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redisaid · 10 months ago

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Strangers - Part 1 of ??

A very special shoutout to @jujoobedoodling for their amazing art, and for sharing this neat little idea with me when I asked if there's any sort of fics they'd like to see.

So, fellas, is it gay to make Sylvaina fall in love over prison letters, in a nutshell? I dunno. Let's find out.

5146 Words

Read it on Ao3!

“I wasn’t expecting company.”

Jaina wants to assure her she didn't come to stare at her like she's some sabercat in a cage—teeth dulled on the bars, roar hoarse and failing. Only she realizes now that this is exactly why she's come. A wave of shame threatens to crash over her, but she dismisses it. She came to deliver Veressa’s letter, and to banish the notion that Sylvanas Windrunner truly was a stranger to her.

Staring at Sylvanas, waiting for her to rattle the bars of her would be cage, would do neither of those things for her.

“Certainly not you,” Sylvanas continues, drawling out the last word with her high, nasally elven accent, still chiming in a banshee double-tone.

They stand now in the Maw, where Jaina had been asked by her friend to draw an interdimensional portal to deliver a letter to her sister as only she and a handful of other mages on Azeroth could. Jaina had been reluctant to agree. She had refused at first, of course.

But here she was, all the same.

You, with that drawl and sneer and the arrow still aimed between her eyes, was about all that Jaina deserved from this woman. After all, Vereesa was right—at best, they were strangers.

“What is it you’ve come for? To deliver more demands from Tyrande? To report to her? To make sure I am completing my penance? Or did you come to gloat?”

The accusations pile up. Jaina lets them. She scans the tangle of strange and unnatural rocks jutting from the charcoal earth of this literal hell. It doesn’t take her long to realize she’s stumbled upon Sylvanas’ camp. Her home here in the Maw, simple, but well lived-in. The undead have no need for food or sleep and suffer minimally from lack of shelter, and while Jaina knows this, she still observes a makeshift bedroll, the embers of a dying fire, clustered close to a lean-to made mostly of chunks of dull grey metal, once the armor of some great beast or terrible construct long since vanished after its master’s defeat.

It has been a year on Azeroth. Jaina knows time stretches in the Shadowlands, but not by a factor of how much. She wonders how long it has been since Sylvanas has seen another person. Two years? A decade? A century?

The woman herself is little better than her camp. Her armor sits beside the fire, mostly shrugged off in rest, and while it looks well-kept, it is still worn. The dark leathers she wears beneath it, and now exclusively, are much the same. At first glance, they do not look so different as when she lay in Oribos after her own defeat, as Uther bade them to wait for her to wake and explain her actions. However, Jaina’s keen eyes find the rips and the tears, the mending that has been executed with scraps of grey cloth and grey metal and grey leather fashioned from the skin of a grey, doubly dead beast. Everything here is grey. Hell is devoid of color, but Sylvanas’ eyes burn into her, bright and blue, demanding an answer.

So she gives it, “None of those are my reason. Your sister, my friend…Vereesa asked me to come.”

Truly, Vereesa’s choices were limited. Only those who had walked the Maw, of their volition or Sylvanas’, could safely find it again. Only fewer of the great mages of Azeroth were capable of entering it without going through Oribos, or asking permission from the entities that ruled there. Jaina, Khadgar, and a few heroic Mawwalkers perhaps were the only ones who could have delivered this letter. And while Jaina had been reluctant, she was not about to offer Khadgar the excuse to use this place as another of his many distractions if Vereesa were to ask him instead.

At least, that was another one of her reasons for accepting.

Only now does the arrow lower, and the bow with it. At the mention of her sister’s name, Sylvanas gives up her fight.

“How can I trust her not to tear me apart, if we’re to be alone there?” Jaina had asked the youngest Windrunner sister, back in her office in Boralus, days ago.

“I suppose you can’t,” had been Vereesa’s answer. “You don’t know her.”

Jaina holds out the letter. It is folded neatly and sealed and she has done her best to resist the temptation to read it or even scry upon it with magic. Such is her trust for Vereesa. Her sister, not so much.

Perhaps this will be the end of it, then. She’ll deliver her letter. She’ll make arrangements for a response. She’ll leave. Sylvanas will go back to gathering souls, living even though she does not live, in this ramshackle camp—this prison of her own making. Jaina will have done something good and satisfied her curiosity. The sabercat will wither in her cage, having gained only further shame from her observation.

Jaina isn’t sure why she expects anything more than that, but she does.

“She wrote you a letter,” she explains. “I’m not able to bring her here like this for her to deliver it herself. Perhaps something can be arranged for her to visit by other means, if you’re interested.”

Sylvanas hesitates. Jaina watches her think.

She watches her closely, waiting for the muscles in her broad shoulders to twitch and aid in pointing her bow upward again. She finds more rends in her leathers, more attempts at mending. She watches, and finds a woman determined, though for what she isn’t certain.

Sylvanas Windrunner as she is now is a stranger to her. Once, her eyes burned red with rage and hatred and it was easy enough to say that Jaina had known her as an enemy. She and her Forsaken whispered, “Death to the living,” though they were of the same people Jaina had once led in Theramore—survivors of Lordaeron, as it were. Scarred in different ways by the same man.

Yet as before, even when Uther, dead and scarred by the same hand, bid Jaina to see reason and work with Sylvanas to defeat the Jailer, she cannot help but to fall into old habits. Magic pulses at her fingertips, waiting. She is ready for Sylvanas to attack her. She is ready to know her as an enemy once again.

This woman burned Teldrassil. She’d resurrected Derek to use against her. She’d blighted her own city in a rage rather than give it to the Alliance, to Jaina specifically, who had turned that battle in their favor.

Jaina is certain that this is still what she is—a burner and blighter, a screaming banshee that knows only hatred—and she’s ready for her.

She is not ready for Sylvanas to put down her bow and the arrow knocked within it, and begin to walk over to meet her.

She’s not ready for the soft muttering that follows, and the wry chuckle that comes with it, “I doubt Tyrande would allow me such a luxury as a visit from my sister.”

This is no banshee, no formless enemy. No, Sylvanas is an elf, still undead and still much unchanged from the last time Jaina saw her, but now walking toward her with purpose. She moves like Alleria, proud and powerful. She smirks a little, the same way as Vereesa does when she thinks no one is looking. Her hair, though dull and ashen in death, is a shade between Alleria’s honey gold and Vereesa’s cool silver.

“You’re so certain she’s changed?” Jaina had asked Vereesa before she’d left. “You were only allowed to speak with her for a few minutes.”

“I know my sister, Jaina,” Vereesa had replied, head tilted upward, smiling. “I know that I have her back, or I will, should she ever be allowed to return home.”

Where is home, Jaina wonders, holding out the letter, to a woman who died for her country, and razed the one she built out of the ashes of a nation everyone else abandoned?

If and when she completes her penance, who will want Sylvanas Windrunner, burner of trees, blighter of cities? Manipulated or not, she did these things. No amount of souls ferried to better places can change that. And while Vereesa claims much, she cannot move the inevitable mountains that will stand in her way if she chooses to defend her sister, to make a home for her in Azeroth again one day.

The dip of Sylvanas’ head upon her graceful neck seems to say to Jaina that she knows this. The way she holds up her hands, bare and long-fingered without any gloves or gauntlets to cover them, tells Jaina she knows what she is to her—an enemy still. A problem unwanted, surely.

But still, Jaina had agreed to come here. She is determined to make sure that the reason for it all was not as simple as gawking at a toothless beast, though Sylvanas doesn’t seem as though she will bite.

She takes the letter from her. She looks to her. She waits.

“I can’t speak for Tyrande, or any authority Oribos and its contingent might have on the matter,” Jaina tells her. “But I can deliver a reply, if you want.”

Now this close to her, Jaina can tell Sylvanas is taller than her sisters. More broad-shouldered like Alleria than slight as Vereesa is, bordering between both of them with the elder’s wildness and Vereesa’s well-manicured elven beauty. She is neither and both, but seems to have maintained some semblance of grooming, despite having no one to look nice for. Her hair is combed and neat. She is clean, with only the barest hint of the grey dust and ash that swirls in the air of this place clinging to her skin.

That grey, at least, is warm in nature, and Sylvanas’ is cold, more toward purple. Their meeting is an interesting contrast of hues.

“Very well,” she answers, one long finger tracing the seal on the letter as she eyes it. “I would offer you tea while you wait, but I have no such thing.”

While she waits. Jaina hadn’t assumed she’d be allowed to, asked to, or really anything but run off with sneers and insults at best, arrows at worst.

She supposes that if she hadn’t seen another person in a year, she too would want them to stay a while, no matter who they were. But has it been longer? The state of Sylvanas’ clothes says yes.

Jaina endeavors to break any falling of awkward silence to seek the answer, “It has been a year or so, on Azeroth, since I returned from the Shadowlands. Has it been the same for you?”

She stiffens, recalling who it was who brought her here the first time, though she saw little of Sylvanas then. Only the Mawsworn that were meant to hold her captive, and keep her from escaping Torghast, though she managed to do so several times. Jaina knows now that her purpose in doing so was just to keep her out of the way—to keep her from interfering with what was to be done with Anduin.

Anduin, another reason for her to come here. Yet she did not find him. The Maw is but one of many possible places the boy could have gone, though he’s hardly a boy anymore. Jaina knows what he did and was made to do weighs heavily on him. She’d thought that maybe he too would seek penance, and wouldn’t care if it was his own to seek, yet there is no sign of him here. This camp is meant only for one.

“There is no day or night here for me to know,” Sylvanas tells her as she slides a sharp-looking fingernail beneath the wax seal and opens the letter. “One could keep track by counting the hours, I suppose, but trust me, it is a dull pastime. It has been a long time. A very long time.”

A long time, Jaina thinks, to wear the same clothes and see no one but lost souls.

A spectral fluttering of wings catches her eye and reminds her that Sylvanas does have one other companion besides the souls she ferries. Dori’thur’s wide eyes catch Jaina’s as she looks up into the canopy formed by this tangle of rock, ironically almost nest-like. The owl spirit makes no motion to acknowledge her, so carefully does she watch her charge instead. Doomed or honored to be her warden, Jaina can’t decide. The owl, it seems, does not care either way. She just watches.

Sylvanas follows her gaze, and a little smile creaks its way into lips that seem to forget how to bend that way. “Don’t mind the owl. It loves to stare.”

“She. Dori’thur,” Jaina corrects.

Sylvanas’ blue eyes are wide for a moment, drinking in the information in a way that shows it is clearly new to her. No one bothered to tell her the name of her warden, really?

“I didn’t know,” Sylvanas confesses. “And here I’ve just been calling you owl this whole time,” she calls up at the spire of twisted stone that Dori’thur perches on.

The spirit cocks her head just slightly at Sylvanas, the first and only acknowledgement she gives.

Jaina stands for a moment, maybe two. She looks around at the humble camp, the spectral owl, the once fearsome undead elf in her ragged leathers, reading her letter with blue eyes that look strange on her.

Sylvanas looks up once Jaina’s gaze comes to rest on her. Her long brows furrow briefly, simmering in the awkwardness, the wrongness of this.

They have never met, despite all the things they both share and do not share, in a way that allowed them the luxury of quiet conversation. And despite the nagging curiosity that dragged her here, the continued insistence by Vereesa that she did not know her, or least as anything but an enemy, Jaina does not know what to say to her.

So instead, she offers, “I can go, and return after a time to allow you your privacy.”

Sylvanas nearly drops the letter. She takes a step toward her. She catches herself and does not take a second. She reaches out a bare and empty hand to Jaina, then drops it to her side immediately upon realizing what she’s done.

“No. No,” she says, trying to make the words come out not as a plea, but anything else. “A while for you is longer for me. I would—I would rather be as prompt as possible, you understand. I have my penance to work on, still more souls to guide. I don’t have time to wait around for you to return here.”

It is a poor excuse, and they both know it. They know it in the silence between the ask Sylvanas isn’t actually asking and the reply Jaina struggles to give. They know it in the way Sylvanas reaches for her, a woman she does not know in any other way but an enemy, and apparent friend to her younger sister and her owl warden, because she and her letter and her excuses for delivering it are the only reason she’s had any contact with something remotely like herself in a long, long time.

Jaina is living and breathing and human and annoyed, but curious. She is not undead and newly made whole of soul again, though she supposes that’s not so new anymore. She knows, though, that she cannot possibly understand what it is Sylvanas is thinking as she reaches for her. But still, she reaches.

Jaina does not leave. “I will wait then.”

Where she will wait is the question, really, and she sees Sylvanas ask it of herself too as she looks back toward her camp. Still, she gestures for Jaina to follow her.

It is a strange time she lives in, Jaina thinks, as she does.

And this is how she ends up seated on a stool of chipped rock, across the dying fire from where Sylvanas sits on her bed roll, reading her letter.

Sylvanas is undead and does not need a bed or a stool or a fire. Her owl warden is a spirit of nature and needs no comforts as well. Yet Sylvanas has made them, and taken the time to make them. She reads and sits cross-legged like a child. Jaina’s eyes pick at her leathers still, finding more wear and tear as she reads, counting the patches and stitches. It irks her. For some reason, of all the things, the state of her clothes bothers Jaina the most.

She’s never seen Sylvanas in anything other than fine armor, meant to intimidate as much as it was to impress. And while she still has fine armor, stacked neatly by the fire in her rest, Jaina can see that too is worn.

“Do you want new things?” Jaina eventually asks. She can’t stand the silence any longer, though from the rustling of the second of four pages, she knows Sylvanas isn’t done reading.

Sylvanas looks up. Her blue eyes dart from Jaina to her armor and herself. To the contrast of warm grey dust and cool grey skin. The mended rips and tears of her leathers match the similar state of her skin. Scars abound as little pale points and lines, streaking across her like stars in the night sky. Just barely visible at the tip of her sternum, beneath the dark leather, a gnarled and twisting point belies the deep scar where Frostmourne rent her and stole her soul, for the first time.

Sylvanas seems disturbed by the question, or perhaps by her own appearance. Maybe both. “I have done the best I could to maintain what I was given.”

“I didn’t mean to criticize,” Jaina tells her immediately, because this is the line she must draw and draw right away, regardless of how many cities this woman may have burned, or under whose influence she burned them. “It’s just—well, with Vereesa’s help, I’m sure, we could get you new things.”

“She has not mentioned this in her letter thus far,” Sylvanas says, holding up the paper as if it were the armor she so desperately seems to want to hide within now.

“She has not seen you,” Jaina tells her.

And I do not know you, she tells herself.

Jaina does not know her, but she knows the scars that form the map of the stars that make up her skin. She knows which is Frostmourne, which is the line under her eye from Saurfang’s ax at the Mak’gora. She knows there’s another from an ice lance she’s thrown, yes there, near her left elbow where there was a gap in her old skull armor.

She can feel that Sylvanas wants to shrink under her gaze, to disappear. But she does not. She sits up a little, chest out, daring Jaina to say something else.

“Then I’ll draft a list in my reply, and trust that you’ll explain the reasoning behind it,” Sylvanas offers in challenge.

“I will.”

Dori’thur, thankfully, chooses this time to swoop down and alight herself onto the top of Sylvanas’ lean-to, rather than leave them to simmer in silence again.

The owl looks between them, then at the paper in Sylvanas’ hands. Sylvanas, having gone back to reading, simply says, “Not for you, owl.”

“Dori’thur,” Jaina reminds.

“Not for you, Dori’thur. What an odd name,” Sylvanas notes, but says nothing else.

“Does she leave you to report to Tyrande?” Jaina wonders, watching both the owl and her charge now.

“That would require her to stop watching me, so no. I do not know how or if Tyrande knows what she sees. Frankly, it matters little to me. I have said that I will do what was asked of me. I do not need a babysitter to ensure that I do,” Sylvanas tells her.

Though Jaina catches something in the middle of her words. A brief dashing of blue eyes. Another little smirk, elven and wry and lopsided in such a way that’s distinctly Windrunner. She wonders who was the first to hold it. Alleria? Their mother or father? Or a Windrunner before them? An elf so ancient Jaina struggles with the numbers.

All she knows is that Sylvanas seems to enjoy the company of her warden, in a way. And that her little secret smile is something Jaina never thought she’d see on that face.

Objectively, dead and haunted and guilty as she is, she’s beautiful still. All the Windrunners are, after all.

Sylvanas is looking up at her again, expecting Jaina to challenge that notion. She’s probably expecting her to question this camp, this fire, these small comforts. The time she takes to mend her ragged clothes. The rest she dares to seek from time to time, though there are no days or nights here in the Maw to track it by.

Jaina clears her throat. “How goes it then, your work?” she asks, and nearly immediately regrets it for how silly that sounds.

How goes it, rounding up the souls you doomed to an eternity of torture? How goes it, making up for decisions that were not entirely yours, but still part and parcel wishes of your own? How goes it, living in the prison of your own failures, alone save for an owl that does nothing but stare at you?

There is a justice in this, yes. Jaina wants to sink into that and never leave. It is easier to feel like this is justice in action she’s seeing. The tedium and wear of it all are things Sylvanas deserves to endure. She deserves worse, depending on who is asking.

But the woman in front of her looks tired. She is as worn as her clothing, body as stiff and rigid as her defensive words.

Jaina will not deny her the comfort a fire and a rest might bring, now and then, though she doesn’t understand why Sylvanas seeks them. Either way, demanding she go without is a cruelty beyond necessity.

“It goes,” Sylvanas answers. “There are still many more for me to find. Torghast alone will take countless more visits to empty. The Beast Warrens are a maze I’ve still yet to properly map and account for, among other such haunts in this hellish place.”

She does not say more. She reads. Jaina watches. Dori’thur too. Sylvanas sneaks a glance at her every now and then, blue eyes flitting fast over the edge of the parchment, then back below it.

Jaina waits, as she said she would.

Sylvanas Windrunner is a stranger to her, but invited her to what home she had here all the same.

“I miss her,” Vereesa had told her, before she left. “I thought the sister I knew was gone, but I know now that she’s still herself, or is now, at least. I had mourned her, Jaina. I had mourned her for years, but now I can say that I miss her. She’s not gone, she’s just not here. And I don’t know when she’ll be back. You can’t blame me for trying.”

Jaina didn’t blame her.

Flipping to page three of Vereesa’s loopy handwriting, Sylvanas says, “I must look a sight to you, for you to say something about the state of my gear.”

Jaina corrects herself. She does not know Sylvanas, but she knew one thing about her, well, about who she once was. She was notoriously vain, and though Vereesa claimed this was exaggerated, she was known to repeatedly tell a story about how Sylvanas had screamed at her once for getting mud on her dress right as she was headed out the door for a Ranger ball, like she thought it was the funniest thing in the world.

And Jaina has just come here to her prison, the first other person she’s seen in gods know how long, handed her a letter, and told she looked a mess.

“It just seems to have been some time, that’s all,” Jaina assures her.

Sylvanas huffs a laugh she hides behind parchment, just like the odd blue of her eyes. Jaina struggles to replace it with the red of her memories.

“If there’s anything else you want, such that I could carry with me through a portal, then ask it,” Jaina offers, perhaps out of guilt.

Perhaps out of curiosity again, for what this woman might ask for. What comforts she might crave.

Sylvanas eyes her at this statement. It seems this is the first time she really takes Jaina in, perhaps to assess her intentions, or perhaps to assess how much she can carry. Jaina isn’t sure. But she knows she now feels like that sabercat in the cage. She wonders if Sylvanas still thinks she has her teeth.

She thinks, perhaps, that she doesn’t want the judgment of a virtually immortal and beautiful elf. Undead though she is, scarred and worn, she thinks Sylvanas might have plenty of criticisms to offer over her messy braid, the prudish nature and drab colors of her Kul Tiran garb, or the crows feat that have begun to claw in earnest at the dull blue of Jaina’s eyes, which only glow when she shows her real teeth.

Instead of worrying about that, Jaina wonders what she might ask for, if she were to spend potential centuries in hell doing penance. Something to pass the time. Playing cards, perhaps? Though Solitaire would get old quickly, and Dori’thur doesn’t look like she’d be much competition at Hearthstone. An instrument to play? Surely those nimble fingers of Sylvanas’ would be clever on a lute or lyre or something elven and haughty and old. Jaina had never learned to play anything with proficiency in all of her thirty-eight years of life, but might come out of such a situation fairly talented at the fiddle or flute. Her brothers would be impressed, surely.

But what would Sylvanas do, to pass the time, in her idle moments? Would she fletch arrows for game that didn’t exist, and flesh she didn’t need to eat, enemies already defeated? Would she sharpen the shortsword Jaina could see resting in its scabbard beside the fire on a whetstone until it was honed and wicked, only to have nothing to plunge it into?

Would Jaina ever be able to consider anything but war-like interests for her, even as she saw Sylvanas considering her from her bedroll, shoulders bare, hair loose, clearly not ready for any sort of battle?

“Paper,” she answers. “Ink and a few quills too, if you’d be so generous.”

Paper was not anywhere close to the answer Jaina thought she’d give.

Sylvanas holds the letter up again as her armor, her shield, her weapon. “Vereesa has asked me to reply, for us to continue to correspond. I wish to write her back.”

“Right, that’s easy enough,” Jaina agrees.

“What was that hesitation? Afraid I’ll draw up plans for world domination upon my eventual return? I’m not interested, truly. Believe me, Proudmoore, it’s not worth it,” Sylvanas assures her.

There is mischief in those secret smiles. A spark in glowing blue eyes that dares Jaina to challenge it, but in the way a child challenges her friend to a foot race. A craving for competition, maybe, in any form, or companionship on the barest of levels.

“Jaina,” she corrects her. “If I am to continue to deliver said letters, as it were, you might as well call me Jaina. And I didn’t think you had your sights set so lofty, but thanks for clarifying.”

Sylvanas nods to this. “So many names have I earned today. Though I’ll still call Dori’thur ‘owl’. Osa is the Thalassian word. It has more punch, right, osa?”

Dori’thur cocks her head just slightly at the term, then slowly blinks her large eyes.

“Very astute, thank you for adding so much to the conversation, as always,” Sylvanas sighs.

Jaina supposes that she too, would talk to a silent owl, if she were left alone for so long. She would probably go insane long before her clothes began to wear out, if it were her.

“Either way, I’ll continue to deliver your letters,” Jaina assures her. “I hadn’t realized this was a more than once sort of favor I’m doing, but I suppose I should have.”

“I’d say Vereesa is lucky to befriend such a powerful mage and be able to make such inane requests of her, but she always did like mages,” Sylvanas notes, going back to reading and flipping to the final page of Vereesa’s letter.

This time, though, the smile stays on her face too long to be a secret. Long enough for Jaina to watch her get lost in a memory, maybe two, and still come out smiling.

Smiling at her sister, a fondness beyond ages and time and dimensions and death—and the reason, perhaps, why Vereesa felt compelled to write to her, and send her friend to check on her.

“Tea,” Sylvanas mutters, eyes still glued to the parchment.

“Padron?”

“Bring tea when you come back,” Sylvanas tells her.

“What kind do you like?” Jaina asks, uncertain. She didn’t think undead drank.

Even if they did, she wouldn’t know the answer. Vereesa likes chamomile, sometimes. She doesn’t really drink tea. Alleria, well, Jaina has never seen Alleria drink anything but alcohol and would be afraid to ask if had any other preferences for more sober sorts of beverages.

“Whatever kind you like. It’s not for me,” Sylvanas says.

“Are you telling me that you’d like me to bring tea for myself when I come back?” Jaina asks, needing desperately for something about this request to be clear to her.

Sylvanas laughs her little laugh. It sounds like it’s been sanded down, worn like the caged sabercat’s teeth, like tattered leathers.

“I suppose I am. I don’t want to be a bad host, but I’m afraid all I have to offer here are rocks and broken war machines and wandering souls. None of these are fit to drink, or to give to company.”

Company. Jaina hadn’t expected to be company to her. She hadn’t expected the hidden smiles and weary laughs and how Sylvanas had tried to cover the desperation in the way she reached out after her. She hadn’t expected to find her nestled in a little camp, forging a mockery of a life that had long been stolen from her and the comforts of living she no longer needed, but clearly still craved.

Jaina isn’t sure. She doesn’t know anymore. She didn’t, even as she first cast the portal spell this morning that would take her to the Maw. She was curious. She still is.

But company, she supposes, is a thing she can try to be.

#sylvaina #sylvanas windrunner #jaina proudmoore #fanfic #count me surprised to be this intrigued by a post-shadowlands premise but ok here we go

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