#andaeros

With a soft sigh, she pulled her robe around her as she sat by where the lingering fire remained for warmth, she stared up at the sky. Settling back onto a hand, she simply gazed into the dark nothingness that lingered and hung like a glorious tapestry. Sometimes she wished the sky would simply devour her. Swallow her up and make her disappear, so she wouldn't have to face herself and the sometimes foolish ways she responded to things.

It hadn't always been like that, of course. Once upon a time she didn't really care what people thought of her. Once upon a time she had been unapologetic, very selfish, and placed no one above herself. It wasn't to say that she didn't still do similar things. On the contrary, Laeynna remained as self-preserving as she ever had been, often under the impression that those around her would be more likely to hurt her than they would to be a supportive role in her life. She had no one to blame for that except herself, of course. She had once been an awful person who deserved that. No shortage of enemies. No shortage of people she had used and disposed of when they were no longer practical to her. No shortage of others she had promptly stepped on just to rise another tier of whatever made up ladder she was trying to ascend.

Had she thought Andaeros might do the same? In the beginning, yes. She had also assumed that his affections were fleeting. Convenient. That she was a momentary plaything for him. She had thought it for so long, in fact, that she had braced herself for that impact. Just assumed it was an inevitability. She hadn't really believed she was good for anything long-term and she had told him that as long as he had want for her, as long as he had need for her, that he would find her at his side. But she'd always assumed that one day he would wake up and decide that was it for him. That he had found the end of the pathway they were travelling together and it was time for them to go in different directions.

She’d thought it would happen in Silverpine originally. Then she thought it would happen shortly after moving in with him. She thought it would happen when he came back after his extended job that kept them divided. And she thought it would happen around the time that she cut her hair and let it return to that moonlight blonde colour it was naturally.

Yet he remained. Yet he still wanted her. But was it her he wanted or some concoction of her that he had drafted in his mind? How did he know that the ‘her’ he wanted was the real one? Wasn't it possible that… it wasn't? And what if she just sabotaged herself again? Every time she got close to something like Andaeros, like happiness, like comfort, Laeynna had managed to proverbially set the entire thing on fire. In fact, she had tried multiple times to sabotage her relationship with him intentionally. Perhaps out of a misplaced idea of doing what she thought was in his best interests, though she couldn't have possibly made that determination and it was insulting of her to even try. A lot of it was out of fear. More fear than any kind of self-perceived altruism.

Born a coward. She'd die a coward.

Andaeros called her strong. He'd said it so many times before. That for all she'd been through, for how she survived it, for acknowledging what she'd had to do to be where she was today, that she was resilient. She never felt strong or resilient. He wasn't necessarily wrong. She just… She could only see herself the way she did. She doubted she'd ever see herself kindly. She definitely would never see herself the way he did.

Pulling her thumb over the beautiful ring he'd bestowed upon her at the lake's edge, Laeynna's gaze dropped down to her hand where it graced her third finger. And now he wanted to marry her. They'd talked about it. When she thought he was either dead or simply having chosen not to return, they'd had to. Laeynna couldn't keep herself together the way she thought she could have. If something happened to him, she needed to know how to move forward and she wasn't even certain that she could. For all that she had tried to keep herself at a distance, for all that she had tried to remain somewhat emotionally detached, that hadn't been possible. She supposed that wasn't how hearts worked, though. There was no controlling something like that. In the same way that surely, Andaeros couldn't have controlled falling in love with her either or the undeniable pull he'd had to her when initially they'd met, despite the repercussions that came from just such a connection.

Talking about marriage, about a future, was entirely different than having it set in front of her. At the time, it had been a… A turbulent conversation. But the feelings they had were just as turbulent. Not for any lack of affection between them, but ideas like marriage and family were weighted and prominent. Terrifying for them both. Andaeros had loved once, a deep, intense, very devotional love. He had poured all of himself into it, and the results had devastated him. They'd practically hollowed him out, leaving him to be a shell of a man. Opening his heart to Laeynna had been no simple feat for him.

He had feared living with her. He had feared any kind of a future with her. She'd understood that. It was so much a part of the reason that she had assumed they would never find themselves where they were now. She never wanted to push him or to feel pressured. She'd never wanted him to think she was giving him an ultimatum. On the contrary, she had decided that when he had enough of her, she would quietly vanish from his life, perhaps like she had never been there at all.

And that would have been it for her. Love had been a… a frightfully unkind thing for her. Distressing and unpleasant in many ways. The kind of experience where she had felt more intensely than she could have endured. For a woman who didn't much like feeling anything except a lot of anger, love, compassion, devotion, those were clumsy things that contained an intensity she didn't know how to wield with grace or eloquence. Where she had found herself wondering if all of that turmoil, all of those nights in wine bottles had been worth it, she had still put herself through it. For him.

Maybe that was why he'd wanted to marry her to begin with. Maybe to him that was the amount of devotion he needed. Maybe seeing her shoulder all of that had encouraged him to understanding that Laeynna was a woman of her word. That she wasn't exactly fickle or short-lived and fleeting with her affections. A romance with Laeynna was never going to be a simple one or a singular night. But perhaps neither of them had realised it at the time. Certainly, that had become apparent as days and nights dwindled onward.

She could have theorised until she turned every colour in the rainbow and would have been no closer to the truth. Admiring her ring, the amethyst stone so perfectly set. The twisting of vines. The dark colour of the ring itself. It was a beautiful, sombre thing. He'd picked the perfect ring for her. No. More than that. The amethyst was the stone she had said she'd liked the most. It was the stone she'd given to him. And here it was, completing the cycle and returning to her. In the craftsmanship of this ring, Andaeros had thought of little else other than her. How terrifyingly lovely.

Did she deserve it? That certainly was a question. No. She didn’t think so. After all of the back and forth? After how difficult it had been, at times, for Andaeros to get her to communicate with him? Even now, instead of talking with him about her feelings and her concerns, she was sitting out in the dark, chilly night, mulling over them. He’d repeatedly tried to remind her that the burdens in life were meant to be shared. That joy and sorrow alike should have been shouldered together. That she didn’t need to be so caught up in what he felt he ‘needed’ to do rather than what he ‘wanted’ to do.

He didn’t need her, after all. He wanted her. She wondered, for a moment at least, did she require being needed? What was the difference between those two ideas, really? A need was a… compulsory thing. A want was more important, perhaps, for it incorporated the true sentiment. A need could be unhealthy. Certainly a want in excess could be as well, but it came down to where each feeling originated from.

Laeynna sighed and that breath, as so many others had before it, disappeared into the world around her, swallowed up by black darkness.

She’d always worry. About everything. If she was good enough. Worthy. Deserving. If she was who he really wanted. If she was who really was meant to be in this spot here and now. She’d wanted so badly to change the way she approached life. The way she approached her own perception of self. She’d tried, certainly. Tried not to care how others might have thought of her. Tried not to create some self-perceived reality. Tried to be more outgoing and conversational. She was always trying. And she was often trying so hard that it was exhausting and taxing. 

If she didn’t think it was obvious, she was wrong. People always knew when others were trying, especially when they were trying too intensely.

At the same time, was it a crime to want to be liked? Was it a crime to want a place to belong? Was it a crime to want friends, joy, happiness, safety, and security? If everyone else in the world could have those things, why didn’t she feel like she deserved the same thing? And certainly there were worse men and women than her, those who had committed terrible atrocities, and likely they still had their own circle of support.

Were her flaws so terrible that she felt like she was doomed to a life of solitude?

No. Of course not. Laeynna Emberflame or Zinnvais Luridveil, no matter what name one used to refer to her, was no more or less flawed than anyone else. It was a difficult thing for her to see, but somewhere in her head, she knew that she deserved more. That she had every right to chase after more, to claim more, to speak up and say she wanted more. Knowing it and acknowledging it were really the first steps, weren’t they?

So she deserved happiness with Andaeros. Would she bring him happiness? By his reckoning, she already did. He wouldn’t have asked for her hand if he didn’t want her damn hand in marriage. She didn’t know how to be a wife, however. Definitely didn’t know how to be married.

In her younger years, plenty of girls she’d known had their betrothals, all a bunch of complicated relationships where there was no love. Instead, they performed their duties as was expected of them and hosted myriad affairs on the side. Laeynna didn’t want that. Not for either of them. The only real marriage she had seen in practise was between her parents. Reknon and Seilahs were betrothed as well and sometimes it seemed like one loved the other. She’d heard it said from time to time in younger years when she and Ankalei were growing up together. Just saying it, however, didn’t necessarily make it true. Laeynna couldn’t remember a single time seeing either of them actually be in love with one another.

Although she supposed there was a difference between just loving someone and being in love with someone, only further complicated by the notion that there were so many different types of love. 

But if she didn’t know how a proper, healthy, constructive marriage was supposed to go, how could she be involved with one? How could she properly love Andaeros as his wife if she didn’t know how a wife was supposed to properly love a husband? Maybe she was just supposed to keep doing what she was doing. What if it wasn’t enough, though?

What she did know was that the more she spun around in this proverbial circle, fearing the unknown, and assuming she didn’t have the emotional fortitude, the only person she was really going to hurt was Andaeros. Hurting herself? Sure. She’d done it for years. She could do that again. But hurting Andaeros? That was unacceptable.

She couldn’t really know without trying. Laeynna had often been more of the mind to simply vanish when things got hard. Or ‘too hard’ according to her. It was what made her own attempts to stick things out so impressive, because to do so was uncharacteristic of her. This felt like another situation where she couldn’t give up so easily. Andaeros certainly deserved better. They had already gone through so much together. Being together hadn’t been easy for either of them and they had both paid consequences for choosing that pathway. If she backed out, it would have been like saying that nothing they’d done with one another had been worth anything.

That couldn’t be further from the truth.

Andaeros made her a better person. Rather, being around him, being with him, gave her the strength and courage to consciously make that decision. Things had been hard, but they had also been rewarding. She loved him. There was no doubting that. Fear, in and of itself, was not a terrible thing. Not the worst thing. It kept one alive, but if it was fed too much, as it had oft been in Laeynna’s case, then it would only prevent one from living. She didn’t want to live a life where she wasn’t really existing. She wanted to live and she wanted to do so at his side in any capacity.

As she eyed the sky, she wasn’t really sure she had stumbled onto any great realisations or found any answers to the questions she had. If anything, it only felt more weighted and heavy, that sinking of reality that she would, one day, become Laeynna Dawnflare. If he was interested in that, of course. She didn’t have to take his name. But as she mouthed it wordlessly to herself, she liked how it felt. She could imagine how it sounded. A bit lyrical, really, and more accurate in representation of her person.

She was neither an ember nor a flame.

She wasn’t dawn either, or a flare.

But to be married would be the dawning of a new journey. A new chapter to add to so many chapters that were in existence and yet unwritten.

There would be more difficulties in the future. She knew that, too. This wasn’t going to be the first time she sat in silence and thought about everything. Questioned everything. Worried about everything. Laeynna would always worry and fret and concern. Maybe that didn’t have to stop. Maybe she just needed to understand how to coexist with it. She couldn’t be fixed and she didn’t need to be. She simply needed to work on how to best thrive in the face of that adversity, to be as flowers when at a disadvantage.

And to come back from withering.

As she eyed the tent where Andaeros was sleeping, she eventually found herself sitting in its entrance, just watching the outline of him. She wondered what he dreamt of. Hoped that he dreamt of her. Of them. Of the future where so many things were uncertain, but where the certainty was that she loved him. And that he loved her. That perhaps, it was a very good beginning for a marriage.

Looking around her sparse living arrangements in the arid climate of Durotar's air, Ankalei dropped herself in a dusty chair, leaning onto an equally dusty table where she'd left a tome open, filled with what she'd deemed to be important events she wanted to go to. People she wanted to see. Most of the notes in it involved Succulent Tart, Nahilvi (though she couldn't exactly understand the draw there), the Horde Expedition, Zaihne, and a list of Laeynna's contacts that she'd made over the years.

As she took quill into hand, she carefully wrote.

— Andaeros Dawnflare —

What did she know about the man, really? He'd been amicable when they met for the first time. Not that she expected anything less of that whole plethora of people Laeynna had come to be spending time with. On the contrary, it had probably been the first time Ankalei noticed Laeynna was developing kinship with seemingly well-adjusted, civilised people, who probably weren't doing a bunch of black market, dirty-handed affairs. Fancy Cakes was an immediate step up from the nonsense Laeynna had been getting herself into when she'd been removed from Quel'thalas.

With a thoughtful expression, Ankalei shook her head. He'd been nice. Too nice, perhaps? No. She didn't know him well enough to make that assumption. She'd seen him. Without a doubt she'd seen him. In tracking her sister down and trying to follow her trail down to the southern continent, Ankalei definitely recognised him. And she recognised that when Laeynna was with him, she smiled in a way that Ankalei had never seen her smile in before.

He'd clearly worried about her when he realised she was missing.

As she reflected on it, however, she didn't know how close Laeynna and Andaeros were. She definitely couldn't say she knew how serious they were either. Laeynna had always been tight-lipped about her personal life, especially when it came to involving herself with others beyond the pragmatic and professional connections she'd built. Ankalei had just barely known of her other romantic affairs or the kinds that even stretched into potential romanticism and so many of those had gone silent just as quickly as she'd gotten slight word of them. It didn't surprise her at all that she found herself in a similar boat with this newer addition to her life.

Sure, she could have asked, but she doubted Laeynna was going to answer and it wasn't a very kind thing to go to Andaeros herself. That was out of the question. After Zaihne had retrieved Laeynna from Azj-Kahet, Ankalei had largely backed off. With her twin relatively safe and sound, it didn't feel appropriate to continue spying on her, even if the intentions behind doing so were meant to be constructive and helpful.

Does he make her happy?

That was probably the most important. Followed closely by the idea of reciprocation. In an ideal world, or what Ankalei imagined an ideal relationship to be like, both sides were happy. Plenty of people stayed in relationships where they weren't for one reason or another, of course, but given how precious life was, Ankalei certainly didn't want Laeynna or Andaeros to feel like either were caught in any such thing.

Does he treat her well?

It was hard not to want to immediately jump in and play the part of the older, protective sister. To grill Andaeros every which way when it came to the emotional and mental welfare of Laeynna. There were several reasons as to why Ankalei didn't do that, however. She knew there was already some preexisting tension where their relationship was involved and though she didn't know the gritty details of it, she could make an educated guess based on what she did know. If she started wagging a finger in Andaeros' face that seemed like it was only going to make things more complicated for them both.

What if something happens and we have a repeat of the past?

That was as much a concern as really anything else was. Perhaps even more so. What was her sister's state like? What if it drastically changed? What if something devastating happened and Laeynna couldn't endure it? How would that impact how she handled things? What if she took it out on Andaeros? Or, what if Andaeros did something awful to her? What if Laeynna never recovered from it?

Ankalei tried hard not to think too hard about that. Things had gotten as bad as they had in the past because she'd not known what Laeynna was going through. If she could begin to rebuild things with her sister, then surely she could invite an open line of communication. If Laeynna could do that, at the very least, just open herself up a little more, then maybe it would be easier to tackle a worst-case scenario.

She wanted to see her twin happy. Laeynna had spent so many years sentencing herself to misery. Ankalei understood why. She got it. But it was excessive and self-destructive. In doing so, Laeynna had essentially stopped herself from living. Now, she was behind in years. If Andaeros could make her happy, Ankalei wanted him to. Laeynna deserved that, she thought.

And if Andaeros didn't... Well. She'd have to have some firm, sisterly words for him. But given the way Laeynna lit up around the man, and Laeynna was not a woman who ordinarily did any kind of lighting up ever, Ankalei was under the impression that if anyone was going to be ruining whatever garden those two were planting together, it probably wasn't going to be Andaeros.

Next to where she'd written Andaeros' name, Ankalei continued.

Laeynna, let him make you happy. Give him that chance. I see a different you when you're with him, a you I never thought I'd see again. I hope you can see how good he is for you. I hope that you appreciate it and I hope you're not taking it, or him, for granted. After all of these years that you've been punishing yourself, maybe try breathing again. Maybe try living. You've condemned yourself enough.

(Mentions: @andaerosdawnflare)

In spite of that, she had found the simplest gifts to be the ones that stirred her heart the most.

She hadn't told Andaeros when her nameday was. He knew the month and she'd left it at that. She didn't want to celebrate it. Didn't feel there was anything to celebrate. She had lived for a couple of centuries at least and really had nothing to show for it. She had existed in a broken world as a broken woman that Andaeros had been slowly piecing together.

He would have been worth celebrating, however, and she'd suspected that he would not tolerate that.

When he'd returned, Laeynna had been an amalgamation of sentiment that she couldn't wholly wrap her cold, calculating logic around. Overwhelmingly relieved to see him. Afraid that he would never return. Afraid that in his absence, he had come to the conclusion that she was less than worthy of him. Afraid that he had simply fallen out of love with her. Afraid that he had, or would, replace her with someone more befitting of him. Someone more deserving of him and his love.

And if he'd had, she had been fully prepared to accept it. To respect it. And to quietly leave his life.

Laeynna had always expected the worst, as it had seemed that the alternative was often so far out of reach of her. Instead, when he returned, he had been overfilling with his love for her. And she had been afraid. Steeled for the worst possible outcome. She'd used her studies to keep herself from him for the first fortnight. Every excuse she could make to distance herself. Afraid that he would simply leave again. Knowing that she couldn't expect him to stay. Angry with herself for being so controlled by her fear. And angry with herself for putting him in a position where he felt he had to question if she still loved him.

She couldn't imagine a world, a timeline where she didn't.

On the day that he had given what he had composed for her, things had gotten steadily better. She had warmed. A little. Although her apprehension and hesitance had still kept her from welcoming him with the reception that he'd deserved. In spite of whatever careful expression she'd worn, however, Laeynna had loved it the moment she set eyes upon it.

He'd pieced it all together himself. She knew it the moment she looked at it. It even smelled like him. Cedar. Bourbon. That earthy aroma and spice she always associated with him. Soft fingertips pressed over leather with an undeniable reverence, like it was more religious artefact than scrapbook. Like it was some divine relic more than tome of memories.

The interior was... overwhelming. It was... her. It was filled with her. So many different sides to her. She had, once or twice, caught Andaeros sketching in the past. There were so many more pieces in the book he'd made for her that there were clearly so many times he'd drawn her without her knowledge. He thought of her so much. He thought of her with such an intensity that she was willing to wager it rivalled her own. She had stirred his heart so much that he had been willing to make something so beautiful for her.

And at the time, she had been so measured about it, despite the turbulent way her insides turned and ached just holding it.

Then the moment she had to herself, Laeynna had wept. Not out of bitterness or upset, but because she knew how fortunate she was. That someone like Andaeros could love someone like her. That despite how monstrous she had been in her past and how she still saw so much of that beast inside of her, he still loved her. How had she been so blessed? Gods that had never seemed to care anything about her had put her in his path, or perhaps he in hers. They had both gone through so much just to be where they were.

...Laeynna wondered how she had survived it all. How he had survived his own hardships and adversities. She wondered what made him stay. If love had any logic to it at all, or if it was some mass of complexities that just couldn't be explained pragmatically.

After that day, she looked at it often. A little every day. As if it would serve as proper reminder that being in love, being loved, was not, and had never been a one-sided endeavour. It wasn't merely that Andaeros loved her. It was that she loved him. And to simply call it 'love' underestimated all of its power and influence. It's magnitude and abundance. It wasn't just love, but the words for its boundless, vast presence weren't ones that had been discovered yet.

It was a perfect gift. One that so perfectly embodied so many things said and unsaid alike. A gift that attempted to contain what could not be restrained within pages or silver tongues.

She loved it. She always would. In the same fierce, undying, unwavering passion that she loved the man who made it for her.

(Mentions for @andaerosdawnflare. ♥)