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jerek · 2 years

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can't seem to face up to the facts

okay im posting midfic but none of this actually happened it was GOING to happen but it was all written before we got the info we have now. imagine these all as like, different timelines i guess

warning: girl it's andumid anduin is so mentally ill. blood, skin picking, he steals a kiss, a little bit of a creep factor.

-- valdrakken --

The moment they were alone-- for how long, he didn't care-- he set Midha against the wall.

Anduin could see her expression shift. She wasn't holding her daggers, but she'd do something to him. He pressed his knuckles firmly, harmlessly, against her larynx.

But what could he say? It was almost funny-- he half-chuckled before managing something like: "You have no idea how close you came to ruling Stormwind."

"What?"

Midha's voice was barely more than air. Try as he might to keep his tone even, he couldn't help but snap. "Don't act like you don't know," he commanded. "How was I supposed to feel? Should I pretend I don't care?"

Her breath brushed his face. Almost against his will, Anduin entertained the image of Sha-tendrils snaking down his throat, or out through his nose. His eyes, either rolled back or glowing white like the Forsaken.

Still, there was no ache in his bones. Only his chest. His voice dropped to a wheeze: "Say something. You went to all that effort to humiliate me, and you won't even say anything?"

She pushed back. It felt...

It should have felt like rejection. It should have stung: maybe then he'd feel that pain he was supposed to feel, telling him to stop and think. But it was only pressure, and so all he felt was Midha's touch.

And he didn't know what he was doing.

The very moment he'd shoved his mouth into Midha's, the exact instant he tasted copper under his teeth and pomfruit on his tongue, he felt pins and needles all over his skin.

That must have been the well she was drinking from. It must have been what kept her going, though for Anduin, he could almost collapse. He couldn't feel the weight of his body on his legs.

She tried to shove him off again, or so he'd realized a moment later, this time grabbing his neck like a kitten. He retaliated in kind, feeling the thud of her body in his teeth, something vile threatening to hiss out from his mouth.

Even though this did far more for him.

Anduin's pulse resonated once, in all his body, and he tore himself away.

Midha had the same look on her face that he imagined was on his. Then, slowly, the shock faltered and faded back to her usual blank stare.

"Like that was your first," he coughed up-- "I'm sorry. I'm sorry." He'd come to by now. He cupped her face, wiping the corner of her lip with one thumb. "I didn't mean to--"

Something stung his cheek. His head turned on reflex, only to be met with a thin line an inch from his eyes... an arrow?

No. A bolt from a crossbow.

His hands unfurled from her shoulders. Suddenly he was clammy. He stepped back, away from the bolt and from Midha, and very slowly turned to see who had fired the warning shot.

And he sighed. A bead of warm blood rolled from the nick she'd left.

"Midha, do you know this woman?" Anduin asked.

The woman interjected: "Do you know this man?"

-- valdrakken, some hours later --

He hadn't allowed the cut from the crossbow to close. Anduin was slipping down an odd slope-- he had been for quite some time. He found he no longer grew faint at the sight of his own blood as he had so many years ago.

There was still a visceral reaction, yes, only it wasn't panic. The blood was as warm as the inside of his own body. As warm as the inside of any human's body... and he couldn't say for any other mortal race, but he liked to imagine they were comparable.

With the cut still open, still bleeding, and when the next few hours were his-- he pressed his thumb against the flow, flattening it into a wide print stamped on his cheek.

The print itself was warm, as if the thumbprint was itself a thumb, remaining where he'd touched a second ago. A coppery note lingered when he breathed in-- it made him alert, lessened the weight of his eyelids on his eyes.

He wasn't slipping, he concluded. He was being carried-- being swept on the scent, like the grace of the Light allowing him to levitate.

If only it weren't his own.

He smudged the blood out like charcoal. And his nail found the scratch again. A tendon in the wrist at his side twitched, his jaw squared fleetingly, every time his playing at that wound strummed too close to a nerve, but it worked and the cut began to weep again.

Blood, he reasoned, was proof of injury. And injury was proof of suffering. Suffering proved that one was... real? Truly in the here and now? Blood was what one signed the dearest of oaths in. It made brothers, made enemies. Rivers of it had carved ravines out between the Alliance and Horde for longer than he'd been alive.

He wanted Midha's blood. He wanted Vyneia's blood. Part of him wanted to bite down on the ghostly Warchief he dreamt of every night, as if she were meat, as if he could partake of her, make her flesh his, and in that way make her real.

But it wasn't hatred that Anduin felt. He wished, more than anything else, that whatever inspired worship could be so thoroughly proven to live and listen. If the Light could bleed, he would bathe in it, and that would be worship.

His face was in his hands. The sharp, metallic smell pooled like fog, steaming the hollow of his skull. Whatever made Midha capable of her feats of strength... she would understand. She wouldn't just paint his face, like he had found his hands carrying out: she would tinge his vision.

His eyelashes were stuck together in clumps. Around his chapped lips, he felt a pulling. It cracked when he moved, and left black flakes. He blinked away some from his eyes.

It wasn't long before Anduin's chest was bare. The only evidence he left would be where his caution failed and his fingers wet the fabric of his coat. Or where his nose caught on the neck of his undershirt-- and then only until they were clean. He wondered: where was Wrathion?

He hadn't known it before, he imagined, but it felt as though he'd always known that Midha kept the worst sides of her adventuring firmly out of her prince's sight. And for what? He'd saved her so many times. It wasn't as though he was innocent, either.

No, nobody in this odd menagerie was innocent at all.

Someone knocked. Anduin's veins were chilled before he even realized what the sound was.

"...Yes?" he asked. Though his voice was small and still, internally he felt a sick humor at the idea that Wrathion himself was knocking.

"Can I come in?" came a smaller, stiller voice.

"I'm not dressed."

Thank the Light he'd had something clever to say.

He remembered reading a historical account of a few Gilnean children, lost in the gray wilderness, who without supervision had completely given themselves over to their worgen curse. They claimed to have murdered Forsaken laborers, easy to catch and still unquestionably evil-- but nobody could verify whether the victims were all undead.

And when one boy was returned to society, and the balancing ritual redone... he was inconsolable.

How, he wondered as that boy might have, could it be he who'd done all this?

"It's nothing I haven't seen," he could make out. And she was right... had she always been this practical? He couldn't trust his memory.

After a silent few seconds, she added, "Unless you're really stark naked. I can come back--"

"No, no, just a moment." He was on his feet, wiping from his face as much wetness and as many clotted scabs as he could in the time it took to slide his chair in and cross the room. His lips and his teeth remained parted around three different sentences, each as ridiculous as the others, and then he was at the door.

Like a child hiding his mischief, he opened the door only two inches wider than she was at the shoulders. "Come in," he said.

Midha was exactly as he'd remembered. She took silent, careful steps, twirling one of those twists of hair in her finger, and turned on him the same candle-light eyes.

"I wanted to say..." she began.

Two seconds of that gaze was more than enough.

"Please tell me you know why I'm like this," he said. He didn't mean to interrupt, but: "I've been on your side of this conversation... how many times, now? Saying I understand, saying I've figured it out-- and this time, I suppose I have, but..."

But now that he had fully crossed over, now that he was fallen and Midha was the one reaching out to offer a path back into the Light, he was blinded.

"Say you know. Even if you don't, make something up."

She blinked at him. She blinked away the white pupils, the ever-present aura that hung like mist. That Midha, uncorrupted, should have been his queen.

"Maybe you're rebalancing yourself?" She clasped her hands behind her back, stretching her arms as if it'd fix all the tension between them. "You don't have to know right now, but that's what I think. Your mind is doing what your body does when you get a fever."

"Fighting off an infection?" he asked. "Maybe-- but the sooner it's over with, the sooner I'll have my people's faith again."

He'd let his guard down, and when his chin dipped, he felt another flare of the Sha's power. There was the faintest smell of burning metal, a numbness on his jaw... she was burning away the stains.

"You represent Stormwind to the rest of the Alliance."

He replied: "And command the Alliances' forces as a whole, if I must."

"How much of Stormwind's government is yours in peace?"

"How much of it must I, personally, sign off on?" Anduin smiled. "My father didn't trust the nobles much. He had good reason, and I try to be as diligent as he was. And whatever's handled by other officials is still within my right to overrule."

"...Is Turalyon gone?"

"Well, he hasn't vanished again-- but then he hasn't declared himself Warchief of Stormwind, either. I consider him an advisor."

"How many kings lose themselves to the title?"

His head grew heavy. A dizzying, leaden pool swelled in his brain, or so it felt, the strange malaise that question burdened him with.

She was leading him, he realized. Guiding him toward either a well-built argument, or full corruption by Despair or Doubt.

"You're trying to make my decisions for me," he said.

"I can't make those decisions."

Anduin's breath stilled as Midha went over the cut. It was like biting into something icy cold-- the Sha spilled under his skin and made it tense and pale. "So it seems," he went on, "neither can I."

Lost in his thoughts again. He barely felt her hand-- but then, she was all he was thinking about.

It was almost impossible not to get pulled in. "It must be indescribable. Keeping the Sha hidden away," he remarked. "Living and breathing for one other person. I have a hard enough time with people I've never met."

Midha dipped her chin. So quick it almost wasn't a nod. "You're right. I always think it'll break me in half."

"And it never does, does it?"

"It never does." The last of the red washed out in what looked like milk. "I do what my mother did-- exploring, except she took the lows and I take the heights."

"Heights of what?" Anduin's arms unconsciously wrapped around his middle-- what lofty purpose was he supposed to see in stretching himself til he unraveled?

The milk turned to vapor, which smelled how she had in the water. Her finger was still a little too close to the cut-- where the angry capillaries made soft and reddish.

He answered himself. "Heights of anything that's given to you. Light, Midha--"

"You swim or you sink. You keep going, or you fall behind."

Her whisper of a voice was insistent in a way that tugged at the ground under his feet. She went on: "I bleed so I don't burst. Live so as not to die. Love..."

Her lips shifted, in some immeasurably small way, toward a smile. "Eventually, everything feels like love."

And what was there to say to that?

"I don't know whether to hate you. Or whether I should pity you, for thinking things like that, or maybe just..."

Anduin sighed. "Join you. In your madness."

"Unless you'd prefer some other madness...?"

He couldn't help his gaze breaking off-- looking down. She had Katrana's tongue. Katrana's way with kings. He wasn't so different now, from his father then.

"No," he said, "if I have to lose my mind, I'd rather lose it to you."

"Good." Midha rolled on the ball of her foot. Anduin himself readied to step back, maybe to catch her close to him-- but she caught him first, her thumbs on the veins of his throat and her lips on his teeth.

He gave an unsteady hum as everything, the walls and his spirit in his body, were shunted forward. His legs knotted, as did the apparition from last summer, the Timeless Isle python that he always expected to kill him.

Don't think too hard now, he asked himself. Anduin looped his arms around Midha. She was so much smaller than him-- his wrists could cross over her back, and his nails clawed into his own forearm.

Her palm was shockingly warm against the back of that hand. Don't, he repeated internally. This is what it's supposed to feel like.

-- stormwind keep --

If it were any railing-- and it could be any railing-- this would be the one.

And now would be the time. Midha was leaning over, almost bent over the wall, staring down at the city below. His hand was on the small of her back, where it tipped up like a duckling's tail.

"You know," he said, walking his fingers up her spine. "Turalyon wants to have spells put in place that would unmask dragons on entry to the city."

Midha's breath halted. Then, slower and somewhat more strained, it started again.

He let his smile show. "Imagine how he'll feel when he can't unmask you."

"Do they think I'm a dragon?"

He chuckled. "I can't imagine they truly believe that. But they'd probably want to check anyway... just to be safe, you know."

"I don't think I'd be much different. If I was."

It was an effort just for her to speak. The Sha couldn't be mastered by anyone, and it was punishing her for trying. True poetic justice, Anduin thought to himself.

"No," he said aloud. "I'd still know you by your human form. I think... mortal minds just work that way, don't you? Maybe if you were a dragon, you'd be able to read my mind a little." His fingers slid back down. "You could see what I was really thinking, right on my face."

She turned her head. He could see it-- the dull, insistent pain she was in, like what he felt when he lied. She asked him, her eyes dull with doubt: "What are you really thinking?"

His smile broke through. In response, he looked to their left-- at a royal guard.

"Excuse me. Could she and I be alone for a moment?"

Beneath the visor, the guard's eyes widened. But he nodded-- "Yes, sir," and left, followed by the other guard posted at the doorway.

His heart skipped. Not in fear, but like a child skipping through a sunlit meadow. This was the dream he had forced to be real, the life he was about to prove himself capable of living.

"This is so much better when I don't have to fight you for it," he said, and tipped her chin up into a kiss.

#dragonflight spoilers #anduin #anduin wrynn #midfic #andumid

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