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Who: Flynn Fairwind & Mathias Shaw
What: Flynn isn't the BEST at taking care of someone, but he will do
When: A little way into the month of October, during the Loneliness event
Where: At the house they inherited from Anduin, in Cassandra

Content Warnings: depression, loss, will edit if more comes up!

Flynn tries not to be too obvious in the fact that he is watching Shaw, where he's seated across the room. It's just that Shaw has been there, seated in pretty much the same place, for the last half hour. He isn't even reading or sketching, he's just sitting there staring off into space and it's breaking Flynn's heart.

The truth of the matter is that Flynn is nearing his wit's end here. He's never seen the other man in such a state as this, and he isn't entirely certain how to handle it. Shaw hasn't been sleeping well, which isn't exactly new, nor is the way that he seems to barely remember to eat save for when Flynn sets food down in front of him. But it's this listlessness that worries Flynn. Shaw has always been a man on a mission, and even his first few days in the Trench he had set himself to writing in that little journal of his. Now...

Flynn doesn't quite understand how to make it better. He just knows that he has to do something before the man in front of him fades away completely.

Decision made, Flynn crosses the room to join him on the sofa, putting a gentle hand on his knee as he does.

"You're going to start growing mushrooms if you keep sitting here like this, you know," he murmurs.

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Damp is perhaps the best description of his entire situation. Every place a draft could slither in carried in the chill of a damp, brackish coast late in the fall. A blanket of clammy sweat clung to Shaw like a second skin no matter the temperature or how often Flynn reminded him to bathe. He chaffed but never fidgeted. He was weary and unstimulated but did nothing to remedy either. It was a caged feeling if the door were slightly ajar and Shaw had no desire to exit.

The house they had 'inherited' with the king's abrupt departure was sturdy, and they had been lucky to come by it, but this place had its claws dug in deep. In the general atmosphere, but most of all himself. There was a persistent, suffocating ache that Shaw was slipping into like the last moments of a drowning victim where they give over to the water filling their lungs.

"Hmm?" The lead pencil he had been holding loosely between his fingers and ignoring like the journal on the side table fell to the floor with barely a sound. Hardly registering it, or Flynn.

"If I do, it will save us a trip to the markets," Shaw said, all the wit of the comment dulled by how far off and disinterested he sounded.

In the corners of the room closest to the fireplace, the shadows shuddered just out of notice.

Flynn's frown deepens at the other man's response -- or lack thereof, for that matter. Shaw has always been somewhat dry, but this is starting to veer towards gallows humor and it's making Flynn uncomfortable, especially because it's at Shaw's expense. This wonderful, strong, clever man that Flynn adores, and he's genuinely frightened for him, because this darkness he's sunk into has lasted for long enough that Flynn is starting to find it hard to tell whether it is the city's influence on the man, or...

His grip tightens on Shaw's knee, and he can't help himself. He's had enough of this wallowing, and he may not know precisely what to do to help him, but he'll be damned if he isn't going to try.

"Matt," he says, reaching a hand up to cup Shaw's cheek and turning his face toward him, his own expression uncharacteristically serious as he meets the other man's green eyes. "I am right here. You know that, yeah? If you need anything, I'm here for you, love, and I'm certainly not going anywhere -- that is. Not unless you want me to," he adds, with a rueful smile.

This was not the first time Shaw had sunk into a point as low as this one. So saturated in the oily, overwhelming malaise of indifference that he just oozed into whatever spot he occupied like a stain seeping into whatever cracks would fit him. After his time being 'hosted' by the Burning Legion, when he had returned to Dalaran from Stormwind, Shaw did not so much as fall to pieces as he just stopped. For nearly a fortnight out of the public eye, he was a blank slate—haunted his own apartment as he merely existed without engaging with the small, self-defined world around him.

One morning, he woke up, shaved, and continued on as usual, then never looked back. Shaw had crushed that momentary lapse of self-control under his heel. Now, Shaw is waiting to wake up again. For this all to be some ridiculous episode, he wouldn't even need to count as a footnote. He was still waiting.

When Flynn squeezed his knee, Shaw tensed barely out of notice but enough to show he was still cognizant. He blinked and stiffened more still when Flynn's warm, rope calloused hand came to cup his cheek. Some of the damp chill that permeated the room fled him then, but only some.

"I...supposed I need to make myself useful soon," Shaw answered slowly as if thinking that was the best answer. The one Flynn would have to hear. "Did you need something?"

Did you need something?

Something twists within Flynn's stomach and he has to pull back from Shaw to keep from flinching, right in his face where he won't have any chance of hiding it from him. Except maybe he wouldn't notice, because Shaw doesn't seem to be paying him any mind at all, just now.

There's a part of Flynn that wants to hit him. Another part of him wants to reach out and grab him by the shoulders and shake some sense into him. He knows this isn't Shaw's fault, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't hurt to feel so...

Useless. Unwanted.

His fists tighten on his knees and he pushes himself up from his seat beside the smaller man and takes a few steps away from him, to keep himself from doing anything far more drastic.

"Tidemother's tits, Matt," he says. "Is that really what you think that this is about? That you're not making yourself useful enough for me?"

In a moment of clarity, Shaw snapped to his feet. Eyes wide as his stance took on a defensive posture, Shaw was very much the man who would take off a limb before being touched, "Am I supposed to be a problem, Fairwind?"

Behind Shaw, as he thunderously stands, a shadow flickers by the fire before it manifests in full. Slim and writing with the smoke until it manifests fully. Her arms shelter around Mathias, and she tilts her gorey, bloodied head against his. Pure affection; her good, green eye was glaring at Flynn from over his shoulder.

"Why am I not useful enough?!"

"For the love of the gods, Matt, are you even listening to what I'm --"

Flynn whirls on the older man, intending to tear into him in frustration: entirely warranted as far as Flynn is concerned. He's been nothing if not gentle and understanding of Shaw's current troubles, putting his own issues on the back-burner and doing his best to be supportive and understanding. The fact that Shaw is lashing out at him in response to this is hardly fair, and he'd love to tell him as much, and more, if not for -- whatever the hell it is that's wrapped itself around the other man instead.

"Holy -- !!" Flynn exclaims, jumping back in shock as he does, before the sudden fear turns into something... Angrier. The figure may be dark and terrible, and Flynn may be frankly terrified of whatever the hell it is, but he has had enough. "No, you know what?" he says, taking a step forward towards the other man and the nightmare clinging to him. "Absolutely not! This is your fault, isn't it? You take your nasty undead hands off of him, right this instant!"

"Flynn- ?!"

In his lifetime Shaw had been at the mercy of men who finely turned cruelty to an art form and demons who made them all look as ineffective as children tearing wings off of gnats. Yet nothing ever made him shout in such alarm as Flynn advancing on him with a thundering fury in his voice. Even in the state, he was in, Shaw's mind turned in on itself- until now, finding the idea of Flynn Fairwind approaching him in anger incomprehensible.

The not-so invisible phantom hissed and melded back into the shadows but remained a palpable force behind Shaw, looming and only perceivable by a glimmer of green that caught in the firelight.

"Flynn?" Shaw repeated, desperation rising in his as he struggled through the thick haze of whatever was clouding his mind set against the sudden, sharp pang of fear lancing through him.

Flynn supposes that the end result is what he had intended, the ghost retreating for the moment, even if it is still visible in the shadows behind him. The look that Shaw gives him in return though, and the confusion and fear on his face...

It isn't fair, Flynn thinks to himself. If he has to deal with these phantoms, with the side-effects that they are having on Shaw, they should at least be visible to the man himself.

Flynn raises his hands to cover his face and lets out a noise of frustration as he tries to pull himself together. He's feeling a bit at the end of his rope, just now.

"These gods-damned ghosts, Matt," he says, at last. "I've had enough of them. They might have been frightening at first but it's getting bloody old now. Did you hear me?" He picks his head up out of his hands and glares at the mist behind the other man. "Bloody old!"

"What?" Shaw finally breathed out, staring at Flynn in disbelief. Still finding himself trying and failing to pull complex words and sentences from his head, drowning in his confusion. Reduced to uncharacteristic monosyllabic words and sounds as he just gaped at the other man.

Following the line of sight where Flynn's ire was directed towards, Shaw only saw the fire's dying embers flickering in empty shadows. The most straightforward explanation was Flynn had lost his mind or spooked himself as he was wont to do whenever his superstitions got the better of him. Only whatever had Flynn so worked up had seen the man's rage lashing out on something attached to Shaw himself.

"Flynn..." Shaw tried to keep his voice firm but couldn't hide how it faltered. "What did it look like?"

Flynn shoots one final glare in the direction of the mist, before raising a hand to rub over his face. He can actually feel a headache coming on, and he hates having headaches, not when he hasn't done anything particularly exciting to set it off.

"I dunno, it was... A girl?" Flynn says, trying to think back about the figure, beyond his anger and fear to the visage itself. "A woman? Youngish. Dark hair, ponytail?"

He shakes his head, not really certain that there's anything more to say. She'd been a ghost, and the whole... Blood and gore bit isn't exactly a helpful descriptor, as far as he's concerned either.

Shaw's expression twisted up before going slack as if he had been punched. Already clammy and on the less-appealing side of disheveled, Shaw looked stricken. Every micro expression, a silent implosion was the pieces stiched themselves together into one terrible, unbelievable answer.

"Amber..." The name comes out painful, like he was letting it bleed out of him.

This couldn't be happening, but then again, Shaw had never told Flynn about her, let alone what she looked like. Even if there were some twisted manifestation of her attached to him, Flynn wouldn't know who she was, let alone what she looked like.

Flynn doesn't know who this Amber is. He's certainly never heard Shaw mention her before. But he may as well have reached out and plunged his own knife into the other man's chest for the way that Shaw's face looks when he describes her, the way his voice sounds when he utters her name...

Flynn frowns for a moment, wracking his brain for something, anything that might help piece this together, but. Nope, nothing. Shaw hadn't mentioned this girl any more than he had the last ghost. That -- Edwin, had he said his name was?

"Sorry," Flynn says, his expression pinching in confusion as he does. "I -- who?"

Apparently, Shaw was thoroughly unconcerned with the real and present danger of there being the ghost lurking behind him. If Flynn wasn't seeing her anymore, then it just did not signify with Shaw, who was more preoccupied with the deluge of memories and regrets threatening to overtake him. Sinking into the chair behind him, Shaw leaned forward as if a great weight was pressing down on his shoulders. He placed his face in his hand and let out a shaken sigh.

"Amber Kearnan," Shaw said heavily. "Another person in my life who died because of my failures."

Flynn crosses his arms over his chest, fighting with himself on what exactly he should do with this information. What little information it actually is, granted. Shaw seems pretty intent on beating himself up no matter what Flynn says or does, and Flynn doesn’t really feel brave enough to be shoved away again.

"With all due respect to whoever she might have been, I am certain there was more to her than that," Flynn prompts, his eyebrows raised at the other man in silent question. Is he really going to be this difficult, here?

Shaw made an exacerbated sound aa he scrubbed a hand across his haggard face. Leave it to Flynn Fairwind to make a perfectly salient point that perhaps Shaw needed to hear, and still somehow be so irreverent while doing it.

"Amber was my best friend- truly, my only friend." Shaw confessed, "And you are right but..."

Deep breaths- this was still Flynn, Flynn was safe to tell these things to.

"She died saving my life to get word out I had been taken by the Legion during the third invasion. To carry that knowledge has been...difficult, at times."

Flynn supposes that Shaw does have a right to be miserable about her death, given the circumstances he's described. He'd been fairly removed from the whole business of the Legion invasions, and Shaw had told him only the barest minimum of his own involvement -- had he said he'd been taken just then?

He moves to sit down beside the other man again, close but not touching this time. Shaw hadn't been very keen on that before and frankly Flynn isn't keen on setting him off again either.

"I'm sorry," he says, after a moment of quiet contemplation. "That's -- well, it's awful is what it is. But honestly mate, you really shouldn't go around calling her your failure. Your best friend? No wonder she's haunting you. I'd be right cross with you as well."

He turns to glance up at the other man, raising an eyebrow at him as he does. Testing the water of Shaw's mood, as it were.

"I--" Shaw had to work the words out of his throat as he struggled to even look at the other man, "there were a few key details when I gave you the more truncated version of my service during the last invasion from the Burning Legion."

His posture goes rigid when Flynn's weight jostles the couch, but Shaw does not attempt to put any more distance between them. Really, he ached to move past all this and pretend nothing happened. To close the short gap between them and forget. That would be easy, but it would also be cowardly.

"Amber and I were ambushed on the Broken Shore before we could alert the Alliance or the Horde that their joint assault was leading into a trap. Amber escaped to get the word out...I did not."

Shaw looks over at Flynn with red threads burning at the corners of his eyes.

"Is she still here?"

Flynn glances back at the space that the ghost had disappeared into at the other man's question, before shaking his head. He wants to be angry, frustrated, something with the other man for keeping this from him deliberately. There's something about Shaw's bearing that tells him though that, however intentional it had been, keeping the truth from him hadn't been through any fault of his own.

"Sorry, love," he says, deliberately softening his words. "Just you and me, now."

Flynn still isn't exactly sure whether that's a comfort to the other man or not.

The line in Shaw's shoulders crumbles as all the tension he had been carrying collapses with a shaken exhale. A full-bodied shiver runs through him as he feels as though a bucket of ice water had been upended over him. There is a relief to be found in Flynn's words. It would have torn him up inside to think Amber might linger here a second longer because of him.

"This damned place," Shaw shakes his head and rests his head back into his hands. "This damned, fucking place. I am sorry, Flynn. I tell you all this now- I wouldn't have lied to you."

Flynn has been trying to hold himself back from moving any closer to the other man, lest Shaw move to push him away again. At the way that he crumbles beside him, though, he finds that he cannot help himself. He cannot simply sit back and watch the other man suffer while he does nothing, he can't. He would rather leave the room completely than do nothing at all.

"I know," Flynn says, shifting closer so that he might place a hand on the other man's knee, gentle and tentative but also yearning for more. To move even closer, to take him in his arms and hold him close and tight. "I know you wouldn't."

Despite his relief that the phantom had seemingly fled, Shaw caught himself looking up and glancing around at every darkened corner of the room. Searching for some hint that the apparition of his old friend remained but only found shadows flickering on the walls with the dying embers of the fire. Shaw didn't know how to feel because he was so drained, like everything in him had been purged in one fraught moment.

"Anything," Shaw began with his voice hollow as he sounded half-awake, "I'll tell you anything you want to know just please-"

Ending all hesitation and distance between them, Shaw collapsed against Flynn's side.

"Stay."

"Oh, love..."

Even despite the hollow, slightly desperate tone in Shaw's voice, Flynn can't say there isn't something within him that loosens to have the other man close again. Flynn understands this, how to do this. Touching him, holding him. He knows he may still wind up opening his mouth and saying the wrong thing, but as he raises an arm to wrap around the other man's shoulders and turns his head to press a kiss against the crown of his head -- he is just so relieved that Shaw has finally stopped pushing him away.

"I'm right here," he says. Which was rather the point of everything he had been saying before the ghost had shown up, but he supposes that that's water under the bridge. "And I promise I will continue to stay so, alright? You're certainly not getting rid of me that easy." He tightens his arm around Shaw's shoulders for emphasis of his point.

"As for the rest of it though, you..." He hesitates, before raising his hand to run it through Shaw's hair, which is admittedly a bit greasy (when was the last time he washed? or -- left this room, for that matter?), though he's experienced worse. "I mean, there are parts of your life that. Y'know. I'd certainly like to know about. But I'm not about to hold you to any sort of an explanation now. I mean -- if you'd like to tell me about any of it, then, you know of course that I'm all ears. But I don't want you to think that you owe me just because you think I need it, yeah? I'd rather..." His hand stills in Shaw's hair for a moment, before he says, simply, "I want us to be happy together, love. That's all. What can I do for you to make things easier for you here?"

"By the Light," Shaw let the curse be strangled out of him on the end of a long exhale. It was a curse because the man had about as much faith in the 'Light' as anything else in his life: sparingly little. The only exception, of course, was the present company.

"I never want to be rid of you. My problem is that I'm not a convincing case for you not to want to be rid of me," There were the self-loathing and doubts of Shaw's capacity of being an even halfway decent partner creeping in again, always slithering into even the tiny crack of his insecurities. Tightly controlled as they were, they always seemed to widen and deepen around Flynn.

Realizing he was sinking back into the pity pool, Shaw followed up with a hurried: "Sorry."

Shaw tilts his chin up and regards the other properly for perhaps the first time this entire evening—likely the last week. A ghost of a smile tugged at one corner of his mouth, and Shaw simply answered, "We trust each other—that's all we can ask of the other here. Trust that I won't try to shut you out and answer whatever questions you may have and that you can always come to me as well. Nothing would make me want to leave."

A pause. Shaw's nose wrinkled, and his expression soured.

"And give me a moment to correct myself. I must smell like the left side of a boar's ass."

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