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The Spymaster does not rest.
Rest is for civilians. Is for the people of Stormwind. For the crown that he serves. That rest, that peace, is not meant for his hands; it is a result he achieves through his work for others to savor and relish in, a proud product of this bloody work he and the SI:7 is tasked with. Rest is not for the blades in the shadows, the quiet eyes of the city, the spy network that thrums across Azeroth like veins, nerves and arteries, connecting to the heart of Stormwind that beats and keeps the Alliance alive.
Rogues, spies, they cannot rest. To stop momentum is to cease existence, to skip a beat, clog an artery, threaten the very system of the kingdom, to choke it and bring it to its knees.
Mathias Shaw simply cannot rest.
Not after everything that had happened in his… absence. Detheroc (oh, just the very name sends a shiver down his spine; isn’t it cruel? how the body remembers fear against your very will?) had stolen Shaw’s name and face, had held him prisoner for who knows how long (days? weeks? months? all of the hours and days began to bleed together, pooling along with the fresh blood spilt from sensitive flesh, carved into sloppy tally marks scratched by his nails and the claws of felhounds that reached their stubby faces in hoping for a taste —)
The damage, oh , the damage. How to undo such untold damage?
The crown left in disarray, his city led astray, the SI:7 following a false prophecy, believing little lies woven in a voice just like his, spoken with that face identical to his. Oh , he could never recover. Devastation. Were it not for Kearnen…
Dear, dearest Kearnen…
See, the Spymaster does not favor being in positions of weakness, and certainly does not enjoy owing something as hefty as his life to champions and adventurers in mismatched armor, and certainly not to a group that calls itself ‘The Uncrowned’; an irony not at all lost on the Spymaster, whose very existence is woven around serving the crown. It all sounds like a highly specific, sick and cruel joke played upon Shaw to make him squirm and suffer. A hell designed for him and him alone. To make amends and correct these horrific, nearly catastrophic mistakes, it’ll take a lot more than sending pleasant thank-you’s to crooked champions and smiling pleasantly at the congregation of rogues in a fucking sewer system —
So, he does not rest.
You pull your weight , Pathonia's voice echoes in his head, her cold, iron serrated voice still crisp and present in his psyche, despite having passed half a decade ago. Earn your worth. Show no fear. Keep your mask up. Pull. Your. Weight.
And that he does. In between squeezing his eyes shut to forget the screeches of demons in his cave, breathing slow to not feel the rattle in his ribs from the conditions his imprisonment left him in, or how his scabbed skin still burns and seethes with the lacerations, cuts, bites, and scrapes from his cage, Shaw is useful. He provides his insight as Spymaster, directs the champions where they must go, and even has at least two pleasant conversations with Ravenholdt for the first time in a decade (though, Shaw has very specific definitions for what constitutes a ‘pleasant conversation’; it differs greatly from the layman.)
It’s not easy. It never is.
Amber Kearnen is dead.
His city is in shambles.
Freshly orphaned king was deceived and left defenseless.
And everything, despite his efforts, despite it all, still, so, so deeply hurt.
Pull. Your. Weight.
It’s a dizzying briefing that Shaw finds himself in. He has struggled already to keep track of what day it was, how much time was passing, and who was talking to him and why. Chalked up to dehydration; Shaw can’t say he felt any sort of motivation to drink any of the water served in what is, again, a repurposed sewer system , so surely, this spinning, he reasoned, is due to this. Add the lack of sunlight for aforementioned architectural reasoning, and perhaps a poorer diet than normal for the same reasoning, and the soreness he couldn’t shake off from being starved and tortured in his own cell by literal demons at the cusp of the end of the world —
His head pulses. Ravenholdt has finished talking. Half the rogues are leaving the table. Something had just been set in stone, and Shaw missed it. Was he dismissed? A burning pain screws tight at his elbow and bicep, where a felhound’s prey drive found ample opportunity to sprint full speed at the Spymaster who, at that very moment that day, had been reaching his hand out the cage in an attempt to reach for something to break free only to be met with horrible, jagged teeth sinking in . It’s almost enough to bring tears to his vision. Or it did, given how blurry everything is. Come to think of it, this wound didn’t really… scab over… did it?
He thinks this is his cue to be dismissed. Even if it isn’t, he needs to sit down. Someone calls for him, probably, given the muffled sound he hears faintly distanced, but he can’t focus on it. His legs have already taken their steps and failed at their one job , and now the rest of him is going down, hands just barely scraping the edges of the table in an attempt to keep himself up. He barely feels the impact as much as he hears it, and very quickly, he sees nothing at all.
Idly, he’s aware that things around him are still happening.
He’s been moved. There are people around him. Now and then, he can almost hear voices. He tries to grasp onto the words, but they slip through his fingers like sand, cascading down in a quiet hush, falling into piles in the darkness, soft and unheard.
It’s unbecoming of a Spymaster.
He tries to struggle against whoever has him, tries to pull away. Anyone could kill him. Anyone could pounce on this opportunity of weakness. Here lies the Spymaster of the Alliance, deeply entrenched in the nest of dozens of rogues, whose very occupations deal with the dark and seedy, the quiet dangers, each of whose skill sets entail the disposal of high profile targets without a single sound. Any one of them could end it. It would be so easy.
Shaw would, if he knew he could get away with it.
So he struggles and strains, tries to give at least something of a fight. Nothing works. There is simply no more strength to spare. Instead, he tries to listen, tries to see through the wisps and waves of fog in his vision, tries to make out who is there and where . Where he’s been moved to, where the exits are, where he can slip away and escape, what it is they’re giving him.
A man of his caliber is supposed to know these things. It is his instinct, his second nature.
It’s like oil and water mixed together in a cup, desperately trying to find unison and cohesiveness, violently stirred by the will of his work, the mighty fist that commands the shadows of Stormwind — but there is no need to uselessly toil and stir these waters. This instinct, this oil, eventually stops spinning, and comes to rest at the bottom of the glass, a grotesque sight that makes way in a lulling, sweaty, feverish head limp against a pillow.
You can rest now, Mathias Shaw.
The voice is soft. It’s calming. It sounds like a memory, an echo, a plea of something beyond him.
Or maybe it’s real. It sounds like a woman’s. Tess, maybe; she always had a kind, nurturing soul caged in knives and royalty.
The waters settle. There is no need to stir them; doing so is thankless and painful, and he has been in such broiling pain for so long now. The act of lifting a spoon is too much for even a master of blades.
It’s festered , he thinks he heard someone say. He’s lucky to be alive.
Lucky. Pah. He’d laugh at that if he could.
What a concept. An insult, even, to put that word anywhere near the Spymaster’s name.
It’s not luck.
It’s not even mercy.
It’s all a joke.
A sick, cruel joke.
He doesn’t know how much time passes from here. He knows everyone is trying to save him. There’s hopefulness in their tones when he can catch onto words, and he wishes he could laugh them away.
Vol’jin had perished, just like this. Or so he read in the reports after his absence.
He too, will perish.
He drifts in and out through the fever. The frustration of losing control had faded by now; there was simply no energy left to be angry at his predicament. He was dying. There was no more fighting it.
He could find peace with it, perhaps. The feeling of floating and drifting isn’t too bad once he’s stopped struggling.
It’d be nice to stop, wouldn’t it?
There’s a distinct click and creak that stirs Shaw, and it takes a significant amount of effort to lift his head to observe. The world spins around him before he can focus on the figure that had entered his room.
A young woman he hadn’t seen among the other rogues before totes a tray of tea, short cropped black hair like a crow’s feather, and a stark red bandana over her mouth.
The recognition presses enough weight to crack and cave in his ribs. Like seeing a ghost.
Vanessa.
It’s over, then.
Shaw drops his head back down to his pillow, letting out a shaky laugh. “Seems I’m dying, then.”
The young woman gives pause, glancing at him briefly before continuing, setting the tray on the nightstand beside him. “So negative. What makes the great Master Shaw say so?”
He lulls his head to the side, facing away from her. It’s easier not to look. Or does he not want to be seen? There’s an emotion caught in his throat that he can’t identify. Grief? Fear? Sorrow? Humor? It threatens to choke him, everything so tangled. His limbs feel cold.
“It’s not the first time I’ve been like this,” His voice comes out breathy and tired. “At the brink of death. Fading, in and out. It’s funny… how sickness can make you see things.”
Vanessa hums at that. “And funny how fevers always bring the most dramatic out of the finest soldiers.”
He almost laughs at that. There’s little air to go around to make it possible. He takes some steadying breaths, though idly, he suspects, he may have drifted off for a short moment. “I was seventeen, the first time. Tried to outrun orcs, fell off a wall, broke my shin. It was rainy and muddy, exposed bone was wrought to infection,” He huffs. “I’d almost died — funny things, I saw, battling that fever. I hallucinated the dead. Thought I had seen my mother, but I couldn’t remember her face. All… so wrong…”
Somewhere, in the back of Shaw’s mind, whatever conscious and cognitive part of him that was still left, he knew he was lacking his usual restraint. His voice is loose, words tangled, and the anecdote is not one he’d normally share easily. Delirious , he almost thinks, just shy of reaching the word. He rolls his head back to see her. Cold, icy blue eyes meet him back, thick dark brows scrunched in scrutiny — or what he thinks is scrutiny. It’s hard to read her, whatever emotion it is she has on.
She looks so much like him. Those high cheekbones, that same dark hair, his eyes — he only remembered her as a child, and only scarcely seen her when she’d taken over the Brotherhood. Up close, he can see the details, see how she had grown into her own. Perhaps in another life, he could’ve watched her grow up. It didn’t have to be this way.
That emotion crawls up his throat again, squeezing and leaving no space for him and stinging at his eyes.
“I wish you were real.”
The words tumble out of him, and Vanessa twitches at it, her expression changing to something even more foreign to him. She turns away from him, pouring a cup of tea, as if trying to avoid his gaze.
“You think you’re hallucinating.”
Her voice almost sounds sad.
“I am. I read the field reports. I already know…” He forces his head up to stare at the ceiling, vision spinning and blurring. “I… I was never given a chance to say goodbye to you. After the riots, your father and I, we — we fought, Light, I could not… I had come home one day, and you were gone. I wasn’t given a chance.”
“You had plenty of chances, Shaw ,” She says harshly, quiet, pained voice spoken through gritted teeth. It feels like a dagger plunged through his heart. “You sent your agents after the Defias. You knew what happened, you knew they were innocent. You could have come with us.”
“I am blood-bound to Stormwind, Vanessa. There was no choice for me.”
“There’s always a choice. You chose a broken kingdom over us. ”
Shaw closes his eyes tightly, feeling the brunt of the dizziness wash over him. The pain is deserved, he feels. It’d be mercy if the infection killed him and severed this red string that tied him to the throne, one woven so deeply by Pathonia. It tethers him. He wishes it would hang him.
“I live with my mistakes. They haunt me every day, everything I could have done differently… There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t wish I could have done more. Saved him.” He pauses, and on these last words, his voice breaks. “Saved you.”
Vanessa stirs the cup of tea, keeping her hands busy and her gaze pointedly away from him. He wishes she would look at him. “How noble,” She says, retrieving something from somewhere he can’t see. “Those thoughts do much for us now, don’t they?”
“I prayed, Vanessa,” Shaw insists, trying to lift his head. “I believe in nothing, not a single one of these higher powers, but I prayed that you could have had a chance at a different life. After Edwin… — the Saldeans, they could have taken care of you. They could’ve given you a different path. You didn’t need to be confined to your father’s footsteps.”
Her fingers are on a vial’s cork, ready to pop it open, but she stops at his words. Her head snaps to him, searching his expression with a wild look. A realization dawns on her, icy eyes widening. “... You were the bandit that escorted me from the Mines… weren’t you?”
“You were just a kid… They orphaned you. Left you with nothing. Left the Brotherhood with nothing. They killed him, and did not bother to see what consequences were left behind. I had to look for you — I had to at least give you a chance.”
Vanessa suddenly abandons the tray reaching to his bedside faster than he can follow and grasping his jaw roughly, forcing him to look at her. There’s no strength to him; his head is loose in her grasp, fully at her mercy. Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t fight back. He makes no attempt to struggle.
“You went all that way — you found me, and you abandoned me at the Saldeans?!”
The touch almost feels real — this image of Vanessa fills his blurred vision. Thick angled brows, hooded eyes, charcoal straight hair, the spitting image of Edwin — it twists his gut and fills his heart with sorrow. He can’t look away. “They would have given you a normal life.”
“Why… Why didn’t you just take me?”
The pain in her voice makes his eyes sting. Desperately, he had wanted to take her. Edwin was dead, and she was left with nothing — he hadn’t seen her in ten years but he still could’ve raised her, still given her all the opportunities Stormwind had to offer, had the SI:7 induct her and change her life.
But he remembered then, what that connection to Stormwind, to the SI:7 and Assassin’s Guild, what that had all done to him, how loyalty was embedded so deeply in his blood he was forced to abandon love to further the crown — he couldn't sentence her to that fate. Not to this same fate that killed her father, that doomed her and the Brotherhood,no, he couldn’t do that to her. She could be normal — no VanCleef, no Shaw, just simple, humble farm girl Saldean. She could have been saved.
She stares down at him, fury and sadness in her eyes that were so familiar. Her fingers dig into his cheeks, bordering on pain. When he answers, his voice breaks. “Would you have forgiven me if I did?”
Vanessa glares at him for a long moment. He can only guess the number of times she’d opened her mouth to spit out a retort, only for it to die in her throat, masked by her bandana. That blasted bandana, and everything it stands for. Perhaps she felt obligated to resume her legacy, to pick up where Edwin had left off. How could he blame her? In that same vein, how could she conceivably forgive him if he’d swooped in and took her back after uprooting her entire life?
She releases him, practically throwing his head back to the pillow, his head swimming with the movement until his vision dances. He can sense the rage in her, how it shakes her frame, how she moves with it like a flame. She is her father’s daughter; he wishes he could have done more.
What a sweet, gentle girl she was. Bright laughter that filled the home, tiny feet stomping through the half-constructed white brick arches to meet him and Edwin. She’d tear into bread with her entire little fists, picking the seeds off of the crust like Shaw would. He used to daydream about what kind of girl she’d grow up to be. Mathias and Edwin talked for long hours about how to give her the best life. The reconstruction of Stormwind felt like building a future, just for her. Just for them.
The thoughts drift into half-formed dreams, far removed from reality while Vanessa mixes the tea next to him. He can feel tears sliding down his cheeks, just thinking about a past long gone.
“I still remember sitting for hours trying to figure out a name…” He murmurs. “Kelsa. Variana. Llana. Charlene. Valeria. Maria. Rebecca. Edwin hated all of them.”
He laughs a little at the fond memory, smiling at the ceiling. “I’m not good at names. That was always Edwin’s strength — and I still remember. He said, no middle names, you get the first one down right or not at all . Which, in hindsight, was solid advice. Vanessa VanCleef — it rolls off the tongue so well.”
She huffs. “Better than Hope Saldean.”
“Leagues better. My grandmother tried so hard to have you named after her, or my mother. She gave me hell for not letting you take my surname too. Funny how different life could have been.”
He has her attention again, but it’s hard to keep focus on her. She carefully seats herself at the edge of his bed, regarding him with a strange look — softer now, than how she regarded him earlier. His voice fails him a few times as he meets her eyes. She leans in in an effort to catch his words.
“I miss you. Every day, I have missed you, Ness,” He murmurs, tear-filled eyes holding her gaze. “I couldn’t bring myself to take you. I prayed, prayed that you’d be better off without either of our legacies, and somehow, somehow things still… I tried. I tried to sabotage those efforts to take down the Defias. I kept the SI:7 out of Westfall, I redirected everyone to the Twilight’s Hammer. I prayed every champion that went into the Deadmines died before they could find you. And still…”
“History repeats.”
“Doomed to an ugly destiny, aren’t we?” He laughs bitterly, weakly bringing a hand to cover his pale face. “When you died… I feel as though a part of me died too. So many years it’s taken me to realize just what I was a part of. How much blood my loyalty spills. What I’ve let it take.”
“And now…” She turns to stare at the cup of tea, her own gaze growing distant. “Now that same loyalty will kill you too. You loved Stormwind so much, demons took advantage of it.”
“There is no love. I don’t think there was ever any love for Stormwind.” His chin lifts, just slightly. “Only duty.”
What a prison.
What a joke.
He feels himself start to slip away again, and he lets it happen, everything around him becoming a swirl of nothing. She watches him as he does, and is willing to believe the softness in her expression was simply that of his imagination.
Her voice cuts through the silence, ringing like a bell tolling in the night.
“ Moth .”
All at once, it feels like the word brings him back to life. It grasps his attention, eyes wide and alert, like something had pulled him from the dead from the center of his chest and into fresh air. How many years had it been since he heard that word?
She regards him with interest, perhaps a hint of sorrow. He forces his head up to look at her, feeling truly awake for the first time in years.. “... You still remember that name.”
“I never forgot it.”
Tiny Vanessa, still learning her words, had heard everyone call him Mathias, but she tripped on her own pronunciation and called him ‘Moth’. Oh how it stuck — he remembers the name only in the voice of a child, but she’s grown now, she’s older, and he missed all of those years.
“I came here to kill you,” Vanessa continues, looking away from him. “I’ve spent years hating you. Resenting you for everything. You took everything from me.”
A dawning realization slowly sets in on the feverish Spymaster as he listens. He doesn’t know if he’ll remember this exchange if he heals up and recovers, but there’s a gnawing feeling about this, about this hallucination, about her ——
“You should,” He says quietly, closing his eyes. “There is no reason why you shouldn’t. And there is… no one on Azeroth who deserves to end my life more than you.”
“... You’re surrendering?”
“Accepting my fate. My consequences.” His breath picks up, forcing his eyes to remain open through the fever. Carefully, he reaches out a hand to grasp her wrist, faintly squeezing with what strength he had. “... You’re no hallucination… are you?”
She stares at the hand for a long moment, contemplating. Then, slowly, she moved to wrap her own around his. “Don’t trust the word of a mind-addled adventurer. I never died.”
Hope blooms in his chest, tears spilling from the corners of his eyes. How he had mourned her — but she lives, she’s so young and still the chance to live this life —
It’s all he’s needed to hear. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, he’s desperately hoping this isn’t a fever dream, that this is real, that she is alive. He holds her hand, as if she’d disappear if he didn’t.
“Then I have no qualms with dying.”
…
The fever breaks a few days later, and Shaw makes his swift recovery. The Champions of the Uncrowned request his aid along the Broken Shore, which he obliges as much as he’s able. There’s still plenty of broken pieces to pick up. Azeroth in turmoil, Stormwind in disarray with the false Shaw planting lies, and on top of it, Anduin ordering him to rest, forcibly taking work away from him to leave him with nothing.
Vanessa had left and taken the poison with her. They never spoke directly again, and for a while, Shaw was almost convinced she wasn’t real once he was fully awake and better.
But Greymane and Ravenholdt informed him otherwise. The Defias were as much intertwined with the Uncrowned as the rest of them.
Vanessa lived.
By the time Shaw had returned safely home, he wept.