Returning Hope
When Sivir sees the color green, her stomach clenches against the ghost of a memory. Those first few months had been the hardest; she would look at that color, any shade of green, and she would remember the feeling of her own blade sliding cleanly between her ribs, the sensation of being sliced, of her insides spilling out, drowning in a thick pool of blood that smelled of iron. She would remember those eyes, green as a polished emerald, watching—just watching—as her guts spilled onto the stones beneath them.
Sivir tried not to remember that moment when she felt her breath leave her body in a thick shudder, the creaking rattle of death's sigh, a sound she'd heard dozens of times before, but never from her own lungs. It had felt as if her entire being had been thrust out of her, all at once.
Dying does something to a person, Sivir thinks. She takes a swig of her drink, and the burn of the alcohol against her throat makes her feel almost alive. She used to drink to have fun, to have sex, to throw her money away. Now, she sits in the back of the Tired Cobra, her cloak hugging her tightly, leaning into the shadows. She drinks to forget, now. To forget that she shouldn't be alive.
She still takes assignments. Shurima is her home, after all. The desert sands are as familiar to her as her own name on her tongue. The thrill of fighting wilderbeasts, of looting the ruins of some ancient temple; there's nothing quite like it.
But the thrill isn't enough, anymore. It's not enough to make Sivir feel... whole. Not like it used to.
Gold used to be her reason for living. Now? Now, gold is just a reminder of Azir, his promises and offers. Royalty, he had called her, promised her a city where the streets were lined with gold. Where she could live a life of luxury and excess for the rest of her life.
It should have been everything she'd ever wanted. Sivir had dreamed of that kind of life, never expecting it to be possible; to be real and within her grasp. She should have embraced it. A year ago, she would have without hesitation.
But that was before she'd died.
A commotion at the bar breaks her reverie, drawing her attention. One man yells at another, slurred words she can hardly make out. The bartender tries to calm him, to no avail. One of the men, the yelling one, slams his fist against the other's cheek. The man who he punched topples backwards off his barstool, and the hat he had been wearing falls off his face, revealing a young man with dark circles under his eyes and a scar that runs across his face.
He groans and pushes himself up, rubbing at his cheek. Sivir sees the blade at his hip, sees the way his hand twitches towards it in reflex, then stills. Instead of reaching for his blade, the man steps forward and takes hold of the drunken man's tunic. He flips the other man onto the ground, offering him a quick kick to the temple that knocks him out cold.
The man reaches into his pocket and drops some coins on the bar, mumbling something Sivir cannot hear before he trudges to the exit. She watches curiously as the man pulls his hat back over his head and slumps out of the Tired Cobra, closing the door softly behind him.
Sivir takes another swig of her drink before setting the empty mug down on the table. She stands and pulls her hood lower on her face before making her way to the bar, where she hands the bartender a generous amount of coins.
"What happened?" she asks.
The bartender accepts the coins she'd proffered, slides them into his pocket in a smooth motion. "This one," he says, nodding towards the passed out drunken man on the floor, who smells of sweat and unwashed feet. "Says the other guy was looking at him funny."
"Was he?"
"No," the bartender responds, and Sivir can't keep an amused smile from her lips.
"Who was that man?" she asks.
He shrugs. "Don't know. Never seen him before. Must be a traveler—has an accent. Ionian, I think."
Sivir nods and tosses the barkeep another coin for good measure before she follows the Ionian man out the door. By the time she steps outside, he's nowhere to be seen. But in a town as small as this one, on the far reaches of the Shuriman desert, there are only a few places where he might have gone.
Sivir walks towards the center of the town, where the only well for miles is located. Sure enough, she sees him. She spots his hat first, where he's placed it on the ground beside him as he reclines against the stones that line the well.
"I don't want any trouble," the man says at her approach. Perhaps he recognizes her from the bar, or perhaps he's just on edge after the fight. But he eyes her warily, as if she were a rattlesnake about to strike.
Sivir cant help but smile, one that doesn't—can't—reach her eyes. "I don't, either," she tells him.
The man eyes her, his eyes moving up, then down her body quickly before returning to her face. He frowns. "What do you want, then?" he asks her.
Sivir opens her mouth to reply, but her mind comes up short. And it's now she realizes she doesn't know the answer to that question. At her silence, the man seems to soften at the edges, his frown abates, the wrinkles in his brow lessen.
"It's a difficult question to answer," he acknowledges, and Sivir finally finds her tongue, as if the words he spoke had broken some spell.
"Ionian," she states. "What brings you this far from home?"
The man regards her as a deer might a hunter. Clearly, this isn't a question he's willing to answer. Sivir sighs. "You don't have to answer that," she tells him, though she knows he wouldn't have told her, anyway.
The man shrugs. "Let's just say that I'm... going where the wind takes me."
A free spirit, then. A man who has no obligations, no cause to worry about his past; a man who isn't needed at home, or perhaps isn't wanted.
The winds are blowing East this time of year. East, deeper into the desert. If this man were to sail along the wind, he would find himself at the gates of the newly risen Shurima, a city once lost to the sands of time. A city Sivir wishes would go return to its rest beneath the ground.
"I wouldn't let the wind take you too much farther than this," Sivir says. "There's nothing worthwhile in this desert, nothing worth braving the heat and sand and death for." Once, she'd thouht differently. But now she knows better.
The man shakes his head slightly. "There is," he says, and there's such confidence in his voice, such surety, that Sivir wonders what it is he seeks. Surely it isn't treasure; gold can't elicit such conviction. She knows this as sure as she knows he is wrong about this, this misplaced determination.
She doesn't expect him to open up, to tell her what he searches for. She sees the way he hesitates, the way he presses together his lips, chapped and dry from the arid winds that drive sandstorms across the lands. She sees the way his eyes narrow at her, as if judging whether she is someone he wants to confide in. And she thinks to herself, He won't. He shouldn't.
He opens his mouth and says, "I'm looking for someone. Someone I care about very much." And Sivir blinks, stunned by the fact that he somehow looked at her—a hooded, nameless woman who has just told him his quest is futile—and decided that she was worth entrusting this secret to. This little tidbit of information, so personal, so intimate, it's as if he shares a piece of his very soul with her. I'm looking for someone. So he loves this person, this someone.
Sivir lets out a guffaw, the sound startling her; the noise sounds like nothing she's ever heard, all bitterness and anger, and it's something that she never expected to hear coming from her own mouth. It doesn't sound like her. But she can't help it. The notion of love, the mere idea of it. She shakes her head. "Love has a way of being buried out here," she tells him.
The man's eyes soften. Perhaps he recognizes the pain in her voice, is no stranger to the loss and grief that constricts itself around your heart and squeezes until you can't breathe. He says, "She's the only family I have," and Sivir hears the unspoken left that hangs in the air between them. "I will find her."
Sivir wonders what it's like to have a family. The closest she had was a mentor, a ragged group of mercenaries and ex-soldiers. That wasn't a family. She'd never felt at home with them.
Sivir looks at this man, with his wild hair and sun-kissed skin, and she sees a light in his eyes that she almost doesn't recognize. But when she does realize what it is, it feels as if she's finally found something she's been desperately searching for, something she'd lost in Azir's tomb, when Cassiopeia buried her own blade within her chest.
Hope.
Movement in the corner of her eye catches her attention, and Sivir and the man both look to the night sky in time to see a rain of shooting stars soar across the sky, their twinkle brighter than any diamonds or coins Sivir has laid eyes upon. They glide to the east, as if all following the same path.
Or maybe showing one.
Sivir knows what else lies in that direction. As the shooting stars wink out of sight, Sivir turns to the man and says, "Go to Azir's palace."
The man's eyebrows shoot up. "What?" he asks.
"Azir's palace. That's where you'll find her. Your family."
The man opens his mouth, a furrow upon his brow, a question surely on his tongue about how she knew, about what she meant. But then he glances back towards th sky. He must take it as a sign from the heavens, because when he meets her gaze again, he nods.
"Azir's palace," he says quietly, and then he repeats it, memorizing it. "How do I get there?" he asks.
It would be so easy to tell him to just head East. So, so easy.
A flash of green, the image of a toothy smirk, and Sivir shivers as a slight breeze stirs memories within her of the trip to where Azir's tomb once lied. But this time, she doesn't banish the memories.
She remembers the journey through the blazing sun, the beautiful Noxian woman who stayed in her tent for too many nights to just be a client. She remembers the battles against the Xer'Sai that killed dozens in their entourage, the sandstorm that buried another dozen. She remembers the descent into the tomb, the darkness that swallowed her vision. She remembers the sensation of being stabbed, of feeling her life ebb away slowly, painfully. She remembers looking into green eyes and seeing regret in them, regret and then excitement. And she remembers dying. Sinking into nothing, buried in eternity.
She also remembers being brought back. She remembers wondering why.
Perhaps this—this is why.
"I'll take you there," she says. A grin finds its way onto the man's face, and she can't help but think that he looks younger, as if a burden of a thousand years has been lifted from his shoulders.
"Thank you," he tells her. "Thank you."
Sivir lowers the cowl of her cloak and extends her hand. He takes it, and his a grip is firm. There are callouses on his hand; he's like her, then. They've worked and fought to get where they are now. These are the hands of a fighter. And that's comforting, somehow.
"Sivir," she tells him.
"Yasuo," he replies.
As they let their hands fall back to their sides, Sivir feels something blossom in her chest, the hope that she can help this man. That she can find meaning in her life, now that she'd lost it once before. And she thinks, as she looks East, that maybe, just maybe, she'll finally find it.