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| Details |
| Author: | inkie |
| Summary: | Ben drops in on Ivrianna a couple of days after Atley's knighting. |
| Rating: | M for Mature 17+ |
It is a gray and chilly autumn afternoon in Stormwind. The sky is a low, leaden cloud-sheet that has threatened rain for hours without making good on the threat, and a brisk, knife-edged wind blusters through the streets, snatching at hats and coat-collars and sending leaves and bits of urban trash tumbling.
A tattered Brewfest poster has been chased audaciously onto the grounds of Stormwind Keep itself, and skips skittishly ahead of the wind as if embarrassed by its own intrusion and hunting for an exit. A fellow interloper — this one authorized, though looking almost as out of place — jogs a couple of steps to catch up with it. He plants a foot on it between one gust and the next and stoops sideways to collect it from beneath his scuffed workboot. On his other shoulder he’s carefully balancing a crate, so it’s a slightly awkward job but he manages to snag the paper and straighten again, crumpling it and stuffing it into his jacket pocket.
He pauses to survey his surroundings.
Ahead of him, tucked discreetly beyond another manicured hedge, is a gravel lane and the little row of neat, timbered houses belonging to married, high-ranking officers of the Royal Guard. Ben silently counts from one end of the row, in search of a particular number; the one he’s apparently looking for has windowboxes full of flowers, which are at present lying low in disheveled distress before the wind.
He adjusts the crate on his shoulder and passes through the gap in the hedge to crunch across the lane and up to the door. He knocks, steps back, and waits.
“I’ll get it!” a young woman’s voice carols from within. The house is sort of small to need such caroling, but nonetheless here we are. The echoes are still fading when the door is cracked open, an obvious attempt to keep the wind out and the warmth in. Ivri peers up at Ben.
“Ben,” she says as if confirming it to herself. She’s confused. Look at that confusion in her face. “Uh… come in! Sorry.”
She steps back and opens the door wide enough for him to squeeze through, though not to step through.
Still, he can likely see that the lower floor is warm and cozy. No attempt has been made to plaster the walls, though the white lines of fresh chinking show brightly against the darker wood. The windows have cheerful curtains of Stormwind blue, and candles are lit to brighten the gloom. The scent of cinnamon suggests either baking or that the candles are scented.
A large rug in the main living area is clearly three or four sheepskins stitched together, and they do bear some stains but toys scattered around make it clear the culprits are quite young. The furniture is stuffed, battered, and has warm knitted blankets on it to disguise the battering. One chair is clearly meant for someone of Ben’s approximate build, the leather perfectly worn without being ripped or torn.
Straight ahead, in the kitchen area, there is a poppet. A tiny doll of a woman turns from the sink, patting her hands dry on a towel. She has blonde hair tucked neatly up, her eyes are huge and blue as a tropical sea, and her mouth is a perfect Cupid’s bow. Or Elune’s bow. Either way, some deity clearly had a hand in it, and in her porcelain perfect skin as well. She smiles a welcome at Ben. “I’ll just go pick up the children from school,” she says, her accent pure Stormwind. “Be prepared for utter chaos in half an hour!”
Ben takes in the downstairs with an unabashedly curious look before focusing on the woman in the kitchen. He does a funny sort of blink, his expression seizing for a brief, blank moment, and then he smiles broadly and bashfully at her and ducks his head in response, uncharacteristically tongue-tied. His gaze follows her out, and only when she’s gone does he find Ivri again. “She looks like my Ma,” he says, a little wondering, and then lifts the crate from his shoulder to heft it in both hands. “I can set this in here?” He’s already moving toward the just-vacated kitchen.
Ivri follows him. “Your mother was gorgeous,” she says. “And where you can set it depends on what it is. Wouldn’t it be odd to find out we are related, even if just by marriage? Though I think Amory’s people have always lived in Stormwind. Where was your mother from?”
As Ivri is standing closer to Ben than is her wont, it’s possible she’s flirting with him. This is Ivri, after all. But her eyes are on the box, and her clothes are the last thing from flattering. The sweater she wears is likely Dane’s, and even her pants are loose and baggy. She’s not even barefoot, for once. Thick socks, that’s what she’s wearing. Some women just can’t do sexy.
“Westfall,” says Ben. “East Westfall, up to the river. Her people was Haskills. Eliza Haskill. Far as I know she never was to Stormwind. If she was it’d be before the wars an’ she’d’ve been maybe a kid.” He has already begun unpacking the crate despite Ivri’s noncommittal answer — or maybe because of it, as the contents do appear kitchen-appropriate.
First out is a sticky-looking loaf wrapped in butcher paper, which he sets on the counter and then, after a moment’s thought, slides aside to make room. Next are two pie plates, stacked one on the other with a regular plate in between to keep the top from crushing the bottom. He sets these down and separates them, removing the intermediate plate, to reveal one dish contains spice-flecked iced buns of some kind and the other contains an actual pie. The crust is unevenly crimped and verges on mahogany rather than golden at one side, but it is otherwise a catalog-standard apple pie.
But wait! He’s not done yet. Next is a casserole dish covered with a floursack towel, and then there’s a glass jug of sweet cider and three brown bottles of hard cider.
He arranges all of these items in silence, surveys them, and takes the empty crate from the counter to set it on the floor. He lifts the towel from the casserole dish, revealing a perfectly golden shingled-potato crust over some fragrantly savory contents, gravy bubbled up around the edges. “Chicken pie,” he informs Ivrianna, and drops the floursack towel into the crate on the floor.
Now he turns finally to face her, propping a hip casually against the counter and folding his arms. “I realize you got people around here an’ prob’ly more’n enough, but where I come from it is Manners to bring by food.” His tone implies it is Manners for a particular occasion; he does not specify the occasion.
He surveys her critically, though he can’t quite muster a severity in his gaze to match the stern set of his mouth. “I have seen you lookin’ better.”
Ivri breaks off a piece of scalloped crust from the pie and pops it in her mouth. “Well, now that you’ve pointed that out, I’m immensely cheered up,” she says. “Nice crust.”
“Thanks,” says Ben modestly. “Burned it all to shit, sorry. Bakin’ ain’t my strong suit.” It is not really burned, all to shit or otherwise, but Judge Mary on the Great Azerothian Baking Show might term it rustic. But, you know. So is Ben.
He shifts and knits his brows at her. “M’ I gonna hug you?” he asks, dubiously and perhaps rhetorically. He tilts his head and eyes Ivrianna warily. “You want a hug?”
Whoa. Drastic measures.
Ivri pauses in the act of licking pie crust crumbs off her fingers. She doesn’t think it’s shit, obviously. After a moment, she finishing licking her fingers and stares at him. “Do… you want to hug me?”
He considers the question seriously. “I mean. I will. I ain’t much a hugger” — he ain’t at all a hugger — “but if it will make you feel better?” That is definitely a question. Will it make her feel better? He has heard that hugs have that effect on some people.
Her brow puckers. “What is happening right now? Is this a grief thing? Are you trying to be nice, is this nice?”
Ben looks aggrieved. “When ain’t I nice? I am nice. This is–” He blows out an exasperated breath. “I mean. Yeah, Ivri. I heard about your– people, an’ I seen you at Mr. Atley’s ceremony lookin’ like half yourself, an’ hell, we ain’t even had a proper talk in like… I dunno. I ain’t even yell at you about gettin’ blood on my wife.” He scowls, his ears scarlet. “You want a hug or no?”
“No. Now it’s weird.” She starts putting the food in food-appropriate places and waves a hand toward the very nearby seating. “Take a seat, though. Good food earns a seat, at least.”
Once he does, she follows behind him but sits comfortably on the floor, snagging a blanket on her way down to wrap around herself. As soon as the air is quiet from all the moving and sitting and shifting, her face seems to drain of emotion and she stares into the fire, curling her knees to her chin.
Ben, who had settled into a chair like a regular person with a regular person’s respect for furniture, contemplates her for a moment. He gets up again carefully, like he’s trying not to startle a skittish animal, and folds himself onto the floor beside her, wrapping his arms around his own knees in a vague mimicry of her posture. After another moment, he leans just enough sideways to bump her shoulder with his, and then settles back into his own space again. There: a Ben hug.
“Hey,” he says gently. “You can tell me, but you don’t got to tell me.” A pause, and then in a drier tone, an effort at lightness, he adds, “Maybe should’ve brung you another knife? Would that help?”
Ivri butt-scooches closer to Ben until his arm is against her, snugging against his warmth. “You’ve lost family,” she says. “You probably know what it’s like.”
“Yeah,” says Ben, watching the fire. He doesn’t shift or put his arm around her but remains comfortably where he is, his shoulder warmly available. “My Ma. Right at the start of last year.” He squints. “Last… yeah. 25. Which makes almost two years. Damn, time goes weird.” After a moment he says, quietly, “Miss the hell out of her, still. You forget about it, sometimes, a little, an’ then you don’t. An’ people will say you get new family as you go, an’ that’s true, I guess. But it ain’t like they fill in all the gap, you know? Same way that person did. Things that was just you an’ them, things they known about you that no one else does.
“It’s fucken shit.”
His voice goes rough at that last and he pauses, swallows hard, clears his throat. “You will see ghosts of ‘em everywhere a while, I guess. Not, like — I mean, not like fucken Plaguelands ghosts, hell. But, like —” He glances toward the kitchen, tips his head. “You come into someone else’s house an’ for a second, there they are, just how you remember.”
He looks back at the fire. “Some days you ain’t ready for that. It’ll put a weird crack in you, maybe. Some days it’s okay. Just, like, kind of a visit for a second.” He turns his head to glance down at her now. “I mean. I ain’t a expert. Been two years.”
She rests her head against his shoulder. “More of an expert than me,” she says. “I keep talking about it, hoping it’ll help. Release it, maybe. It doesn’t. When I do manage not to think about them, it comes back sharper than before. I feel empty. Like they took too much of me with them. And I cry all the time.”
Ivri lifts the hand that’s not sandwiched between the to wipe her face. She doesn’t sob, just weeps.
“Do you still cry? After two years?”
“I don’t cry,” he scoffs, immediately and almost venomously — the venom does not seem directed at Ivrianna. He is very still for a moment, a thread of tension pulled taut in him, and then he says, “Still feel like it some, yeah. Most the time when I do, I hit somethin’ instead.” He swallows again, gazes glass-eyed at the fire. “She’d be pretty disappointed about that, I reckon. Cryin’s probably okay.”
“You don’t cry sounds like something your father told you. Why do you keep taking advice from him, anyway?” She still doesn’t look at him. Just the fire. “You should listen to your mother more. Girls are always told it’s all right to cry. We get held when we cry, hugged and told everything will be all right. Sometimes it’s not, but it feels good to hear.”
Ben sucks his teeth at the mention of his father. “Yeah,” he says. “Well, there is your difference. We ain’t all get it like that.” After a moment he shifts, very very carefully, to draw his arm out from between them and drape it around her shoulders. Still not a hug, technically. Maybe kind of a squoosh. Super cazh. Bros.
“I dunno if everything will be all right. But, I mean, I dunno that it would be if they wasn’t dead, neither. When’s everything all right? Just fucken different. Some of it’s good, some of it ain’t. It’s good they was with you a while. It ain’t that they’re gone. It’s good they raised you an’ your brothers up how they done. It ain’t that you turned out such a fucken brat anyhow.” That part is said much too seriously to be serious.
He squeezes her shoulders a little and glances down at her. “It’s good you are gettin’ married, yeah? That’s good?” That part is serious: a serious question.
“Eventually,” she says, butt-scooching closer. She arranges the blanket so it’s over him too, at least his chest, so that she can get closer still. She even wriggles down lower so she fits neatly under his arm, resting a hand on his chest. “I don’t know if I can do it now. I’m… I’m too angry with him and it’s not fair. I just keep thinking how I’m their only daughter, how much my father would have loved walking me down the aisle. How much my mother would have loved helping me get ready.”
She sniffs, not at Ben’s odor but longer. Trying to keep snot off her hand, maybe, since it’s in the perfect position to catch any tears that fall. “He asked me months and months ago, but he wouldn’t… he wouldn’t go forward. The day befo– The day before we came back and found out my family had died, he finally agreed. I talked him into it. Now I blame him. I don’t want to, but I do. If he had just gone forward with it, they’d have been alive to see it.”
Ben nods thoughtfully and looks back at the fire. “You did kind of a face,” he says. “When he said it. He know? That you’re mad?”
“We’re going to talk about it,” she says. “About why I told him, after the ceremony, that I wished he hadn’t announced that we’re getting married next week. I did tell him no again. That we’re not. But I didn’t want to talk then about why. So I pushed it away and remembered how splendid he looked getting knighted.”
He’d have difficulty telling that she’s smiling, but she does relax a fraction. “And he did. I was so proud of him. And Elohad, so distinguished. Colson didn’t even annoy me.” She looks up. “I made Colson laugh once, did you know?”
“No,” says Ben, with theatrical shock. “Was he sick that day?” He flicks a glance and a slanted smile sidelong at her without turning his head toward her, and then sobers again. “I mean. Might could be he figures to go ahead with it because you got a gap in family now, and he wants to try an’ stand in it for you. But it is okay to tell him that he can’t step in for your parents. Would be fucken weird, for one.” There’s that transient dry note again. He pats her arm.
“But also no one is gonna do that, ever. They were the only them. You put it off a week, you put it off six month, you put it off three years — they still ain’t gonna make it. I am not tryin’ to be an asshole, you know? I mean, that is — shit, Ivri. It really is the fucken worst. Ain’t gonna change. All that’s gonna change is how you feel on it, maybe. So if you reckon it will feel better in a month, a year, then that is when it’s okay. If it is gonna tear you up no matter when, then maybe it don’t matter when.” He pauses, tilts his head, considers, staring at the fire again. “I mean. That ain’t helpful. I know you have been around and around it in your head yourself. Just… I mean. I guess I get it? I ain’t tellin’ you to do nothin’ but what you feel like doin’.”
Another pause. “Maybe I just like to hear myself talk in a circle. That is how you can tell I’m cut out for a paladin.”
The hitch of her body is either a laugh of a sob, but it’s just the one and she’s still relaxed. “I think I just want to wait until I can marry the man I love without wanting to punch him in the nose and scream at him that it’s all his fault. I know it isn’t. So I’ll just keep saying no, and maybe I won’t tell him why.” She thinks about it. “Except I sort of did. A little. But sometimes people say things that aren’t really heard. I hope he didn’t hear it. I don’t want to put that on him, or have him feel that’s what I really think.”
She shifts, uncomfortable. “I mean, it is true. If he had just… But he didn’t, and I didn’t force the issue, and here we are. It doesn’t matter what we could’ve done, only what we do. I just need time for my heart to get that message, you know?”
“Yup,” says Ben. “Fair.” He glances at her again. “You know once you marry him you are still gonna want to punch him in the nose some, probably. I mean, this is you we are talkin’ about.” He pats her arm again.
“My Ma always talked like I was gonna get married someday. Told her a hundred times I never was, but she wouldn’t hear it. Guess she known some shit after all.” He weighs something for a moment in silence and then confides, low-voiced, “Sometimes I ain’t sure I got married for the right reasons. I mean — don’t hear me wrong, I love the hell out of my wife and bein’ married is probably one of the like top three least stupid things I done. I just — I did rush at it, an’ probably for as many bad reasons as good ones.” He shifts his weight a little, settles again. “But the bein’ married is good, so maybe the reasons don’t matter.
“Ismene’s dad just died, did you know? I mean, not just. Not of plague. Just of… bein’ a mean old cuss, probably.”
Ivri peers up at him. It makes her blue eyes look bigger. “And you think she wanted him there?”
“At the wedding, or dead?” Ben asks drily. He glances down at her and makes a face. “He was not at the actual weddin’ — no one was but Sil — and I don’t reckon he would’ve been. She might’ve liked to make peace with him about it before he went, but I don’t know that was ever gonna come. I don’t think it mattered to neither of us particularly at the time that our people wasn’t there because none of our people knew fuckall about a nice marriage anyhow. We was not exactly set up for success.” He squeezes her shoulders again. “But your people did. They did real good. I can see it would matter to you for them to put their blessing on it.”
“And a daughter’s wedding is different than a son’s. Or so my father told me at my brothers’ weddings.” She sighs. “Maybe they’d have enjoyed it. But…” She shifts around at a new thought. “They knew Dane. They approved of him. He was treated like one of the family. For Winter Veil, my father and mother gave him an armor stand in the house, next to theirs and my brothers’. So I’m glad of that.” She sounds surprised a little, as if she’d forgotten.
Then she smiles up at him. “They’d have approved of you, too. Good thing they met Dane first and not you, or my home life would’ve been different. Besides, everyone knows you and Ismene are made for each other. Big practical farmboy and flitty little priestess.”
"How come she is priestess and not country miss, and I am farmboy an' not paladin?" he wonders, insincerely aggrieved. "Anyhow, you are a city girl an' a brat, so that would've been a damn mess. Mr. Atley, he is good Barlowe material, and they known it and so do you. Someday you two are gonna be all set up just like 'em, with six hundred kids of your own." He nods once, sagely. "Only all girls and one boy, just for variety. And to make Mr. Atley ‘Sir Dane the Gray.’"
Ivri sniffs and looks back at the fire. “Colson’s a paladin. You’re a farmboy. Don’t feel bad; I’m fairly certain Sir Sev is a farmboy, too.” She thinks about it. “Or a gardener. He’s a gardener, you’re a farmboy. Colson’s a paladin.
“And I’m an assassin,” she says, quieter. “I take peoples’ parents from them. And their brothers.”
Ben startles subtly, a fractional shift in his posture, and casts a sharp look down at her. After a moment, he squeezes her shoulders again. “Ivrianna Marie Barlowe,” he tells her. “I realize I am like a year older’n you, so you do not have the benefit of all my wisdom yet.” For once, though the words are teasing in their pattern, his tone is not; he speaks gently. “So lemme just tell you what I learned in that year an’ get you caught up. Sometimes some shit — people, world, circumstances — make us into a thing, an’ it takes us a little bit to realize maybe it is the wrong fucken thing. Not a thing we meant to be. So then we got to decide: Do I go on bein’ the thing they want to make me, or do I be what I say I am?”
He studies her, his brown eyes grave. “F’ you want to be an assassin, that ain’t me judgin’ you. Be what you decide. Just — make sure it is you decidin'. If that ain’t who you meant to be, you don’t got to.
"I ain’t sayin’ it is easy to change that up, especially I reckon if you got other people dug into an idea of you, but you ain’t a girl who does a thing the easy way anyhow, I have noticed. But Sir Elohad ain’t a drunk bum. Sil ain’t a no-account runaway circus act. Mr. Atley ain’t a footman. And I ain’t a Hazan.” A pause, and the amendment: “Well, yeah, I am. But I am the Hazan, an’ I get to tell them what that means.
“If it is… politics complicated, like with SI:7 or whatever, I mean– Cobalt’s got more lords an’ ladies in it right now than Mr. Shaw can shake a stick at, an’ the ear of folks from the 7th Legion to King Varian. An’ Cobalt has got your back.”
He addresses the fire. “I reckon also it is easier to decide what you mean to be if you got people at your back. I was not even half sure till I met Sir Elohad an’ Mizzy an’ the rest of ‘em. I mean, I had a idea, but I did not really believe in it. But you get some people who’ll do that for you, then that’ll put you a long way forward.” Another shoulder-squeeze, and then an arm-pat. “You got a lot of people believin’ Ivrianna Marie Barlowe can do whatever the fuck she sets her jaw at.”
He glances back down at her. “An’ you are no more an assassin than I am a paladin. I am a farmboy an’ you are a brat. You come into this world a brat an’ I reckon someday you will go out of it the same. I believe in the brat that is you, Ivrianna.”
Her laugh is full of tears. “Well you certainly talk like a paladin, Bennarin The Hazan,” she says. Her hand pats his chest and she pushes herself to sit upright. “People have been telling me for months now that I don’t have to be what I am. I never heard freedom in that, just blame. Just disapproval. Brat that I am, it made me dig my heels in harder.”
She rises easily to her feet, a smooth uncoiling of muscle. “But I hear you.” She stares at the food, then nods a little. “So I’ll get lunch set out for three rambunctious children and one very harried mother, then I’ll go talk to Dane.”
“Good girl.” Ben rises himself and stretches. “That chicken pie is good as hell, so don’t eat all of it yourself. You can tell my Ma when she gets back that it’s her recipe.” It’s a joke, say his tone and his manner, but there’s a wistful shadow in his eyes. “An’ you tell her it was nice to meet her.”
He moves around her, back into the kitchen, to collect his crate and dishtowel. He hoists them back onto his shoulder and turns, jamming his free hand in his pocket. “Ain’t gonna hug you,” he warns Ivrianna. “But I’ll see you around.”
“Good. I don’t want farmboy cooties.” Ivri walks to the table, a little slower than usual. She’s looking down at the table when she says, “You can come by anytime. We taught Amory to be a Barlowe. She’ll feed you and take care of you. I’ll tell her you’re basically family.” No, she didn’t look up at him at all during that.
Ben is silent, and because she’s looking at the table, she can’t see his expression. “That’s okay,” he says at last. “Can’t fill some gaps. Just got to respect ‘em.” A pause. “But I ‘preciate the hell out of you, Ivrianna.”
The door closes quietly on his shadow, an assassin-worthy exit.