Work Text:
Lor'themar had said it twice already.
Once when Liadrin had first raised the subject in the Sanctum of Light, her voice low and careful in the way she used when she believed herself to be diplomatic, and once again when she had followed him through the city and up to Sunfury Spire and through the halls into his office.
"My answer has not changed."
And now a third, tired time as she closed the door behind her as though the conversation were simply not finished. As though his answer were a position that could be eroded given sufficient time and the right application of pressure.
She had always been persistent.
It was one of the qualities he had spent the most years admiring and the most years resenting in her in equal measure.
Lor'themar stood with his back to Liadrin, who was positioned near the doorway with her arms folded beneath her pauldrons, standing with that perfect soldier posture she had long instilled in her blood knights.
Across the chamber stood Thalyssra, who had been present before either of them had arrived and who now observed the exchange from the far edge of the room with the composed discretion of someone who understood perfectly well that this particular conversation did not yet belong to her.
Lor'themar himself stood at the narrow window that overlooked the Bazaar far below, watching the late afternoon light turn the white stonework amber.
It was a view he had stood before many times. It had carried him through darker days than this one.
Today it offered no comfort at all.
"It is foolish to refuse to meet with her," Liadrin said at last, and although her voice remained controlled it carried the unmistakable strain of someone working very hard to keep frustration from sharpening the edges of her words. "The Amani could offer us a vital force in our fight against the Void. I am not asking you to extend them an invitation into the Horde, but right now, we need all the allies we can get, Lor'themar."
A brief pause followed her words.
Lor'themar heard the small shift of Liadrin's armour as she moved, not closer to him, but rather the restless movement of someone who would rather be in motion than stuck in a disagreement long stilled.
"I know there is much still to be fixed between our nations," she continued. "I know there is blood spilt that can never be repaid. But can you not put that aside, when the fate of our world hangs in the balance? The fate of your people?"
The word your landed with particular precision. Liadrin had always known that the most effective way to reach him was through Silvermoon. Lor'themar had very few vulnerabilities left after everything he had endured, but she had catalogued each of them over decades of shared history with the ruthless efficiency of an elf who had not survived everything she had survived by being careless.
"This conversation is over, Lady Liadrin."
He did not raise his voice. He had been speaking in that register for twenty years - the flat, toneless declaration that brooked nothing, invited nothing, closed the door and locked it and swallowed the key. He had used it in war councils and on battlefields and in the long, grinding years spent rebuilding a shattered kingdom from the bones of its dead. It was a register his fellow leaders in the Horde respected. A register his advisors obeyed. A register his enemies had learned, eventually, to recognise.
But, in truth, Liadrin had always been stubbornly impervious to it.
"Zul'jarra has extended an olive branch through me - through my role as her hash'ura - and I tell you now that this is not a gesture she makes lightly," Liadrin shook her head. "She is not her grandfather, Lor'themar. She has worked for something different for the Amani, and she is willing to--"
"I know what she is working toward," he said. His voice remained flat. The Bazaar below was filling slowly with the end-of-day crowd, merchants closing stalls, civilians moving in small clusters toward the residential districts. Life seemed to go on, even as the skies above their city spelled out their doom. "My answer has not changed."
"You are being unreasonable."
It was not the word itself. The word itself was unremarkable. It was not even the slight elevation in her voice that came with it, or the familiar quality of exasperation that he had known in her for decades, the exasperation of an elf who knew him better than most. It was none of that. Lor'themar could not have said, afterward, what it was exactly.
Whatever it was, something in him flared with anger and did not go out.
"Do you want to know why I won't face her, Liadrin?" He moved when he spoke, and in his face, judging from Liadrin's reaction when he faced her at last, was an expression he had not intended to wear in front of anyone. "Why I can't?"
That last word had been spat rather than spoken.
Liadrin took a half-step back. He watched it happen - the fractional retreat of a warrior who had not expected to need her reflexes in a private office - and some part of him noted it with a distant, ugly satisfaction.
"Lor'themar--"
"Whenever I look at her," he said, and his voice was not flat now, not level, it was something else entirely, something pulled up from a depth he had spent considerable years ensuring was inaccessible, "all I see is him."
For a moment the memory rose with such clarity that the present blurred at its edges.
He forced himself to keep speaking.
"When she speaks, all I hear is him." He watched Liadrin's expression change and kept going anyway. "I remember every moment of it. His blade slicing across my skin. I remember his hands."
Lor'themar's own hand had curled against the edge of the table beside him without him noticing.
His knuckles were white.
"I can still feel the weight of them. I can still feel his fingers working into my wound, coating themselves in what was inside me, and hear the sound he made while he did it."
He had not meant to say the last part.
Liadrin had gone very still.
"I see her warpaint. Red upon her skin, and I cannot..." Lor'themar held Liadrin's gaze and he did not look away, because this was the part she had asked for, this was what she had pushed until she had reached. Let her have it, then. Let her see what was underneath the locked door. "All I can think about is how my own blood looked. Wet and glistening, as he painted it upon himself. Upon his skin. My blood, reduced to paint."
The office was very quiet.
"All she is," Lor'themar said after a long moment, "in my eyes - all she will ever be - is the blood of Zul'jin. And for that, I will never make peace."
The words hung in the air between them. Liadrin stood very still, her jaw set.
"Lady Liadrin." Thalyssra's voice was quiet, and her hand was suddenly on his arm - and when had she crossed the room? Her fingers settled there with the particular kind of pressure that was not restraint and not comfort and was somehow both. He looked down at it before he looked up at her - the contrasting pale silver-blue of her fingers against the shining gold of his pauldron. "Perhaps you should go and check on those at the Sunwell. It has been a long day."
A beat of silence from the doorway.
"I--" The edge was gone from Liadrin's voice. He did not look at her. He was counting Thalyssra's fingers against his arm and concentrating on the rhythm of his own breathing, on the specific technical work of keeping himself inside the room. "Yes, I... I suppose you are right, Thalyssra."
A pause. A stillness.
"Lor'themar."
He assumed there had been a nod of acknowledgement to accompany his name.
He did not look up to see it.
He did not look up because looking up would have required more from him than he had left, and some small part of him was still doing the accounting of what tonight would cost him, what sleep he would not get, what his body would do with itself in the dark hours when there was nothing to distract him from the memories that still haunted him from decades ago.
The door opened. The door closed.
He stood in the silence that followed, and Thalyssra's hand did not move, and he did not ask it to.
The light through the window had shifted. The Bazaar below was quieter. Lor'themar had moved away from the window at some point - he did not precisely remember when - and was standing near his desk without having sat behind it, one hand resting on its surface among the accumulated papers that accompanied his title of Regent Lord, the letters and trade agreements and tactical reports that constituted the weight of the world he had been handed all so many years ago.
Thalyssra had not moved far. She stood a few feet away with her arms loose at her sides, watching him with the expression she wore when she was contemplating something carefully.
He looked up at her.
She raised an eyebrow.
He read her expression without any difficulty. "Don't tell me," he said, "you're going to ask me to meet with that troll too."
He had intended it to land lightly. It did not. It came out sounding like exactly what it was - a preemptive deflection, a door swinging closed again - and by the way Thalyssra's expression shifted, she recognised it as exactly such.
She was quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet she employed when she was choosing words the way he might choose a blade - carefully selecting whatever was needed for the specific kind of damage the situation called for.
"When my people look at me," she said at last, "do you think they see Elisande?"
Lor'themar stilled.
"When your people look at you--" her voice did not waver or soften, but there was something in it, something careful and precise that was not cruelty and was certainly not pity, but was something far more difficult to manage than either - "do you think they see Kael'thas?"
That name - Kael'thas - fell the way it always fell. Like a stone dropped into the stillest of waters.
He was aware, distantly, of the muscles in his jaw tightening. Aware of the old, familiar clench in his chest that came with that name, that legacy and the dark shadow it had become that had hung over Silvermoon through years of rebuilding - the beautiful, golden face of a prince whose betrayal had become the thing people whispered about when they thought the Regent Lord could not hear, the shape of a failure that had preceded him and which he had inherited and which he had spent the better part of two decades trying to build a legacy outside of.
He thought of the doubt he had seen, early in his regency, in the eyes of people who loved their city and had learned, through catastrophic ruin, not to trust the word of those who led it. The cautious murmurs of citizens who had already followed one leader into ruin and were uncertain whether the next would prove any wiser.
He thought of Liadrin, in those early years. How she had looked at him.
"Lor'themar." Thalyssra said quietly.
He remained very still.
"You know as well as I that we are not those who came before us." Thalyssra paused, but Lor'themar did not speak. After a moment, she continued, "and as such, Zul'jarra is not her grandfather."
She let the statement settle. That was Thalyssra's way. She was not Liadrin, pressing and arguing and forcibly building her case brick by brick. She simply said what needed to be said and let it occupy the space it occupied and waited for him to decide what to do with it. "She is not the one you hate."
Outside, somewhere in the Bazaar, a bell rang the hour. The sound carried up through the window and into the room between them, thin and clear and ordinary.
"Zul'jarra is not the one who hurt you, Lor'themar."
Lor'themar thought: And yet, she is. Because all she is, in my eyes, is the blood of Zul'jin.
He had meant it when he said it. And he still meant it.
And Thalyssra was right.
Both things were true, and the space between them was where he would have to live, if he chose to act as the Regent Lord rather than the elf beneath that title.
He exhaled through his nose. A small, controlled sound.
Thalyssra was still watching him, her arms now folded, her expression patient in the way that was not passive - the patience of someone who had waited out worse and knew how long these things took.
"You are right," he said at last. His voice came out quieter than he had intended, stripped of the register he'd been using all afternoon. "As you always seem to be, my love."
She unfolded her arms and came to stand beside him at the desk, and her shoulder was against his, and she did not ask him to commit to anything, or to spontaneously be a better version of himself by morning.
Outside, the Bazaar bells rang again.
"I'll... consider it," Lor'themar said.
Three simple words.
Three words from an elf still standing inside his own damage, extending, from that place, the minimum required gesture toward what came next.
Thalyssra's hand moved to his, her fingers settling between his with the ease of long familiarity.
Lor'themar remained standing, and he did not feel anything close to healed, and did not feel absolved, but he was, nonetheless, still standing.