terrible, not even if it's slowly killing you. You're just quietly, horribly miserable, where no one else but you ever sees it. The only thing you'd ever admit to is if it might comfort me." The accusatory phrases are gentled by her loving tone, and the velvet touch of her skin against his. "And I wanted to write all the right things to comfort you, but I never know what those are really. I'd say the wrong things, or be awful, and I hated it. I just wanted to make you happy, even if only for a few minutes."
“And you did,” Lathrik assures her, not even bothering to deny the long list of accusations. “You did make me happy. S’why I kept every letter ye sent, and read them whenever I had time alone. They got me through the Krasarang Wilds, where the Sha of Despair held influence. We… struggled there. Some of us more than others.”
She lifts her head up to meet his eyes, her own red rimmed and teary, but filled more with a loving brightness than any sorrow.
"What happened with you? What did the sha make you think or remember? What did it try to use to eat you?" she demands, one right after another. No, she will not ask only one question at a time. But, at least they're all related.
“Just that… our bein’ there wasn’t going to make a difference. That it wouldn’t matter if we all just gave up. Or that I’d spend the rest of my days away from you, because the situation’d never improve.” Lathrik tries to shrug it off. “But the others were a wreck, too. Ye ever see depressed Ren without a drink? Not something I’d prefer to see again.”
All Lathrik's shrugging does is move Natalyah's arms up and down for all that she lets it go.
"I'm not likely to," she says. "It's not that I don't care what happened to Ren, or Elle, or anyone else there. But I know that they all had you there to watch over them and look after them. I care about what happened with you, because you wouldn't have leaned on anyone. You can now though, because I'm here. You can lean on me." She illustrates the point a little counterintuitively by leaning more on him, but maybe it's just about pressing more definitively against him.
"And I'm here to love you no matter what thought went through your head," she tells him in that direct way as if she's ready to defend herself against a challenge against her words. "And to remind you that if the situation never improved, then you'd be seeing me even sooner, because I'd never leave you in something like that by yourself." She punctuates this sentence with a hard kiss for emphasis.
Lathrik makes a soft sound of amusement. “Aye,” he says after the kiss. “We’re well through it now, and things are looking more hopeful thanks to Cobalt’s efforts. And your being here is… I hope the golden vale hasn’t driven me mad after all.”
His gaze on her carries its usual intensity, mixed with a deep and desperate yearning. “What ye did earlier, I… For a moment, I thought…”
Natalyah tilts her head, a lupine gesture, as she scrutinizes him back. "When I did what earlier? Arrive looking even more beautiful than you remembered?" she quips, but amidst the prideful primping toss of her hair and quirk of her lips in a smile, there's a furrowing of her brow.
“You seemed to… fade away,” Lathrik says. “And t’be honest, the reason I kept going is because, even if you were an illusion, I’d still have brought you here to be alone with you.”
His hold on her tightens as he says this, as if assuring himself that she is, at least, solid.
Natalyah is very solid. She also seems to be going back and forth between two visible thoughts of deciding if she's touched that he would want an illusion version of her, or if she's mad at him for straying from her with an illusion of her.
"I can't tell if that would count as you being with another woman," she ends up telling him, having come to neither conclusion in full. "Lucky for you, you don't have to worry if you've gone mad from dreaming about this place." She pops a wicked smile at him. "You were already mad, that's why you fell for me."
She puts a hand up to his face. "It's only a trick of a technique. Here, I'll show you, so you know what it looks like properly with me, and so next time it won't make you wonder. I'm supposed to use it in combat situations to avoid drawing attention to myself. I thought you'd approve, for our deal."
Lathrik lets out a breath and closes his eyes for a moment. “Alright,” he says when he opens them again. “Show me, and I’ll see if I can still find ye with the Light.”
Natalyah darts forward to plant a kiss on his cheek. "You will," she tells him confidently. She takes a breath.
And then —
Nothing happens.
Wait for it. Waaaaaaaaaait for it.
She lets go of the breath. "I'm not exceptionally good at it," she says defensively, preemptively, in case he might say something about it. "I just need to…" She stares intently at him.
And then, finally — there. That sense that she's faded out of existence, a press of shadow against his psyche encouraging him to forget that she's there, to look somewhere else besides her, to pay her no mind.
The shadow is met with an aura of Light as Lathrik takes on a faint glow, and soon after, that glow reaches Natalyah as well, imparting a feeling of safety and sanctuary. He nods, satisfied. “You’ve been working hard,” he says with a slight smile. “S’pose I should do the same. Off-record, at least.”
Natalyah preens under the praise, which goes the rest of the way of breaking the power of the Fade. "I told you that I would have to find interesting things to do to tell you about," she says smugly with a self-satisfied smile.
She slides her hand down from his face to his chest, fluttering her lashes at him coquettishly. "If you wanted to work hard at something off-record, I have some suggestions. As a matter of fact, that wall over there, for instance, would be perfect for page 215 with a very, very athletic man in excellent shape. I could make it easier if I levitated myself, or… you could work for it."
“Believe I’m still a bit over-dressed for 215,” Lathrik murmurs, his gaze taking on a hungry edge, as one hand slides down to her hip.
Natalyah is pure returning feral desire in his arms as she shifts restlessly and eagerly against him, her hand tracing the back of his to encourage him to keep touching her where she likes to be touched. She holds his gaze like she'd like to fall into it directly, an implied dare in her own.
"Well, I suppose I could work for it, too, and do something about that," she purrs, leaning in to kiss him, before she does just that.
Time Passes in a Bookish Manner (Certain Books Anyway)
Natalyah is a picture perfect display for the definition of languishing, draped mostly over Lathrik in an inelegant sprawl, with the sheet still tangled over most of leg and across her back. She hasn't moved in a while now, even after catching her breath fully. She's comfortable on her paladin pillow, thank you very much.
It's also one one of the longest stretches she's gone without talking while not being actually asleep, but Lathrik knows she didn't actually do more than perhaps lightly doze, because she's remained fully human.
"I think we've really fully broken the other curse," she murmurs as she turns her head with effort to be able to go back to staring at him again. "The one where something happens or someone appears to interrupt us if I try to get you into bed. I half expected Ren or Elle to knock on the door at the worst timing."
“Aye, well, Ren’s got his hands full proddin’ the engineers along and doing some legwork to see if he can pin down where Elle’s run off to,” Lathrik says, a flash of guilt passing over his expression, even as he strokes his fingers through her hair.
Natalyah makes a mmhmm sound, eyes half closing with her petting, and then opens them again. "Wait, what?" she says. She stirs slightly more, turning over more of her to look at him. "Elle's still missing? But it's been — I thought he'd have wandered back by now for certain if he just wandered off without telling someone. He does get like that, not saying what he's thinking of doing out loud to anyone if you don't ask him exactly. What happened? Where did you last see him? Is he actually AWOL or MIA or whatever?"
“We’re on rest,” Lathrik says, shaking his head. “Lt. Commander’s gone for a home visit. Our charge is… around, and fairly safe here. Elle disappeared the day after we got leave. I last saw him in roughly the same place I was standing when you arrived. Couldn’t tell ye what he was doing, didn’t think much of it. We’ve been… distant. I regret that, now.”
Natalyah scrounges up the will to move her arm specifically so she can poke a finger into Lathrik's shoulder. "Don't you even think about blaming yourself," she orders. "I saw that guilt, Lathrik. Maybe you've been distant, but if it was still going, then that means so has Elle, and so he's just as much to blame." She plants a kiss on his chest for good measure in addition to the poking. "Why have you been distant with him?" she asks, because she wants to know, and Natalyah just asks these things.
“Talking with him’s been… strange since we enlisted,” Lathrik says, staring straight at the ceiling, a familiar, brooding expression beginning to surface. “For a while, he distanced from Ren, too. But Ren… he’s a nosy lad, and kept seekin’ him out anyway. Figured between Ren and the engineers, Elle was alright. Now I’m realizing, I don’t know that he was. It’s… hard not to take the blame. Earlier ye said Ren and Elle had me to watch over and look after them, but… did they?”
Natalyah pokes him again with a hard finger. "Yes. I know you, Lathrik 'First one in, last one out' Hazard Dinnsfield. If you had any reason to suspect that Elle was in trouble, you'd have acted. If Elle was hiding if he wasn't alright, it isn't on you to magically read his mind. Hana's been writing to him all this time, and she knows him as best as anyone, and she didn't mention anything about him being so deeply in trouble, and she would have," she argues, and blows a breath up at the shorter layers of her hair sticking to her forehead. "And he waited until he was off duty, so maybe what he needed was time alone, and what were you supposed to do differently about that?"
This gives Lathrik pause. “Are ye saying we should not go looking for him?”
"No, of course we're going looking for him," Natalyah says irritably as she scooches up his chest towards the crook of his neck, all drowsiness from earlier discarded. "If he wanted time alone, then he should have said. Now, he'll have to deal with us when we all show up." It comes out as more of a threat than anything.
"It would have been a lot easier if I'd been here sooner, where I might have had even a chance at following his scent, but I can still help. If we can narrow down the search area, I could pick up his scent. And to narrow down where to start searching just means asking everyone questions, and I'm very good at that," she asserts.
“With the mogu, Zandalari and Sha around, I only hope…” Lathrik frowns. “Hana. You mentioned Hana. If he’s stopped writing her, she may turn up here herself.”
"Then we'll have another tracker with us, and we'll be sure to find him all the faster, and he can give her an explanation she'd be owed all at once," Natalyah says firmly, already gathering momentum like a storm brewing on the horizon, with flashes of electrified energy.
Relaxation time is over. Hope Lathrik enjoyed his sum total of maybe twenty whole minutes of relaxation. Luxurious.
"We'll start at the platform so I can ask some questions myself, in case I catch something that hasn't been. It never hurts to have more than one approach, scientifically speaking. And we can pick up my luggage while we're at it. I mailed it all to myself, so wherever that is," Natalyah tells him. "And then depending on what we learn, I'll start sniffing around, just in case he didn't go as far as you might think. We will find him. After that, you can both make up whatever this distance has been."
“Detective ‘Talyah on the case,” Lathrik says, sitting up and reaching for his clothes. “Ren’ll have some insight as well, possibly the engineers, and even Snarley’s warmed to him, so she might have something. I’ll collect your things.”
Natalyah's pleasure at her titling vanishes instantly, as she is dislodged from her paladin pillow, who is now also dressing, both things that make her pout, even though she's the one who lit the fire of doing under him. She watches him grumpily, and simultaneously appreciatively, both expressions vying for supremacy on her face.
But, perhaps oddly telling, she doesn't argue or protest him collecting her things, that she could do it herself.
"Your reward will be that you won't have to sleep with Booktalyah on you tonight," she tells him, her tone rich and sweet as vanilla cream. "Because that's my place. And I'm coming back to it no matter what I find out for today."