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| Details |
| Author: | inkie |
| Summary: | Elohad returns home late to Niris, following Cobalt Company's expedition to Karazhan and its emotional aftermath. |
| Rating: | M for Mature 17+ |
Chain: The Ference Legacy
It is past midnight in Ironforge. The ceaseless rumble of the mountain’s forge-heart carries on unabated, but the bustle of the city’s streets has faded to the hush of an occasional passer-by or patrolling Thief-catcher; here in the Mystic Ward, the continuous cart traffic and staccato of hooves through the city’s main gates form only the most distant ghost of sound. The braziers are banked low, and most of the light at this far end of the Ward is the arcane blue flicker spilling down the steps of the mage cloister’s portico.
Lamplight still glows softly from the ground-floor windows of a nearby house, though. Every once in a while, a tall, slim silhouette crosses one way or the other, pacing or preoccupied or both.
A slightly ragged looking Elohad Ference approaches the lit and wakeful house. What’s left of his hair is rumpled, and one sleeve of his wrinkled shirt is entirely missing. There are traces of what looks like soot dusting the front of his pants, all the way down to the cuffs. His shirt is tucked in, but it does not particularly help.
He approaches the door, heaves a heavy sigh, and hangs his head slightly. Without lifting his head, he knocks.
There is a little scuffle of running feet from within and then the door is snatched open. Niris stands there breathless, her eyes ferociously bright, and stares at him. “You — knock? You’re knocking now? At your own house?”
And then she flings herself forward, wrapping her arms around his neck and crumpling against him. “Elohad Marie Ference,” she says, suspiciously damply, into the side of his neck. “I was worried.” She squeezes in a manner that could either be fierce relief or attempted strangulation.
Elo wraps her up in his arms and crushes her. Gently. He lowers his face into her short, silvered hair, but still doesn’t say anything. He just holds her for a while, as though she were a piece of his wrecked ship floating in a recently-calmed sea. And then he moves into the house, still half-embracing her with one arm as he shuts the door with the other. He finds the nearest armchair with his gaze, looks at it for a moment as though it exists on the other side of a vast barren wasteland, and then propels himself toward it, letting Nir slip gently from his grasp as he does so. He sinks into it, puts his elbows on his knees, and then lowers his head wearily into his hands.
Niris stands helplessly for a moment, gazing down at him. She starts to wring her hands, visibly catches herself, takes a breath and smooths her skirts instead. “Do you want coffee? Something to eat? What can I get you?” It sounds like How can I help you?
Elo lifts his head out of his hands and then shifts so that he’s collapsed against the back of the chair instead. He stares in her general direction, but not exactly at her. “Just… you,” he says. “Just… don’t make me anything yet. Don’t go get me anything. You’d have to… turn away, and I just…”
He shakes his head. Words are still not wording. He takes a moment and tries again.
“Just… maybe sit here.” He gestures to the other chair. “Or closer, or — I don’t know.”
Niris considers him, brows drawn together. At last she says gently, “Move over. There’s room.” She flaps a hand at him and then draws the hem of her skirt up to smush herself gracefully into the chair beside him.
She drops her head against the chair’s back and gazes with concern at Elo’s profile. “Ben told me,” she says. “The… gist of it, anyway.” She lifts a hand to rest it on his chest.
Only then does she blink. “Elohad. What on earth happened to your shirt?”
He winces slightly. “Azizia. Needed the sleeve for a blindfold, doing a ritual out in the wilds of Terokkar she hadn’t planned for. It… didn’t go well. I mean really didn’t. She caught on fire. I tried to heal her and it didn’t completely work and I just… left her there.”
Suddenly his formerly halting cadence turns into a tumble of words like a broken dam.
“She wasn’t bleeding out or anything, she said she was fine, but I could see she was still in pain and that I’d been too wrapped up in my own head to reach her all the way with my healing and so because of that on top of everything else I went so mad with grief and shame I just… left her there. I had the choice of helping her get to a better healer or hiding how badly I was losing my mind, and I chose to hide.” He doesn’t look at Niris.
Niris slides her hand to his opposite shoulder so that she’s doing sort of an awkward half-hug, her arm draped over his chest. “She… caught on fire,” she repeats thoughtfully, mildly. Huh.
She squirms down against him to prop her head on his shoulder. “Elohad,” she says. “It’s all right. It’s going to be all right. You’re here, now. And I’m here, and Dane is here, and Ben is… somewhere, and it’s going to be all right. Eventually.” She plucks at his shirt collar. “You don’t hide, Elohad. You were hurt yourself — you are hurt — and sometimes there’s nothing left in you to give. It isn’t shameful. It isn’t.”
She tips her head a little, beneath his jaw. “Will you tell me? About it?”
The question melts him so dramatically she can likely feel it, a settling of his tense muscles against the chair. He sighs and addresses the ceiling as he continues to cuddle Niris.
“She said she could summon my father. Talk to him. I still don’t know if she was manipulating me into it or vice versa, because it turns out she had her own issues that tied into it… but that’s not mine to talk about. But what I worry is that it was me pretending to be reluctant to make her push harder, so it wouldn’t be my fault if it went wrong and I wouldn’t have to feel guilty. If so… it didn’t work.”
He laughs ruefully, and pauses to kiss the most easily reachable part of Niris’s head.
“None of it worked. The ritual was a disaster. She said the elements rebelled because we were summoning a spirit that was tied to a different world. I also wonder if my dad didn’t just see a blue gal with totems and think she was a damned troll, he would have no idea what a draenei was. He’d have tried to murder her on sight, now that I really think about it. Which I wasn’t at the time, clearly.” He sighs heavily. “I didn’t even see him show up, but she said she did. Through the blindfold? I dunno. I don’t know how shamans work. But she saw him right before it all went to hell.”
Niris lifts her hand to brush her fingers along his jaw. “Elohad. If she offered to do the ritual, and she wanted to do the ritual, then you didn’t manipulate her into doing the ritual, no matter how coy your protestations might have been. And if the ritual went badly — well, that’s terrible, and I’m sorry for her and will certainly want to see that she’s all right. But that falls to her as well, I am sorry to say. You aren’t a draenei. You aren’t a shaman. You don’t know the forces she works with. That had to be left to her judgment, because she’s the only one of you with any ability to judge. You had faith in her. Which you must, of course. They all rely on your faith in them.”
“I did,” he says softly, ambiguously. “I did have faith in her.” Is he just agreeing with her point? Or is the past tense significant? He doesn’t stress the word, exactly.
She puts her hand on his chest again to press herself upright so she can look sternly down at him. “It was not your fault. It was an error in judgment on Azizia’s part, it seems to me. Well-intentioned, but incorrect. And it sounds as though she came through it as well as can be hoped — she told you she was fine? — and perhaps will be more cautious in the future. You didn’t harm her, Elohad.”
He inhales deeply, then exhales. “Okay. Okay, I believe you. I know you wouldn’t just… let me off the hook if I’d fucked up.” Another deep sigh.
He pulls her closer, wrapping both arms around her now, and sits as though absorbing her in some ineffable way. He lets the silence stretch out for a moment.
“I thought that part of my story was over. Just… a big question mark I’d never be able to turn into a declarative sentence. The answer was, ‘It’s a mystery’. But now the answer has pulled everything apart inside me and I don’t know how to put it all back into place in time to — you know, be me.” He gestures vaguely in the direction of Cobalt HQ.
“Well,” she says, gently dry, though her eyes are dark pools of sympathy. “You have always been terrible at redecorating. But that’s why you have me.” She kisses his nose lightly. The gesture is impish, but neither her gaze nor the hand on his chest are teasing. “What do you mean in time? In time for what?”
“For the…” He gestures again vaguely toward HQ. “For the next person to need something.”
“Elohad.” Niris pushes away from him again, just enough that she can give him The Eyebrow. The stern one. “The next person who needs something can need it from Jo. Or Ben. Or Auralind. Or me. That is what you have a co-captain and officers for. And yes. I know you offer them all something special. But they can make do with the rest of us for a while if need be, because you cannot offer what you haven’t got, if you’ve emptied yourself out.”
She lays the flat of her hand on his cheek. “There are people besides the ones in Cobalt Company who need you. Your family. Yourself.”
Elohad looks at her, eyes suddenly bleak. “You need me?” It’s a strangely listless, inflectionless, truncated sentence, as though he already knows the answer and isn’t thrilled with it.
Niris stares seriously at him. “What is it, Elohad?” She doesn’t take her hand from his face.
“You don’t,” he says flatly. “Little Dane does. Ben does, though he’d deny it. But not you, huh? And Ben’s going to figure it all out soon enough, and then — I guess I’ll have Dane left? If he even knows me. If I don’t turn into that father who’s always going away somewhere and doesn’t want to talk about it… and my kids just… give up.”
Niris sits up sharply. “Elohad Marie Ference,” she warns him. “Don’t. Don’t you dare. You just– you ask Ben, why don’t you? He’ll tell you. What a wreck I was. It was embarrassing.” For a moment she seems to shrink in on herself, looks small and adrift. “It was embarrassing.” The little, miserable emphasis she puts on the word suggests she means something other than ‘embarrassing.’
Elohad reaches out to lay a hand against her cheek, then slides his fingertips down to her jaw and underneath, so that her chin is resting gently on his open palm. He gazes at her intently as she speaks, one thumb caressing her cheek.
She takes a breath and draws her dignity around her again. “So don’t. Decide that for me. And Ben… what is Ben going to figure out? You have been better to that young man than anyone in his life has ever been — including me — and he thinks you hung the sun. He aspires to you, Elohad. I’m reasonably certain he only agreed to the adoption business because of you, not me.”
Elo continues to gaze at her, and there is a slight sense that he hasn’t processed her last few sentences. After she has been silent for a moment, he closes his hand so that he is gripping her jaw rather tightly, keeping her face turned toward his. It’s rough for Elo, but not Hazan-rough, not alarming exactly.
“Say it,” he says quietly, but with the force of something almost like anger. “Say you need me. If you can.” The tone of the last sentence heavily implies not if you’re brave enough, but if it’s true.
Niris leans toward him, into his grasp. Her gaze is locked on his. “I need you, Elohad. I do. Ben does, and Dane does, but I do more. So don’t you dare.” She reaches to grip his collar, gives him the barest suggestion of a shake.
Her golden eyes are abruptly sheened with tears, and she glares at him, wet-lashed.
Elo’s return look suggests that a basket of injured kittens has interrupted their conversation by sailing through the window to land in his lap. After a moment of heart-struck shock, he folds both his arms around her as he did in the entranceway, almost crushingly, and buries his face in her hair again. This time he rocks her back and forth a little as though she were an infant in need of vigorous soothing.
It is some time before he’s able to speak again, and when he does, his voice is rough. “I’m here,” he says. “I’m here. I’ll always be.”
“You promise,” she tells him: It isn’t a question, and it sounds like a warning. She pulls away from him only so that she can then lean back in to kiss him fervently, biting at his lower lip. When she sits back again, she regards him sternly. “Now. Tell me about the rest of it. If you can. Ben told me —” Her gaze softens sadly, and her tone gentles. “Ben told me how it was. With your father. Elohad, I’m so very sorry.”
He winces a little, then settles back against the chair, one arm still keeping her close. He addresses his words to the ceiling.
“He didn’t recognize me,” he says. “I mean, I guess I look almost nothing like the freshly-knighted, golden haired, starry-eyed dreamer he left at home.” He smiles wryly, angling his face back toward Niris. “You remember that boy, too. Tell me you would have recognized me if this had come charging into your home armed, instead of seeing me after all those years because I’d arranged a meeting and you were expecting me.”
“Do you think I’d have expected you to stay frozen in time? Do you think I hadn’t watched years pass in the mirror myself?” She tilts her head, her severity teasing now. “I would have recognized those eyes, and that smile.” She kisses that smile again.
He studies her drowsily for a moment, smile still lopsidedly touching the corners of his mouth even as a fading shadow lingers in his eyes.
“But you are alive,” he says. “Very much so. And mortal, and have had the mirror to remind you. My father… he has been living the same loop of time over and over for almost thirty years. There is no part of him that would expect his eldest son to be a balding paladin backing up an assorted group of mercenaries to assault the castellan of Karazhan.”
He sighs softly and settles back against the chair again. One hand absently runs slow fingertips from her nape backward up through her hair, charting familiar territory, soothing without disarranging the silvered strands.
“His shade fell to the ground like a living man struck down. And it stayed there. I knelt by him and told him that the Ference tower still stood, that he had a granddaughter and two grandsons. And there was a sort of shimmer and then the shade was gone. But I can’t be sure that he didn’t just — reappear back at the beginning of the cycle. That I did the right thing to free him.” He hesitates. “It wasn’t a lie, was it? When I told him the tower still stood?”
“No,” Niris tells him immediately. “It was not a lie. Your father understood what the tower represented, that it wasn’t just stones on a border, hm? I trust that he did, at least. The tower still stands — not only does it stand, it does because you rebuilt it, and built it taller. Ference is strong and growing. You have two strong sons, and land, and influence. You serve your house’s duty, and you’ve elevated its name.” Her voice softens again. “You didn’t lie, Elohad. He would be proud.”
Elo’s eyes mist up again, and he nods. He gives the back of her neck a little squeeze. “Thank you,” he says roughly. “I just… I should go back. Make sure he’s not still there. Right? I should go back and check. There’s still the matter of what’s causing all this, and we never solved it. So I should go back, right?” He doesn’t look like the idea exactly thrills him.
She studies him, one corner of her mouth twisted down. “Would it… reconcile you? Make you feel more at peace?” She hesitates and then says gently, “If he’s still there — if he’s returned, somehow — then I expect it means there’s nothing you can do for him. Which means that right now, what’s done already is the best you could do. There’s no further help you can offer him. Would returning to that help you?”
He considers this for a long moment, fingertips trailing up the back of her scalp again. “I hate leaving a job unfinished,” he finally says, decisively. “That counts both for the tower, and the ghost. I need to know if it’s done, and if not, that — like you say — I’ve done all that can be done. If there’s something keeping him here that isn’t me, I don’t have the power to release him. Unless maybe it’ll take finishing off whatever’s at the top of that tower. Either way, we’ve got to get back in there. Because I don’t feel settled yet.”
Niris nods, still studying him. “All right. You’ll take Ben again?”
“Of course.” The response is instinctive, immediate, but then he takes a moment to reflect. “Unless you’re worried about both of us being in there if something goes wrong. But I’ve come to rely on him quite a lot these past months. He’s an excellent leader and warrior, and he’s really coming into his own as a paladin as well.”
Niris shakes her head. “I’m not worried about that,” she says. “Not with you there to look after each other — I’d rather know that, in fact — and with the rest of them besides. Mr. Atley and the twins and the others. What worried me was that if you went without him, he’d go haring after you anyway.” She lifts her eyes briefly ceiling-ward in a show of exasperation, and then leans forward to kiss Elohad’s eyebrow.
She draws back to scrutinize him again. “You said he’ll figure it out. What do you think he’s going to figure out, Elo?”
“Oh, you know.” Elo gestures vaguely. “Life. That I do not in fact hang the sun. That he’s got this, he’s the tower, and I’m just a faded old man with a lot of stories I tell over and over again.”
Niris lays her hand on his cheek again. “He will have it someday, yes. And when he does, it will be because of you — everything you’ve taught him in two years and will teach him, everything he’s seen in you and strives to do. For you. Do you think that boy didn’t learn to read a man’s character a decade or more ago? Do you think he didn’t size you up in the first few minutes he met you, and hasn’t been making a study of you ever since? He will listen to your stories until he’s memorized every word, and then he’ll finish your sentences when you get too creaky to remember them all yourself.” She pats his cheek affectionately. “He’ll make sure Dane has them all memorized too, no doubt. But there’s no mystique to it, Elohad. He didn’t latch on to Lord Ference or the tower or the legacy first. He latched on to you. If you decided tomorrow to — abandon the tower and run off to be a traveling tinker in Redridge, he’d be right behind you, to learn how to be Azeroth’s best tinker. If you abandoned Cobalt Company to return to the stage, he’d step right up there with you, resolved to be a star.”
She pauses. “Which would be terrible. Please don’t do that. Can you imagine?”
He laughs, instantly and involuntarily, but halfway through the outburst his mirth takes on a bit of an uneasy quality.
“I uh… yeah, that was the other thing. At Karazhan. Medivh had a stage there, a huge one. It was… gorgeous. And one of the stage managers was haunting the place and he didn’t attack exactly but he… charmed me I think. Did something to my head. My memory of it all is a bit hazy but I know I… embarrassed myself horribly. Thought I was elsewhere in time, a big damned star basking in my ovation… Nine of them saw it, too. Nine of them. Including Ben. I looked an absolute fool.”
He looks almost more distraught about this than the whole “helped kill my dad” part; it’s clearly harder for him to talk about, and his gaze is more evasive than before.
Niris raises her eyebrows. Her face is doing a thing that suggests she’s not entirely certain which expression best applies in this situation. “Well,” she says at last. “That’s — first of all, you were charmed. Didn’t you — when you went to that… Shadow Maze or whatever it’s called, weren’t you all charmed by that warlock? Into attacking one another? This particular charm seems a little… more peculiar? But I don’t know why the rest of them would view it any differently. Perhaps you were… more susceptible because of your history? But perhaps also that’s for the best. If you feel embarrassed about it, imagine how… Mr. Atley would feel, if it had been him? Or Cressidha?” She smiles faintly, wryly.
“Bless,” says Elo solemnly. And very, very Nirisly.
“My sentiment exactly,” says Niris drily. She smiles at him. “Now, why don’t you get out of those clothes so they can be washed — or burned — and have a bath?” She arches an eyebrow at him. “And then say hello to your son — the smaller of the two — and perhaps have something to eat, and then definitely come to bed, hm?”
“Oh,” Elo says, his face as carefully neutral as though he were playing the role of an Aspenwood in a theatrical production. “Yes. Definitely.”