Part 9 of the How He Got Here series

Part of the arc: Unclegrumble Origin Story

None of it ever got easier, in the sense of anyone actually approving. Alliance guards still did the thing where a hand drifted toward a sword whenever she walked past, then drifted back down once it occurred to them that a discipline priest who’d survived the Scourge probably wasn’t losing sleep over a rusty blade. Forsaken circles back in Undercity had opinions too — mostly a version of “a gnome, though?” delivered in the tone the dead reserve for genuine disappointment, which apparently proves that dying, coming back wrong, and losing most of your original organs still leaves plenty of room for standards. She heard enough of it secondhand to get the gist. Neither side ever really warmed to it. The disapproval just got boring, eventually, and lost its grip that way rather than through anyone changing their mind. Even bigotry has a shelf life if you refuse to give it anything new to work with.

They never moved in together, which everyone assumed would resolve itself eventually and never did. She kept to Tirisfal for years, and then decided the distance had stopped being worth defending and got a plot of her own near Founder’s Point instead — walking distance now, not the ride down from Silverpine or the detour through Goldshire it used to take. He kept the tower — two households, still running in parallel, purely so both of them had somewhere to retreat to whenever the other one tracked grave dirt across the good rug. She visits him. He visits her, close enough now that visiting barely counts as an occasion. Every night, for years, in whatever direction the evening happens to point — the kind of consistency that would be almost unbearably romantic if it weren’t also, most Tuesdays, mainly a matter of whose turn it was to deal with the foxes getting into his workshop again.

What they actually have, underneath the jokes, is harder-won than either of them likes to make a fuss about — the kind of durability that only comes from being told, repeatedly, by two factions who agree on almost nothing else, that the whole arrangement shouldn’t work. Nobody sets out to stress-test a relationship that way on purpose. It just happens, falling for someone the world has strong opinions about, and it does something a wedding-approved courtship rarely has to bother with: it turns staying together into an actual decision, made over and over, rather than a default nobody thought to question.

Which doesn’t mean it stopped stinging. There was a wedding once, early on, that never sent an invitation for two — nobody had worked out where you seat a rotting priestess at a table of Alliance in-laws, so the problem got solved by simply not solving it. Conventional society, it turns out, showed startlingly little imagination for exactly this pairing, and neither of them has spent much energy being surprised by it. Their actual social life happens elsewhere now — a loose, permanently ridiculous circle of people the ordinary world never built a box for, half of them undead, most of them armed, and every one of them better company than anyone who’s ever RSVP’d “just the one” to a wedding invitation.

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