streets

Crowded streets. Strange smells, horrible smells, enticing smells. Elves, both pale and colorful, covered in red blood, green once-blood. Tauren barely giving anyone room, pushing past. Gnomes sneaking by, punching people in the shins who don't see them. A variety of wild mounts and trained steeds - simple things sometimes, pretty horses and excited hawkstriders, but often not, like crazed-eyed black bears and outrageously large mammoths and silky-coated tigers - moving through the crowds just like the rest of them.

In all of this, there's the usual issues with crowds. People getting too close to each other causing fights, pickpockets lusting after fat purses and dumb soldiers of the Horde and Alliance, and a noise level that registered like a small epic battle with armies whose numbers range in the thousands. The Dalaran guards barely patrol at all, but they are strict as hell when Horde or Alliance ventures too close to the other side's sanctuary.

Strict as hell may be an understatement.

**

Tailor was carefully making his way through the absurdly diverse crowd when a night elf suddenly toppled into him, thrown down the street by the way-too-well-armored Horde guard protecting their sanctuary. He thought briefly, absently, as he was crushed into the street, if he had been human if it would be hurting more or less. He honestly couldn't tell. The angry crunching of his bone against the stone touched his ears, and he knew he should feel a higher level of pain than he was experiencing. He struggled to sigh, but the night elf was heavier and more aggressive in his determination to get up off the other man.

The elf's hands accidentally found themselves half-trapped in Tailor's robes, and the guttural sound he made over him caused the Forsaken to startle into activity. His claw went straight for the Ally's throat while the other pushed him hard on the shoulder, so much so the night elf simultaneously whined and growled, a peculiar combination that only sent Tailor moving faster. The bones that were what was left of his hand tightened around the elf's throat. He staggered around on the floor of the street, ignoring the loud sounds of hooves, paws, and claws hitting around him as people continued uncaringly past.

Finally, he got himself into a position where he was relatively above the Ally and looked down at him with the most disapproving stare he could muster, all disheveled, surprised, and demure as he usually was. The night elf was turning a light shade of lavender but had his hands still caught in the thick of Tailor's robes, unable to pry them away to grab at the Forsaken's wrists to pull him off. His striking amber-glowing eyes were fixed on Tailor's face. A thin line of bright red blood was inching down his forehead, through his brilliantly dark green eyebrow, curving with his cheekbone. He looked unnervingly more surprised than Tailor.

The Forsaken dropped his throat with a not-exactly-gentle push and moved his hands to the night elf's, working to remove the other man's fingers from the delicate but complicated laces tying up the front of his garment. Apparently several of the elf's rings had become quite friendly with the cords and cloth, and he had only made it worse by struggling, basically becoming trapped like those old tricky gadgets where pulling actually caused more trauma.

In the few moments he was avidly working to free the elf from his robe, Tailor tried not to compare his bone-fingers to the the Ally's thicker, radiantly-colored ones but the contrast was too stark to restrain his mind. He plucked one elven finger free, holding it gingerly between the pointed tip of his index and thumb, and stuck his own hand within his robe's front to try and engage the complex tangle from the inside. The confusion was immense, and he spent some time assessing the elf's various rings as he pulled and tugged. A platinum thing with one big blue oval-shaped sapphire, thin pieces of cross-wire metal looking worn and rusty, a spiky stitch-like ring stained inky black.

The last of these caused the most trouble, and Tailor murmured low in irritation in Gutterspeak as he pinched the threads of his garment from each stitch. He was still holding the elf's other hand in the air with one hand as he toiled with the other stuck to his chest.

He happened to glance up, not really caring in the least what the night elf was doing, just that he needed to be unattached to his robe as soon as possible. The absent-minded look was his first since getting on top of the elf, which he realized as soon as his gaze turned from his newest project.

He had managed in his firm shifting of position to actually move to straddle the night elf, his more prominent hipbones stark against the slight leather-bound curves of the man below him. His knees were pushing against the stone through his robe, which was straining in the front because of the weird pose and tension. His bone-fingers were holding the elf's hand in midair between them, totally unthinkingly on his part.

However, for the night elf, things in the last few minutes had been quite different, and that was apparent by his expression.

Tailor recognized embarrassment as he easily could as a Forsaken, but it was momentarily confusing why the night elf would be looking so flustered.

Those amber eyes had stayed on him, though, and slowly turned from their hands in the air to the Forsaken's features instead.

It was Tailor's time to feel somewhat distracted and nervous as their eyes met. He was aware he no longer really had eyes but the sockets where they once were now glowed a disturbing, bright yellow not unlike the sun. He paused in his complex struggle of the rings stuck to his robe as they looked at each other in the face for the first time.

The night elf was... without a doubt... something he could have spent many hours staring at. The scholar in him suddenly lusted after the idea of it: keeping the elf in his laboratory as a beautiful case study, making him move in certain specific ways so he could examine the definition of the muscles underneath violet skin, turning his sketchbook heavy with ink as he drew out different stances and poses as he showed him how night elves fought and cast spells and slept, running his bone hands through the elf's long hair marveling at the ease of the two together, discovering slowly, quickly maybe, if his body responded to brief touches, to sincere touches, to direct touches, to erotic touches, to hard touches...

The lights in Tailor's eye sockets went out in surprise, his body's imitation of a blink.

The night elf was staring at him, his eyebrows narrowly moving in something akin to a quiver. His lips were alternating between being firmly closed and opening slightly. The skin high on his sharply defined cheeks was noticeably darker, like a blush.

Tailor immediately dropped the elf's hand and stood up. For a second, the night elf had no choice but to go with him, least he rip the fabric or lose a ring. In the end, he lost the stitch-styled ring to Tailor's robe, and he fell back, looking startled and a bit bewildered.

The Forsaken stared at him. His chest was rising without him wanting it to, and he found his fingers drumming by his hipbone as he gazed down hard at the night elf, who was in turn watching him intently.

He couldn't even manage the shortest of apologies in Common, which he knew, or in Darnassian, something he had begun to learn recently. Instead he turned on his heel and tried to go back to where he was heading, but he honestly and completely had forgotten why he was there let alone where he was going before he ran into the elf. Or the elf had run into him. All that he knew was he wanted to go to his laboratory and drown himself in his work, immediately.

Even though he was beginning to suspect for the next few days... all his focus would be on a particular race of Alliance... possibly even just one member of that race.

It was nearly four hours later he realized he had unintentionally stolen the elf's ring, and that night, with the white stars distant against the deep black sky, he seem to stare at it endlessly.

without time in mind

The slope of his jaw always intrigued her.

So many of her own people - not humans, she no longer... really could associate, acknowledge them as hers, she meant Forsaken - had so little definition left to their jawlines. Some had even go far as to staple or slam or cement metal against their cheekbones to make false jaws; she had seen a few without the lower portion of their mouths, tongue hanging out as they wrecked havoc on the landscape. She knew, personally knew, a warrior woman with the skin of her lower jaw completely gone, like she had spent her time as Scourge screaming so much there was no flesh left to remind her of civilized conversation.

So the blood elf, with his strong jaw, intact with slightly tanned skin without a noticeable flaw and frighteningly smooth except when she caught him accidentally in the morning, had in turn always intrigued her. Even the times she had walked into his room in Silvermoon City to ask about their next arena battle or request assistance in battle, he still had looked good. Disheveled, embarrassed, clinging his sheets against his bare chest, she easily could tell he was still just as intriguing. The dark scruff around his mouth and on his cheeks and throat only registered as something more attractive.

However, as they crossed through swirling violet lines in the cavern deep in Tanaris, she watched his face transform with utter surprise.

His features turned stronger and less subtle. His skin darkened considerably, the color of mud after midnight, and his hair flitted once. His long blonde locks started to spiderweb black from his forehead, then poured backwards like water pouring over a sudden cliff. His brow shortened violently, which amused her the most. Those long, flexible, cat-like things swept down to just bushes over his now very brown eyes. Similarly, his ears went in immensely, curving now, no longer pointed like thin equine knives.

He was blinking rapidly. His red-armored mount had yet to change and wouldn't, she knew, their steeds remained the same through the illusion during their stay in the Caverns. But his stance was different on the horse, as was hers on her strange steed from the Outland.

His gaze was turned just on her. He had yet to assess himself. His eyes - normal, warmer, more telling - fixed on her body.

She felt no embarrassment and smiled widely at him. "Get off your horse," she demanded mildly, and he obeyed, still struck by the change that had come over her. She dismounted without care.

"You're human again," he echoed hollowly.

She had to giggle and pushed his shoulder. She could feel the thicker muscles and fat and stronger bones under her incredibly heavy plate armor as she moved as such, and she enjoyed it as much as she could, knowing it was an illusion and that she once was like this but could no longer remember it.

"You are human, too," she told him, and his expression blossomed into confusion then shock as he looked down at at himself for the first time. His hands went for his helm strapped to his hip, and he slammed it on hard enough the metal clanked and spread throughout the cavern hallway.

She slapped his neck - the only non-armored part of him she could reach now - and snapped half playfully, half in real aggravation, "You take that off! You look good as a human."

He shook his head in genuine humiliation, but she would not take no for an answer. She shoved his armor again, her death knight glove causing his paladin's armor to ring unhappily as the contact between unholy and holy. "Take it off, or I am leaving now."

He paused uncertainly but removed his helm uneasily finally, looking displeased at the change from lean and pretty to rough and gruff. She shrugged at his expression and patted him on the cheek, momentarily marveling at her own now-human hand. Though she did not notice it, he relished it, leaning into her touch so softly it would have been hard for anyone to realize it, let alone her of all people.

In her mind, her view, her assessment of him, she found his new jawline just as intriguing as his elven one.