A/N: For those of you who know what I'm talking about, I swear my head isn't just completely crammed full of babies so that's all I can think about! This is, obviously, an 'origin story' and it's been floating around in my brain, unwritten but pretty well formed, for a loooong time now. Long before my own stuff happened, if you catch my meaning. I know; excuses, excuses.

Hope Again

*

Dreamfoil, sungrass, a shaving of briarthorn. She stirred the precious mixture with a steady hand and watched it carefully until it had reached the consistency of thin gruel. There could be no waste, no starting over. All these herbs were dearly bought and hard to come by, but Serlah did what she could because she had to. Sister Anna was a good woman and gods knew she did what she could, but it simply wasn't worthwhile sparing more than one magic healer on a camp full of filthy, lazy, murderous orcs. The mixture began to simmer gently and she removed the pot from the flame, covering it quickly with a rag soaked in cool water. She left it in the window of the tiny hovel where the sun would warm it gradually for a few hours and the sweet, clean scent would drift away to be buried beneath the other odors of the camp.

She remembered how exotic and unfamiliar Azeroth's herbs had seemed at first, even young as she'd been when she'd first come here. Mother had taught her well about every growing thing on Draenor and Serlah had soaked it all in as firebloom in the sun. The herbs here had felt strange. They did new things, or did old things in odd ways. She ruined many brews at first and she'd been punished for it, even as her mother had ruined just as many. In the end, though, she'd come to know them as old friends, each with its own personality – this one cranky, liking to keep to itself except for a grudging tolerance of this other in small doses. This one friendly with every other herb and adding a lightness to all it touched. Another, giving a measure of healing to everything to which it was added. Mother would have been proud of what she had accomplished, had been proud, but Serlah was glad she was not here to see her now in this place. This blighted spot on the grassy beauty of the Arathi Highlands.

Because it was a terrible place. People died here every day, sometimes because there wasn't enough healing to go around for all those who were sick, but sometimes because their heads had been beaten in or their bodies tormented beyond endurance and not even the little healing she or Sister Anna could give could help them. And sometimes they died because they didn't want to live. Serlah had felt that creep coldly into her heart before, several times, and she was thankful that she'd still been able to know terror at that feeling. Each time, Lurigk and her herbs had called her back.

Ah, Mother, it's better you didn't live to see this. And there it was again, the horrible thought: that death was better. Mother couldn't have lived here, though, probably would have died in the camp in just the way she'd died in the hills. She would never have submitted to either the humans or the lethargy.

The memory, and the blood, still seemed very fresh sometimes.

*

Lurigk's days were not as full of activity. What work could a man do in the camps and not draw attention or suspicion upon himself and his family? His skills as a leatherworker had been useful once, but these days there was little enough leather clothing among the orcs, and less reason to repair it. Most could barely bring themselves to care enough to dress themselves in the morning. Rather than become like so many of the others, he did what he could to help his mate. He let her purpose become his own.

They never spoke about what their lives had become for more than half a decade now, and never about what they had been before. This was life now, plain and simple. Everything before this had been wrong, must have been wrong, because it had led them to this. They had given everything to something foul and twisted and now they must live in foul and twisted remorse. He tried not to think of this very often either, but it was unavoidable at times. At those times he knew he teetered closest to joining his brethren who spent their days staring stupidly at the walls or performing any act imaginable for a jug of sour ale from a human guard.

And so he crushed herbs to dust patiently, quietly, not even really living anymore for a day in the future when he might do something else in some other place. His life had become this and there was no more future to wonder about.

"Liferoot," Serlah said softly and passed him a board of grainy bark. He took it in silence and began dicing it fine as sand while she raised a pot to the fire. It was past dusk now and their lamp still flickered, but they wouldn't be bothered. The guards knew Serlah's importance in the stunted, anemic social structure of the orcs. She did a distastefully necessary job no one else but Sister Anna could or would do, so they would leave the dirty little hut be with its single lamp burning after curfew.

He finished and passed back the bark, and as she took it their eyes met. For the thousandth time they each recognized the mirror of their own weary despair. It wasn't like her to shed tears and she didn't now, but she couldn't look at him any longer and she squeezed her eyes shut. The liferoot scattered to the hard-packed floor where they would have to sweep it up later and use it, dirt and all. Lurigk stared at it for a minute and sighed, then scooted to sit closer to her and rested a hand on her thigh.

"We do well enough," he said quietly, though he didn't know what compelled him to make such an assertion. Surely it tempted the hand of fate to move against them again.

"Well enough," she nodded and opened her eyes. The pot boiled and she removed it, then took a pinch from the dusty liferoot and sprinkled it in carefully. "A little more than usual. The dirt will change the balance. Why do I keep healing people who only want to die."

She hadn't even the energy to make it a question. She'd been over it before: she might be just stubborn. It might have been because of the past, when she could think only of killing. These internal inquiries invariably ended in a blank wall of indifference. She simply didn't care; healing people was just what she did in this place.

"Because maybe they shouldn't want to die and somehow you know it," Lurigk said suddenly. She hadn't expected him to answer and she lifted her head to look at him. He was silent so often she'd grown used to it.

He almost seemed surprised at his own words, but he said, "If there ever is a time after this…" No, how could he allow himself to say such a thing? Expunge that from his thoughts, he'd always told himself, and maybe he could finally learn to be content if not happy. Despair crawled into the vacuum hope left behind. Leave no room for hope and there'd be no room for despair. No room to live…

Serlah took up a mortar and pestle. The zest of fresh silverleaf clouded around them and she thought as she worked. Lurigk was wrong; she knew of no such thing as a future in this place. But her own life force struggled somehow to lend strength and life to the failing, and why? What for? So they could live two more years here – three, ten, twenty – and then die just as miserably as they would have yesterday?

"We don't live because we don't want to," Lurigk spoke again. "We're some of the lucky ones, my love, because we have each other."

"If only we had been able to live as we should have." Their decisions, and their parents' before them, bore the blame for that. But there was the past again, informing everything. Always regrets and never hope, never believing anything good could still come.

"We still could." He frowned, and his brain tried to chase the sudden thought away. Irresponsible at best and horrifying and heartbreaking at worst; they'd both seen what could happen. Selfish, wrong. No, not wrong, he thought fiercely. Exactly the way the world was intended to continue in the face of all the worst trauma and horror.

Serlah was watching him closely now; she could see the thoughts passing across his face like clouds in the sky. For the first time in a very long while, she saw a tiny flicker of something besides blankness or sorrow. The warmth of it drew her in and she clutched at his arm, desperate not to see this new thing leave his eyes.

"What, please?" she whispered.

"A child," he replied, and he smiled.

A word, one tiny word, long left unsaid and un-thought of, but how different the air felt once it had left his lips. Something in her heart glowed warmer. He was right.

For the first time since she'd been little, Serlah wasted herbs that night. She knelt in the corner where they kept their tiny store of personal things and selected a cracked earthen jug full of cold brewed tea, a special tea she drank every night that kept her womb barren in this barren place. She tossed the contents out the doorway and let it run in rivulets across the filthy, narrow street.