#two rooms

So it was with great irony that she approached a dark ranger now--Clea, yes, definitely Clea, who was easy to tell from the scar on her chin and the way she wore her ashen hair swept mostly to one side beneath her hood--to ask where she might find her wife. Jaina had been making an effort to get to know them better, or at least to tell them apart. After the incident with Vereesa, Sylvanas had only allowed them to guard the door to their chambers. That, and they had recently seemed to warm up to Jaina. Well, in that they were ambivalent mostly, and didn’t hide thinly veiled hostility in their crimson eyes when they looked her way.

Seeing Jaina spend more time with their leader, and seeing Sylvanas enjoy it, might have had a lot to do with that. They were fiercely loyal creatures. Jaina admired them for that, if nothing else.

And she had learned that a little effort went a long way. “Good evening, Clea,” she offered, nodding to the undead elf as she made her way to the door to her and Sylvanas’ apartments.

It earned her a tiny smile. A ghost of a thing. Much like the woman who wore it, if only for a second. “Good evening.”

They did not use titles for her. They had but one queen. Jaina would not force herself as a second.

“Has Sylvanas already retired?”

It was a simple question, easy enough to leave her lips. But it felt so out of place. So domestic. So regal. So...needy.

Jaina didn’t see herself as a needy person. It was a word she hadn’t ever thought to apply to herself. Now that she did, in that moment as she stood before the door to her own home, she hated it. She could level cities. She almost had. She was in the running for most powerful mage living today. In fact, she was pretty sure she could outshine Khadgar if it came down to it, so that settled that. She was not needy.

But she did want to see her wife.

“She has,” Clea answered with a nod.

She didn’t volunteer any further information. Despite the way Jaina’s mind ran as to when or how or why, Clea only told her what she needed to know. But then again, she couldn’t possibly understand the one-sided game of cat and mouse Jaina had been playing for the better part of two hours.

She’d gone first to the war room, of course, where she’d found Lor’themar, glaring daggers at her as he offered a gruff explanation that Sylvanas had just left not a few minutes before.

It was about the sum of as many words as he had spoken to Jaina directly in the year prior. She didn’t fight that either. Lor’themar had every reason to hate her. Many people in this keep of hers did. Some grudges would take more than a breakthrough in her own marriage to dispel. Perhaps in another decade, she might hold a pleasant conversation with the former Regent Lord.

Jaina’s next stop after that had been the range. Sylvanas could often be found there when she had time to kill between meetings. Just as often she would be the one shooting as she would be the one scolding her rangers in quick, snapping Thalassian that sounded so different from their soft whispered jokes. So less elegant. So much of a reminder of what she was and always had been--A general. A commander. A woman of war.

But she hadn’t been there. Kalira and Vorel were there instead, and let Jaina know they hadn’t seen Sylvanas all day. Kalira had always been the most refreshing and verbose of the rangers with her, but now Jaina was pretty certain that it came down to thinly-veiled flirting. The wink at the end of that conversation had been telling, of course.

Enough that she wondered just what exactly was discussed at that range, besides everyone’s apparent slacking in their training regimens and poor form.

From there, it was a matter of poking her head into every room of the keep that held any interest--from the armory to the kitchens to even the library. But her wife was neither here nor there, or had just been seen passing through.

“Thank you,” Jaina said and nodded in return.

Clea said nothing in return, but the little smile ghosted across her pale lips again as she moved to open the door for Jaina. A rare moment of deferment and propriety. One Jaina did not expect from any of Sylvanas’ rangers.

Maybe she should ask what they really did talk about while they shot at target after target together, in the hours between the time they spent safe-guarding this fledgling kingdom of theirs.

Maybe it was better that Jaina did not ask.

She let it go. Like so many things. She was an expert at letting things go, even grudges others were not willing to part with. Everyone assumed it part of her efforts to maintain the bastion of peace she helped to forge for the world. And yes, that was a part. A small part.

In truth, Jaina was just very used to not getting what she wanted. From revenge to peace. Hot to cold. Satisfaction wasn’t hers to have. Compromise was a flavor that she fed to herself until she could claim to like the taste. In truth, she only tolerated it. But others would spit it out every time, so it was always left for her.

But as she walked beneath the symbols of her united kingdom, into the hall glittering with Forsaken masks and Kul Tiran anchors, Jaina felt that at least this latest compromise seemed to be just getting better with age, like a fine wine. Every day, she was surprised to find a new piece of tenderness behind the mask of her undead Ranger General, her wife and queen. Her enemy little more than a year ago. The woman who she now sought out for something. Jaina hadn’t decided yet. Pleasure? Comfort? Both?

There was a quiet stillness to Sylvanas she had come to enjoy. When they were alone, that was. It was both literal and not. She only breathed when she needed to speak or fell into a moment of animal habit, a seeming instinct that her undead body still stubbornly obeyed. She was content to just spend time quietly with Jaina, writing as she read, or reading as she wrote. Jaina had never pictured herself as enjoying a lover that would hardly talk to her through the course of an evening. But Sylvanas made herself present in other ways. A cup of hot tea, delivered before Jaina could ask for it. Her favorite breakfast, arranged to be delivered to the suite just after she usually woke in the morning. A light trailing of gloved fingers across her shoulder. Cool skin against her warm cheek as they settled into bed on a humid summer night.

It hadn’t been a hard day, as days went in New Lordaeron. Jaina had spent much of it in budgetary meetings, the first regarding the navy, of course, and the second about the mounting costs of their growing capital city. She hadn’t had to participate much in the last one, despite how long it had run. Sylvanas had been hiding some fine accountants in her Undercity, and Jaina was more than content to let the undead man her wife had nominated for the position of provisional treasurer worry about the ins and outs of financing the city and its reconstruction.

There had been a time when she could hardly bring herself to look upon one of the free undead. Before even she knew them as the Forsaken. Jaina knew of them. Her first return trip of the Eastern Kingdoms had been a great test of her resolve. In every skeletal face, she saw a person she’d failed. A woman she might have spared from that grizzly fate if she’d shown more backbone at Stratholme. A man she might have evacuated with her survivors to Theramore if she but had more time on her flight from her blighted adoptive homeland. Whatever good that might have done him, as Jaina winced realizing that such folly would have probably only bought such a soul a few more years of life. The worst had been the youth she’d seen locked up in Stormwind’s stockades, all rags and bones and glowing eyes and missing half a jaw. The Alliance representatives had told her they’d caught him as a spy, for the Horde of all things.

And now, she looked upon faces like that with trust. She sought out the dull pulse of the necromancy that held her wife to the body she’d reclaimed like a moth to a flame.

Perhaps her marriage wasn’t the only compromise that aged well.

Speaking of that energy, Jaina followed it like a dog on a scent. Now that she was close, she could feel Sylvanas. She was more powerful than her ilk, different than any other dark ranger or banshee or other undead. Perhaps that was why they so readily called her queen. Jaina had been privy now to more information on why her wife was different, but she suspected that her iron will alone would have always kept her apart without the help of her Valkyr or any other influence.

So finding Sylvanas in the sitting room, hands busy with simple idle work, red eyes trained on what she was doing, and only the perk of a single long ear serving as the acknowledgement that Jaina entered the room was strange.

No iron will. No screaming general. Just an elven ranger, fletching an arrow, with bare shafts and bits of feather lined up in neat piles on a coffee table.

Jaina watched her work for a long moment. Maybe too long. But her hands were graceful and gloveless as they wound sinew around and around, fastening the feathers she held in place with expert ease. Sylvanas had long, calloused fingers. Jaina knew now how they felt on her skin. On parts of her she would never have imagined letting the Banshee Queen touch for all those years that she fought against her. Whatever her jumbled thoughts had been prior to watching them work were now banished. Jaina was mesmerized, almost to the point of speechlessness.

But she felt the need to make sure Sylvanas didn’t know that. “And I learn yet another of your many secrets tonight. Let me guess, you never let anyone else fletch your arrows?”

“You cut your own quills,” Sylvanas retorted, still keeping her eyes on the arrow shaft as she finished wrapping it, holding the sinew in place beneath her thumb as she reached for a small brush in a bowl of something--a glue of some sorts, probably--and then painted a careful seal to finish the job off. “I don’t see any difference.”

“So do you,” Jaina noted.

“And?”

“I suppose we have that in common then,” Jaina said as she approached the spread of feathers and sticks on the table that were fast turning into elegantly-made arrows. “We don’t trust others to know what we can do better ourselves.”

“Precisely,” Sylvanas said as she turned the arrow in her hand, examining all sides of it before lining it up against the neat row of finished ones. Only then did she look up at Jaina. “Why delegate when the result will be better otherwise?”

“To not be working all hours of the night, I suppose,” Jaina countered.

“I am not working,” Sylvanas told her. “I am...relaxing, you might say. I never minded fletching my own arrows. I’ve always found it meditative, in a way.”

Jaina looked at the table of bits and bobs. It was not so unlike her own desk when she would play with enchanting catalysts or use ten different inks to write up spellbooks and plans for new wards or cantrips. Only Sylvanas’ version of such repetitive tasks was much more militant and organized than Jaina’s chaos.

Sylvanas’ eyes followed hers as Jaina scanned over the various piles, puzzling at their meaning. She offered an explanation, simple and honest as any she was wont to give these days. Secrets were not worth keeping between them. Not anymore.

“The eagle’s feathers are for balance. The others are for identifying the type of arrow,” Sylvanas explained. “But I doubt you were seeking me out tonight to learn about fletching.”

“You knew then?” Jaina asked.

Was Sylvanas purposely avoiding her here? Sometimes, she wondered. Sometimes, she worried. What had grown between them in these last few months had always felt so tentative, so fragile. Perhaps because it was such a calm and quiet contrast to the first year of their marriage, where they had spent much of their time fighting battles on the front lines of paperwork, planning, and due process where there was no war front to serve otherwise.

Perhaps it was because Jaina herself wasn’t sure if she truly knew how to live in this time of coveted peace. At least, not yet.

But she was trying to learn.

“Only when Clea told me as I entered our apartments. I thought it best I stay in one place and let you find me,” Sylvanas told her.

She started on another arrow, wrapping the cut eagle’s feathers into the notches expertly. Sylvanas balanced them with a gentle grip, holding them in position until the sinew was tight enough to do it for her. Jaina wondered how much of it was muscle memory--centuries of nights repeating the same motion--and how much was a determined cause of perfection.

Jaina did not speak again until Sylvanas had finished this arrow, and laid it too next to it’s similarly perfect brethren. “Thus the hunter becomes the hunted. I suppose your rangers must talk.”

“Clea traded shifts with Anya just before I arrived. Anya, who talks far too much, so yes,” Sylvanas answered. “Though they didn’t say why you were seeking me out.”

She looked up to her fully then, gesturing to the open space next to her on the couch. Sylvanas did not pick up another arrow shaft. She waited, both for Jaina to sit and for her answer.

So Jaina sat, and gave that answer as she swept her skirts into order about her legs. “You’re usually the one to seek me out in the evenings,” she said. “I wondered about you as the hour grew late and you didn’t come around to scold me for being awake.”

Truth be told, she wasn’t sure why. She didn’t have a name for this. She didn’t have a firm answer as to what it was. She knew that she never minded Sylvanas’ nightly scoldings. She might very well have missed them when they didn’t occur. But voicing that was another thing entirely.

“Most people don’t use the word ‘scold’ in an appreciative tone,” Sylvanas noted.

There was a wit and an intelligence to many things that she said that Jaina enjoyed far too much. She kept her double-toned voice low, so low that the overtone was nearly gone, though she could never truly be rid of it. Sylvanas even allowed herself to relax from her rigid and militant posture, angling herself against the cushions of the sofa for comfort and to see Jaina as they spoke.

Likely not for comfort. She did little in the name of comfort, at least, not for herself. But to Jaina, she was witty and smiled a little into her statement as she relaxed next to her.

“You should know by now that I am not most people,” Jaina told her.

“Most people do not miss me, so I would have to agree with that,” Sylvanas replied.

These days, she would shuck off some of her armor as she walked into the doors of their apartments. Jaina would have known she was here even without Clea’s report, from the pauldrons that were hanging on near the door, and the clawed gauntlets left resting on a hall table. Sylvanas still wore her hood and cuirass and sabatons, but her bare shoulders were a combination of soft curves and hard angles against the couch cushions.

As was all of her, really. Jaina knew better now. She had once seen Sylvanas as such a hard and harsh woman. Honed like steel to a weapon of her own making. No doubt she was still, and could be at any moment.

But Jaina knew now how soft her skin was. How she smelled of rosewater and bathed with special oils to tame her hair into rigid straightness. Jaina knew she liked the way she smelled and the softness of that skin and the way Sylvanas’ collar bones would poke into her cheeks.

She knew what she came here for.

“So what if I did miss you?” Jaina asked. “Perhaps we should work on being in the same room more often.”

She leaned toward her wife. Yes, her wife. The phrase wasn’t new to her, but had taken on added meaning in these last few months. But Jaina resolved that it no longer had to be new and tenuous. She didn’t have to have an excuse or an especially hard day to want to fall into her arms.

And Sylvanas didn’t have to play coy at leaving herself open and ready to be fallen into either. Though perhaps, Jaina might resolve that she liked that.

But that was a battle for another day.

“I would venture to say this might be the first time we’ve sat together in this sitting room of ours,” Sylvanas noted with a twirling little gesture of the hand that hung over the back of the couch. “Perhaps we might do it more often.”

“Perhaps we might,” Jaina agreed as she leaned in, laying her weight on a combination of hardness and softness. Armor and skin. Banshee queen and wife.