tentacruelest | 10th Wave

10th Wave

The cacophony of noise here is growing worse. Stow your bleating, lambs, or I'll cast yeh overboard to fill your jabbering mouths with seawater.

[Never mind that they're not even sailing over water at the moment. Jones can understand English, but is speaking in Scots Gaelic]

[Private to Sylvanas]

If yeh would oblige me a moment, m'lady..? I've something you might like to see.

[Private to Bush]

Yeh've been quiet, Warden. Plotting something?

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[That she can figure out easily. She nods.]

[Satisfied, Jones closes his comm rather than get frustrated and break the damn thing. He gathers up a small wooden box under his claw and sets off for Sylvanas' room.

Keeping an eye out so as to not be intercepted by Bush, Jones arrives within moments at Sylvanas' door and knocks]

[She opens the door, expecting him. She only hesitates for a fraction of a second before holding it wide so he can enter.]

[What wounds Jones sustained from his skirmish have, by now, either healed completely or he's hiding them well. He limps inside in his usual gait, touching his hat with his free hand in a gesture of respect]

I suppose yeh haven't the faintest idea what I'm saying.

[The room doesn't match it's resident. It's...light, and rather fantastical. It suits the person she was before she was made undead, the one that existed on the Mirror Barge. For the creature that she is now, the room just didn't fit.

Again she shakes her head at him, lifting and dropping her arms at her sides in a show of frustration.]

I haven't the faintest idea what you're saying.

[For someone whose room fits him a tad too well, Jones attempts to refrain from commenting on the decor. Even if Sylvanas wouldn't understand his words, she might have a guess at his tone. Perhaps she even likes this.

With a grunt - and wishing he had the words to express his feelings at the moment - he hands her the box.

Inside of which is a bloodied lock of Arthas' hair, pulled from his corpse while it was still warm. The head's long gone; disappeared when the man came back to his senses. But this remained, and it's this token he offers the dark lady now.]

[Point of fact, she mostly hates her room this way. It's painful to be in the space. It feels like she's haunting the one place that should be hers on this damnable boat. But it's not like she can communicate that to him at the moment.

Right at the moment, however, her room is the least of her concerns. It's hardly the first time she's seen a bloodied box, she actually guesses what it used to contain fairly quickly. She reaches in and takes out the lock of blonde hair, stained red. She knows who it belongs to because of logic, but she'd have recognized it otherwise by color, by scent. She knew Arthas very, very well.

She lifts her eyes up to Jones, and even though she knows he can't understand her, she asks anyway.]

You did this...for me?

[He can't quite gauge her words, but gains their meaning all the same. Usually either in control or a blustering rage-filled monster, here Davy finds himself at an awkward impasse. He shrugs, slightly embarrassed with his token now that it's out in the open. Perhaps Sylvanas had wished to kill Arthas herself? Maybe he should have brought a weak and dying man to her door so that she could finish him off herself. Or maybe her feelings had changed in recent days and she'd come to an accord. He might have broken a peace.]

[Now wholly overwhelmed with doubt, he closes the box after Sylvanas removes the hair and places it cautiously atop her bureau, giving a slight noise in the back of his throat that might have been mistaken for an inquisitive apology]

[Lack of common language was limiting, but there were ways around it. He wasn't a ranger in her army, so communicating without words was difficult, but not impossible. Meaning and gesture were what she had, and she would use them to the best of her ability.

She approached him, twining the lock of hair, her keepsake, through the fingers of one hand. The other, she raised and laid upon his shoulder, like she had done during the flood that had made her overly friendly. She'd told him after that of her aversion to touching, so this gesture would be significant. And since he couldn't understand her anyway, she abandoned Common and spoke in her native language.]

O'ther'a, inishore.

[Jones feels his limbs turn to jelly at the touch, and one of his knees very nearly buckles as if Sylvanas' hand were much, much heavier than it actually was. He lowers his head and avoids her eyes, tentacles curling around the buttons of his seacoat.

She likes it. That has to be enough]

[To call how she felt about his gift "liking" it was rather two dimensional. What she felt was a tumultuous maelstrom of emotions that, had she not been so lucky as to be an animated corpse at that moment, would have had her trembling with the thwarted need to express them. As it was there was no heavy breathing or light headedness to give her away.

She'd felt Arthas die, as she often did, but this death had been done in her name. And a token had been brought to her to mark the deed. It was very like the moment that had driven her to Ice Crown back in Azeroth. The moment that had resulted directly in her ending up on the Barge. If Jones only knew what this gift was inspiring.

She took her hand away, perceiving that the gesture had made him uncomfortable, by his reaction. The lock of hair, she idly plays through her fingers, like a lady might do with a loose ribbon, curling and uncurling it from around a finger.]

[He was uncomfortable, yes, but not entirely for reasons Sylvanas might have thought. Long ago, he had fiercely, wholly loved someone else and was burned for it in many different ways, culminating in his own journey to the Barge. Some of it was by his own doing, but his love was the initial catalyst; as such, Jones had sworn never to extend his heart to any other creature.

Sylvanas resembled his lost love in some ways; she was fierce and strong and commanded a presence without raising her voice. She was imprisoned by those foolish enough to think they could lock her away for very long. She was vengeful and bloodthirsty and unforgiving. For all of these reasons, Jones' heart locked away in his cabin ached.

But he would not presume to make the same mistake again. He was too old to go seeking after love again, and too poor and unworthy to seek this love. Jones had set his eyes on the stars once upon a time - Calypso was, after all, more powerful than any living woman had ever been - and had regretted his heart's ambition to this day.

No; he would not love as he was. But he could be loyal to the heart he once had as a young man, and do right by a powerful lady brought low by forces that dared to command her, that didn't have the slightest idea what she was capable of...

Jones was..tender, around Sylvanas. He would not presume, would not encroach or proposition her. But he was at her service nonetheless.

He stepped away from her now, only a step back so as to let her reflect privately on the gift he had given. Suddenly he felt himself wishing that he'd presented the token in some other, fancier form; handing the lock of hair in a box with no adornments reeked of thoughtlessness.]

[No she couldn't guess at the why. They had shared only the barest of information about their individual pasts, and both of them respected the other enough not to press beyond what was offered.

As for the presentation, she actually appreciated it. She'd long ago adjusted to the simple brutality of her existence. She was a creature of anger, pain and blood. A fancier wrapping would have been as out of place for her as she was in her own cabin.

So now they stand looking at each other, unable to speak anything coherent, and she finds herself at a loss of what to do. She'd thanked him the only way she knew how, and he seemed to accept it. Now, it seemed neither of them knew what else to do.]

[The deed done, Jones stands awkwardly, silently, before Sylvanas. Oddly, he's grateful they can't quite understand each other at the moment. He wouldn't have any idea what to say otherwise, and takes the flood for an excuse.

With a grunt, he touches the top of his hat to Sylvanas and begins to back away. It's a heavy thing, his gift; he's certain she'd like to mull it over in the privacy of her cabin, alone]

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