10 - DWC - 27 May - Day 3 - Linger / Gaze
It was a quiet afternoon. So quiet that the weight of her thoughts felt as if it had the power to deafen out everything else. As if it could send the entire world spinning and she hardly would have taken notice. Laeynna paused by the desk she’d commandeered for her various studies, though most of them had once been of the botanist and alchemist variety. It had been some months since she had done such a thing, however. Half a year, in fact, as she stared down to its surface. Instead, the table had become a glorified storage for her books, her diagrams, the record of prior experiments that had landed her into exile to begin with, her journal, and most recently—notes pertaining to a particular music piece she had begun composing nearly a year before.
As she pulled out the relatively simple chair she’d assigned to it, she cast a look over to the harp that Junarra had delivered around the later part of the prior year at her humble request. She had worked on it a little here and there, but with the time available to her, and recent conversations fresh in mind, it seemed like a good way to spend some of her free time. She seated herself and as she carefully manoeuvred the small and modest pile of parchment beneath her hands, she looked first at the careful scribbling of notes on staff and the plethora of incomplete measures. Beside that page, a sheet of notes. Rather, a directive of what her piece had been meant to convey.
She’d said that she’d composed it for him. That it was to express all of the complexity that had come from a struggle of understanding her own feelings and how they had evolved from a great deal of wariness into an unspoken love they had exchanged in Wintergrasp. With a tip of her head, Laeynna’s gaze pulled over schooled script, elegant and refined, just one more thing that reminded her that no matter how she could have been pulled out of Quel’thalas, it never could have been pulled out of her blood.
—-—-—
I could not say what drew me to you the first time. Suspicion. Curiosity. Intrigue. The cut of the shirt you wore that night, perhaps. I had tried to be polite and spent the entire night hiding behind my cup of tea, whilst Master Larethmyr hovered ever nearer me. And in the way I eyed you, you eyed me in return. I never liked it much when people looked at me. I thought my appearance strange for years and not in the pleasant way. When I had your attention, I felt remarkably aware of myself. As if I was being assessed. Afraid of trying to understand what you wanted of me, why you looked so intently, I tried my best to hide. Master Larethmyr saw something I did not. We spoke of it once. That he berated the entire evening back to his estate, displeased that you kept looking at me, though we had scarcely exchanged more than polite greetings. Or perhaps he believed you were too observant, seeing things that others did not. How could they know, after all, what was happening? Why would they have? It was never truly their business to begin with, and I had remembered my youngest years, in which gossip was unladylike. Me, being a mere woman with no power to my name, placed in opposition against a member of the Blood Knights. I think you did not know the details then, but I think you knew something was not right. After that… I had thought that would be it. A first meeting. A first curiosity. But every time our paths crossed, every time we were in the same space, still you eyed me. Like you did not care to look anywhere else. As if I was the only thing you really wanted to see. I felt it, like hands atop my shoulders. What did you want of me then, I had wondered. I thought you intimidating. I feared you. You left me apprehensive and wound tight with concern. Perhaps you were inclined to put a knife into my back. Perhaps you knew of me from a different time with a different name. When I finally asked, it was merely that you found me intriguing. That you wished to know more about me. We danced and danced and danced. Always back and forth, spring and autumn eyes and fel ones. Written letters and gifts, like an old, traditional courtship. No one had ever done that with me before. Some had tried, perhaps, but my ambitions so lofty that everything else had fallen beneath what I could perceive. What I had want to perceive. What made you different? Can the seeds of affection be so simply defined? I should think not, for the moment that such a success made, all of the enigma, the magic, the intricacies of the heart would eliminate what made it so wondrous to begin with. I simply knew then, as I do now, that you were different. ‘You are so dear to me.’ You began to say that and I could not have known then what it meant. Your healing heart unable to make declarations of your love in simplified words, so instead, you used every other way in the world to say it. And for a time, I remained blind and deaf to it, convinced that of all things, I needed to keep you at a distance. Monsters like myself, I thought, were so unworthy of those affections. And to you, I had thought myself no more than a passing fancy and trivial pastime. Yet in the cold, beneath those stars, with flakes of snow in wet hair, I saw how you looked at me, a look I had seen before but had not truly acknowledged. And I felt fear again, afraid you would wrap your hands about my heart and crush it, for if it had been your intention, you had me precisely in the perfect place to do so. That night, my heart pounded with an intensity unrivalled. I had thought to myself that facing my exile again, my proposed execution, would have been easier than braving what your eyes had spoken. What a coward I have been. What a coward I was. Sometimes what a coward I still am.
—-—-—
Coming to the bottom of the page, Laeynna’s lips rose into a subdued, soft, and sombre smile. Just reading the words, she could relive every one of those moments. From late nights where he escorted her home, to baths where he teased her about her inability to swim, to the repeated attempts of his bourbon that she simply could not withstand. Every single moment, every single point had a place in history. She felt them each all over again and though she had most recently been caught up in her worry and concern, she still felt an undeniable fondness.
They still looked at one another the same way. That same intensity, as if they were nearly blind to everything outside of them. But the flutters that once had been fear metamorphosed into butterflies.
Loosing a very soft breath and affectionately splaying slender fingertips atop the page, she found her gaze moving back over to the sheet of music in progress. She was getting closer to its completion, she thought. If Ankalei had been right about his return, perhaps she could finish it in time to give it to him.
With a tilt of her head, sweeping some of her dark hair behind her ear, eventually her eyes found the newest book to have a place on her desk. Its contents, she thought, only one piece to the larger puzzle at hand, a very rudimentary introduction to the concept of harnessing the Light. If she could succeed, perhaps she could buy herself more time. More days. More weeks. More years.
As many as she could to continue looking at him in the very same way, wishing to make him the very centre of her world.
— @daily-writing-challenge
