Author's Note: Sorry about the wait! I've gone back to school, and things have been very busy. But tonight, I just felt like writing some fanfiction, so I took a break. Thank you so much to all of my reviewers! You guys are SERIOUSLY what keeps me writing. I keep getting stuck, and then I go read your wonderful reviews and suggestions, and I just figure out the next one! You're all so helpful and I couldn't do it without you!

That being said, I need your help. Firstly, if you could please tell me if you think I'm keeping Kimmuriel in character, that would be great. I'm doing the best I can to think the way he does, but I want to see how well I'm doing.

And secondly, if you would all let me know how you think the story would best progress: basically, I'd like to know if you think it would be best to bump this fic up to an M-rating and include a light lemon or not, or an implied one but no raised rating, or whatever you guys would like to see. I'm honestly torn each way. I think there could be some advantages to each option. So tell me what you think, please? Thanks!

Disclaimer: I only own Nadina Namieh.

Chapter 6

Revelations

She had never felt so worn down in her life.

It had been two days since what Nadina had started to refer to as "the Storeroom Incident"—because she simply could not comprehend what had happened: that Kimmuriel had kissed her. The thought was too bizarre, too intimate, and all of the paths that flowed from it screamed danger at her. Unless, of course, kissing meant something different in drow culture, which she highly doubted…but there was no way of finding that out without asking about it, and asking about it included admitting that it had happened.

She felt as if she had been walking on pins and needles every waking moment. Everything had changed for her, and she was terribly, hopelessly confused. Yes, she had admitted a while ago that she was physically attracted to Kimmuriel. But physical attractions, in her experience, had nothing to do with what was safe or wise. Lust was lust. She was still terrified of the unpredictable, inhuman drow, whom she had thought hated her. The potential knowledge that her psionic captor did not, in fact, find every part of her repulsive as she had first thought was not something she wanted to think about. It was completely fine to fantasize about something she knew would never, in three of her lifetimes, happen, but something completely different and dangerous to do so when it suddenly moved into the realm of the possible. She wouldn't put it past the drow for it to have been some sort of trick, for him to have read her thoughts and done what he had to mislead and taunt her.

Either way, she had to tread extremely carefully and thus the reason for her exhaustion. It was much harder than the human had ever imagined possible to have to watch not only every word and deed, but every thought as well. Even then, when alone, she found her thoughts drifting back to the problem, and she hurriedly shoved it out of her mind. Unfortunately, if she couldn't think about it, she couldn't resolve it, either.

Nadina was physically attracted to Kimmuriel—he was trained in combat, and thus his body was doubtlessly to be considered attractive by the majority of human women. But that was where the lure ended. She knew what he was: cruel, selfish, unpredictable, hateful, powerful. She had been with the human male equivalent of him enough times to know that she wanted nothing to do with him. There was no emotional connection between them, that she fully understood. Fruitless thoughts that would never be acted on where one thing. But she did not want to accidently tempt him, as ignorant of drow culture as she was. A drow was not to be trifled with, especially not one that knew her innermost thoughts better than she did.

Kimmuriel was talented, magically gifted, and far stronger physically than she could ever dream to be. Nadina certainly wasn't a virgin, hadn't been since that silly boy Renald two summers ago (and, thankfully, there had been more since him), and that was partly what any desires for Kimmuriel that she did have stemmed from—but she had no desire to be raped.

At the moment, she was in their shared quarters, alone. They'd continued sorting the goods in the storerooms for the last few days. It was, admittedly, a task she enjoyed: it employed both her physical strength, as well as her mind, and it was constant, with little or no breaks, just the way she liked it. She'd been very careful, however, not wanting to get trapped between Kimmuriel and the wall again, always leaving herself a way out, somewhere she could quickly duck to if she sensed danger. It hadn't happened, but she was prepared. Had he been a human, she would have slapped him, and let her wishes to be left alone be known—she'd slapped men stronger and larger than her before, and then broken noses and teeth when, enraged, they tried to use that strength and size. But Kimmuriel was different. Somehow, slapping him had seemed like a bad move. Thus the quiet question being her only response.

But today, they weren't sorting boxes and crates in a storeroom. Kimmuriel was busy with making records and bargaining with gray dwarves and whatever else he did when she was left sitting here, twiddling her thumbs. She used the few candles in the room whenever she could, letting them cast a soft, dim light that still felt more natural to her, even after all of the time she had used the infrared vision. She'd taken advantage of the opportunity to bathe again, and then had carefully combed out her long hair, freeing it of tangles and smoothing it down. It was an activity that was relaxing and pleased her greatly—until the memory that her once beautiful, dark hair was now white as bone, as if she was an old woman.

She stared at the silky ivory tendrils in her hand before letting them fall back to her shoulder and holding her palms out before her in the candlelight, staring at them, an activity she had not engaged in since her first few days in the dark. The myriad occupations of her time, and the little time she spent in the light, as well as a desire to ignore it, had helped her to more or less forget about the changes to her physical appearance. Her palms were her palms; if she looked closely she recognized the shape and feel of them, the ridges of calluses and the neat lines of her nails. But the color was so odd that they no longer looked like her hands. Suddenly seized with a thought, she reached out and lifted the candle from the table, rose and strode back into the washroom, where the pool of water she had washed in stood.

The drow had many interesting mechanics, and the wash basin was one of them. It was a pool carved out of the very stone of the room, she assumed by magic, a comfortably large size that three people could probably fit in, albeit uncomfortably. Somehow, there was a current that flowed through silently, ensuring that the water was always clean, and it was a comfortable temperatuew. Now, she knelt beside the edge of the pool, holding the candle out beside her, and looked down into the smooth water like a mirror.

With a splash, the candle slipped through nerveless fingers and broke the smooth surface of the water. The light immediately extinguished, and Nadina was left in the pitch darkness. But she did not care, the hand that had held the candle slowly moving to the side of her face. The other hand followed as she forced herself to breathe deeply and reach in to retrieve the candlestick. It was one thing entirely to know that her skin had been changed, but completely another to look down, expecting to see herself looking back, and instead seeing a drow—seeing Kimmuriel. The change affected her face like it had her hands. She recognized the lines, and planes of her face, but it seemed strangely alien. Somehow, the altered colors seemed to bring other, different features to the fore.

In a daze, Nadina carried the candlestick back into the other room, setting it on the table and sinking back into the chair. She realized that, like it or not, she was resigned to a life in the Underdark now. Nadina may never have thought of herself as overly beautiful or an eye-catcher, like Serenade was, but she had been proud of her pretty features. But now... There was no way she could live in the light again, not when she would have to see that abomination that they had turned her into everyday of her life. At least in the dark, the ugliness was more or less hidden. Quickly, she blew out the other candles, switching her vision back to infrared. Human skin and drow skin shared the same color this way, she mused, looking at her glowing hands in front of her. If this was to be her life for the rest of her days, she might as well embrace all aspects of it.

With sudden violence, she seized the damp candlestick and threw it at the wall with all of her might, whirling in the darkness so her hands could find the others as well.

XXXXX

Her hands may not have looked like hers anymore, but at least they were still as deft and capable as ever. And Nadina had never been more grateful for something to do. She was back in the storerooms, busily sorting through crates again today, along with the other drow members of Bregan D'aerthe whom Kimmuriel had enlisted. They were working on four different rooms, the doors opened to the hallway, crates moving from room to room. Unfortunately, this job required torches, as infrared wasn't good for discerning worn metal from fresh, but the work kept her mind preoccupied . Though she couldn't understand the drow tongue fully yet, she caught a sense from the workers that she wasn't expecting—the camaraderie of sharing a workload. It seemed to her that quite a few teases and taunts were passed around—though never to Kimmuriel, and they never stopped working. For herself, Kimmuriel had set her to sorting through the boxes of one room, and so she sat working alone, save for when someone came and collected a box to move elsewhere.

As she set a mail shirt in the crate with the others like it and pulled another crate towards her, she felt rather than heard someone coming to retrieve it. That was the way all of the drow moved: like liquid silk. Now used to the quietness of her new world, she was in tuned to the little sounds that marked their passing, such as the breath of a whisper as they turned the corner with the minimal amount of space between shoulder and wall, or the softest tread of their strange boots on the hard floor.

Kimmuriel himself knelt beside her, one knee on the stone floor, examining the mail in the crate. Despite herself, she looked up at him as he settled beside her, and then her eyes alighted on his left hand, sitting on the edge of the crate nearest her while his other reached inside, counting to himself. In the dancing torchlight, the threadlike white design around his finger stood out on the darkness of his hand. She had studied her own design when it was first put there, but she had never looked at the scar Jarlaxle had bestowed on him. She had assumed that they matched, but as she looked closer, she realized that they did not. His were thick, straight lines in an interesting pattern, while hers were delicate, feminine, curving designs.

Almost before she realized she had let herself get distracted from her work, his eyes slide sideways, and then his head turned towards her, studying her face and then following her gaze and looking down at his own hand, unfurling the fingers so he could see the pale lines for himself.

"Yes, they are very different," he said casually, as if it was a normal thing to read someone's mind, she thought nastily, angry at him, dread blossoming in her. Then again, she chided herself harshly, her anger sinking as quickly as it had risen, for him, it was normal.

Before she realized what that he had moved, the drow had reached over with his hand and caught hers in it, pulling it to him, and turning her to face him in the process. The day before yesterday, this would have caused fear to spasm in her stomach, and eyes to dart towards the door. But after seeing her reflection yesterday, all of her previous fears of misleading him were gone. She was still human, under the darkness, and unattractive to him. And she had nowhere to go. She was trapped down here until she truly was old and her hair was white anyway, without the help of a spell.

"They are a bit symbolic," Kimmuriel continued, seemingly oblivious to her dismal mood. He laid his left hand on hers so the two puedo-rings were side by side, easily compared. "Jarlaxle used the spell quite a bit differently than its' intended purpose. It comes from the far south, and is the marriage rite of the Enudrin people. I have no idea how he discovered it. It is supposed to be a binding ritual, as the lines can never be removed." He ran a studious finger over the lines on her skin, and Nadina fought to keep her face still and normal as the movement sent a slight chill down her spine. She kept her eyes fastened on their hands, unable to look at his face.

"They are representative of our histories and personalities," he added, turning her hand over to study the other side. "You may make of that what you like." With a final touch to her lines, he released her hand, but he remained crouched silently beside her. Nadina kept her eyes down, sensing that he was trying to search her face for her thoughts—or in his case, just read her thoughts, actually, she realized again with another sinking feeling.

She heard a soft sound, almost like a scoff, from him. "You really do not like that, do you?" he asked, the slightest touch of amusement and thoughtfulness in his voice.

Hot blooded anger leaped to the fore again, so much that she lifted her head to glare at him—how dare he mock her by flaunting what he already knew just out of her reach! More than anything in the world, even more than she wanted to be free, she wanted to hurt him, somehow, in any way, and she cursed him and his ancestors vehemently for their impenetrability, for his invincibility that made him so superior to a mere human like her. What she wouldn't give to make him taste some of the humiliation she choked on every day. But the flash of emotion died quickly as she looked up at him, again, to her growing frustration, unable to meet his eyes. Her thoughts turned apologetic out of the lick of fear that clenched her insides at the thought of having insulted him, all the while hating her own helplessness, knowing that there was nothing she could do to protect herself from him and she was ashamed in her weakness.

She closed her eyes against the tears that welled up there born of frustration and humiliation, and which only added to her shame.

Finally, Kimmuriel moved, shifting from one knee to the other. "Well, then," he said, having been privy to every line of her emotional thoughts. He moved his hand again, reaching out to take her chin in his fingers, pressuring her to lift her face, but, No, please no, she prayed as she resisted, and to her amazement, Kimmuriel dropped his hold. Instead, she felt his deft fingers lightly touch her crown, lifting a lock of hair and running it through his fingers.

The gesture, though she knew it was never meant to be comforting, made hot tears press against the insides of her eye lids regardless because of the memories it brought to the surface, such that she had to fight them down. She refused to cry openly in front of him. She remained absolutely still, like a statue, and he sat there as well, gently twirling a lock of her hair through his fingers in an almost thoughtful manner.

For once in his lifetime, Kimmuriel found himself at a loss as to how to react, and it was not an occurance he wanted to experience again. For all he had remarked on how simple-minded humans were, their emotions were certainly complicated and confusing. He praised Lolth for blessing him with cool-headed logic. He enjoyed the way her hair felt on his skin as he ran it through his fingers. It was finer and silkier than his own. He cringed at the thought of ruining it by turning it black. Lolth knew the only natural color for hair to be was white. He let it slip through his fingers and fall back into place, studying her closely.

The woman really was very pretty. The thought had occured to him while studying her hands: feminine, neat, lithe, but still strong, callused. It spoke volumes about her. One did not get callused hands like those unless one trained with a blade for quite some time. A thought occured to him, but he quickly dismissed it. Arming Nadina was not something that his instincts judged as a good idea.

It was clear that something was wrong with her, but what he simply could not understand. He sensed it stemmed from him reading her thoughts, but he had no idea how to fix it, or if he even could. Had it to do with her not being able to keep secrets from him? He had picked up some frustration at that. Despite himself, Kimmuriel could understand that feeling a bit. He himself had a rather lot of secrets he did not want to be common knowledge.

With a mental sigh, the drow picked up the box he had come to retrieve and rose to his feet. "Will you be able to finish the rest of these," he asked, "or do you require a break?" Nadina didn't answer verbally. She just turned back to her new box and started emptying it.

XXXXX

"Where is Narbondel?"

The question surprised Kimmuriel, who was once again record keeping, both because he was focused completely on what he was doing and because Nadina had never before shown any interest in anything remotely drow related. He glanced up from where he sat at his desk to look at her. She stood about ten feet away from him, beside the open chest where the scrolls were kept, and was sorting a few them, as he had requested of her. Her pose was relaxed, her weight settled mostly on one foot, both hands held up in front of her, records in each, her eyes trained on them. He couldn't help but admire her for a moment. She made a striking image, wearing her her usual shirt and tunic, which followed her bust and waist closely, over trousers that showcased her long legs to an advantage, and caused some more of that heat to shoot through his gut. That was something he was still getting used too: while drow women looked distastefully down on men's clothing, she had made it clear that she prefered it.

Nadina glanced up at him, and he read confusion as to why his answer was so long in coming in her thoughts. It was a warranted question, after all, she had been nearly everywhere in Bregan D'aerthe's keep without seeing it, and it sounded like it was important and common knowledge, not a secret subject.

"Narbondel is not here, in the keep. It is in the city of Menzoberranzan," Kimmuriel answered, toying with his pen. "Do you think a band of outcast mercenaries is important enough to be favored to house the pillar, or that we have talented enough wizards?" The last was the closest Kimmuriel had ever come to being sarcastic. One corner of his mouth twitched as if it might smile.

Nadina lowered the papers, though she looked at the desk thoughtfully, not at him. "A band of outcasts?" she repeated. "I was under the impression that you worked for and were intimate with the city. Is this not part of it?"

Kimmuriel gave a humorless, knowing chuckle. "No. Bregan D'aerthe is not part of any of the cities. We are a group of misfits who have taken the only chance at life, and therefore the only hope we have of any sort of revenge."

"Which is all a drow lives for," she said bluntly. He shrugged a shoulder. It was a racial judgment others of her race had impressed on her.

"We may often be hired by the Houses of Menzoberranzan and occasionally Chad Nasad, but there are few of them who would not want to destory us, if they had the chance. Jarlaxle is a very unorthodox drow male, a thorn in the priestesses' sides. One does not join Bregan D'aerthe lightly," he continued, completely serious. "Most of us are of fallen, dead houses. Living is the only way we manage to spite those who think we are dead. Take Jarlaxle, for instance," he said, turning back to his records. "He was a third son."

Nadina waited for an explanation, but none was forthcoming. "A third son?" she finally prompted quietly.

"Traditionally, the third son is always sacrificed to Lolth," the drow continued without looking up, writing. "It is only the daughters who are truly important to a House. Males are just unnecessary mouths to feed."

Nadina looked back down at the scrolls she held, but she wasn't reading them, rather, thinking. How horrible, and utterly barbaric! To think that any child was unwanted...if she were to conceive children, would that fate lie in wait for them?

"I never said Bregan D'aerthe felt the same way that the matrons of the cities do," Kimmuriel commented as if she had spoken aloud. "I simply gave you the ideals most drow hold to."

"And what about you?" Nadina asked almost before she had thought the question, lifting her eyes to look at him. Kimmuriel raised his head and looked at her, but she dropped her eyes as soon as she saw his. Still, the split second of eye contact caused another spasm of that cursed heat to course through his belly, and he had to fight distracting thoughts away.

"What about me?" he asked, setting down his quill. He registered that this was the first question she had ever asked that was directly related to him, and for some reason, that gave him a...positive feeling. Not one that he could name as happy, but certainly not a negative one. He scoffed at himself. It was only because it was related to the conversation. Her feelings toward him were very clear.

Nadina wished she hadn't asked the question, but she had, and she did want an answer. She sensed it was another piece of the puzzle that was this mysterious drow she had been thrown in with. He seemed about as cheerful as he got, and she was not in the mood to back down. "Why are you here? You seem to have so many useful talents. You're very strong. I don't understand how you could end up an outcast." She looked down at the scrolls, holding her breath.

"One only joins Bregan D'aerthe if one is invited to," he answered delicately after a minute. "Few of us are in a secure enough position to refuse. And Jarlaxle doesn't expect or like to be refused. His terms are very clear. House Oblodra was fourth in the city when it was attacked and destroyed."

"So your family is...dead?"

"Drow law is absolute. If the attack is successful, life continues as if the destroyed House never existed. To fail would spell destruction for the attacking house. Houses do not attack unless victory is assured. It took the most powerful house to destory Oblodra." The last, Nadina noted fondly, was said with a bit of pride. She was, she admitted, shocked. An entire family, simply wiped out—and not one else even bothered to note that they were gone?

"I'm...sorry." The soft statement gave him pause and made him look at her, though she wasn't looking at him. For the second situation in too short a space of time, Kimmuriel was uncertain of how to respond.

"It was years ago," he said, dismissing it. "In such large cities, such things happen at least once a tenday."

"But if you survived...doesn't that mean that the other family failed? Couldn't you have the other house destroyed?"

"And what purpose would it serve?" the drow asked. "I would still be houseless, and while some houses might take me in to bolster their ranks, I would always be an outsider, never to be trusted. Maybe to be called to please a mistress sometime, more likely sacrificed to Lolth to gain more favor. Houses are not destroyed unless she wishes it. Here, in Bregan D'aerthe, I have power, and my own will, and I am free. Which would you rather have?"

AN: Aww, poor Nadina, trying to understand things that make no sense to the human mind. I hope I got those bits about drow culture right, someone tell me if I didn't so I can fix it! It's been awhile since I read the first books, and I don't have them with me here. Anyway, thanks for reading! Look for the next update soon. It will probably come once I have answers to those questions at the top. You are all amazing! :D