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| Details |
| Author: | Athena |
| Summary: | Joelle Ebek is having a Time of an evening at the Fallon Charity Gala of Year 29, and a few of his friends try to stop the roll of extreme urgency that has swept into the young guardsman, with mixed successes. 3700~ words. |
| Rating: | T for Teen |
After The Speech
Joelle, Finley
Finley doesn't lead them through the guest route to the gardens by the rear foyer, which would take them past the auctions and therefore the potential for so many people to greet and conversations to pass through.
And he doesn't take them through the front entrance either, where they could run into late arrivals or servants of guests who could see them leaving the house together.
No, Finley guides them along the front foyer into the dining room, and then into the kitchen hallway, nodding into the kitchen at the staff, before he leads Joelle out through the servant's entrance along the eastern side of the house.
The area is dark, lit only by a single lantern meant for the staff. This is not where guests are meant to be, but Finley lives here. He exhales a breath out into the still warm early summer evening air, sliding a hand into a pocket as he drops most of his public gentleman persona, and gives Joelle another assessing look.
If Joelle notices any difference between where guests are or are not supposed to be, he shows no indication of it, moving along as he's guided with the ease of someone used to following orders without question. When they stop, his gaze slips away for a moment to take in the sky, something in him relaxing just a bit more, before he refocuses on Finley.
He doesn't say anything, at first, and there is a stillness to him that some people might fill with fidgeting. But then, finally, "I didn't buy an orchid," he dutifully reports.
Finley laughs softly. "S'good to know. And I hope your father's been better?"
Joelle nods, clasping his hands behind his back. "He's back to work," he says. "Miralynn took care of him herself. He worked hard to return to duty."
His face, his voice, even his eyes have a forced neutrality in them, the feel of someone simply relaying facts about a story they heard somewhere.
Finley doesn't press it, not here. "That sounds like good news," he says, a careful remark that doesn't actually say that it is good news.
He sticks his hands in his pockets, rocking back a little on his heels. "So, will you tell me what happened in your head when you were listening to Fallon's speech, and what the thoughts were that brought to handing over your wallet then and there?" he asks gently enough that it sounds like a man asking a question and leaving an opening deliberately that Joelle could say no, he won't, and Finley would let it be.
The silence returns. Joelle stares at the ground outside the ring of light created by the lantern, as something rages behind his eyes. In just the slightest of movements, his shoulders tense, then relax again, and he holds perfectly still otherwise.
"Did you see it?" Joelle finally lifts his gaze again.
Finley considers the question. "I saw you," he answers, a shift of pronouns.
A slight tremor runs through Joelle's body, and his hands clasp tighter together behind him. "I'm sorry," he says. "I didn't mean for anyone to see." There is genuine hurt in his eyes.
Finley's own expression is harder to see the murky lighting, but there's a guard up now where there wasn't a moment before. "Ah, then… I'm sorry for looking, if you didn't want to be seen. I didn't mean to pry into something private."
Joelle shakes his head, his hairpin jingling softly. "You're my friend," he says, reaching out to pat Finley's hair. A navy blue half-glove encloses his hand, an accessory that wasn't present during his previous ballroom experience. "I don't want to hurt you. I failed a little, but it's okay. Everything is."
Finley lets his hair be pat, and if he glances at the half-glove, he doesn't say anything. "Right. It's okay," he repeats. If it isn't, it's hard to tell through anything he shows. "As for the rest, you should know that when Fallon was speaking of people to give where they hadn't done military service. He was addressing the nobles and the well-off who don't have any part of the physical looking after the kingdom and the Alliance. He wasn't talking about guards in service to the kingdom. It was meant in support of people like you. You might not think of it the same, because you weren't on the front lines. But that's the truth of it. You put your life and body on the line, ready to give both in service, if something happens in the city or country here."
Finley shrugs a little. "If you want to do more though, for whatever reason, there's a proper way to do it at the Gala tonight if you'd like. There's an auction of things donated, and to bid on. The money will go to the Stormwind Military Families Fund. Truth be told, you might see some of that money come right back to your own family, if your father had medical bills. But, the prices start high and will be going higher through the night. If you just want to give what you have, you can talk to Miss Curran in the rear foyer, and donate what you have." A pause, a false start of movement he halts somewhat. "I'd talk to Fallon first, though. He could tell you himself, and you could ask him whatever you'd like."
Joelle abruptly freezes at the mention of his body, and his hand recoils back towards his chest, as though a knife or an arrow had found its way there. He fights to keep his expression serene, but his face is already moving, so he forces it into an awkward smile.
"I… will find Fallon," he says.
Finley nods tightly. There's a lot of feelings, and Finley's not meant to be prying into them, so he doesn't. "All right. Fallon'll be in the ballroom, most likely. Miss Curran's in the Rear Foyer. I'll be in the ballroom, if you…" A telling pause of a word he doesn't use, before he pulls up his pleasant expression, and smoothly shifts the sentence, "want to talk again. Cheers, yeah?"
He gives Joelle a brief tap of a pat, and enters back in through the servant's door, striding purposefully back to gathering.
Joelle waits, and waits, then finally sinks into a crouch, his hands covering his face. He does not scream, but he probably wants to, somewhere deep inside.
After The News of Theramore
Joelle, Mordecai, Colson
Joelle moves in long strides from the ballroom, holding his injured hand above his heart, cupped by his other hand in an effort to contain the blood. There are glass shards stuck in it, but he pays it no mind, focused on getting out of the house as fast as possible.
"Elle. Elle!" Mordecai calls as he chases his friend down the carpeted hall leading to the front entrance, Colson in tow. He is not usually in the habit of running in hallways, and he hasn't started just yet, but he might very well do so if Elle doesn't stop.
Colson keeps up with Mordecai easily, a man who can start a military march or an emergency physician sprint at any time. The sense of a wound makes it way past the ringing knowledge of Theramore. "He's wounded," he says softly to Mordecai, frowning faintly.
"Ebek!" That is not the usual gentle voice of the paladin. That is a Knight-Captain giving an order to a soldier, and it doesn't ask, but commands a halt, the kind of military sharpness that is meant to cut through any battle haze or panic.
Mordecai stops in his tracks. The Knight-Captain voice may have worked too well. It wasn't even his own name that got called.
Joelle freezes, still staring towards the door, the escape.
Then he turns, and his expression isn't quite as bland as usual. There is shock in his eyes, the result of his injury. His body shakes with it, trembling at the sight of his own blood spilling down his arm. These are not superficial cuts on his hand.
Mordecai snaps out of it and hurries towards him, eyes going wide. "Elle, there's glass in your hand," he says. "Come, there's a-a powder room right behind us, we can help."
The Knight-Captain, his usefulness over, is a facet that is shed easily, as Colson returns to the mild mannered holy paladin. "Please, let us help you. We are healers," he says in the Paladin Voice, a gentle tone that says that everything is going to be all right, he's here to help.
Joelle stares at them as though he is not quite registering what is happening. He glances towards the door again. "I have to… go," he says. "The… I was going to… Pennings."
"No," Mordecai says softly but firmly. It's his turn to pull out the Infirmary Voice. "You're wounded and in shock. Come with us." He doubles back to the powder room door, knocks, and hears nothing. He opens it. "Over here, Elle."
Colson nods in support.
Once again, Joelle glances towards the door, clinging to the scraps of the last thing he remembers he was doing. But in the end, Mordecai's firmness wins out, and he moves as he's told, staring perplexed at his hand. It won't stop shaking. Why can't he make it stop shaking?
There's a shift around Joelle he may or may not consciously feel as the paladin's [Devotion Aura] includes him within it, a strengthening of an armor even in cloth, and Colson murmurs a [Blessing of Might] in a prayer over Joelle.
Mordecai gently guides Elle to stand by the sink. "Colson, my first aid kit," he requests. He shrugs off his very fancy long-sleeved outer garment, tossing it over the back of the toilet, and quickly washes his own hands in the sink.
Colson reaches for a bag inside his coat pocket, and removes a kit that does not look like it could have possibly fit into a coat pocket so smoothly, and yet, here we are. Talk to Cressidha Aspenwood today for your arcane pocket needs!
"Here," he says as he patiently holds it for Mordecai.
Mordecai finds his tweezers within the kit and sterilizes them, then sets them at the ready and gets a tiny pair of scissors. "All right," he says. "I'm sorry about your glove, but it needs to come off. Colson, would you help hold his hand steady? Elle… this is going to hurt."
Joelle does not seem to understand the concept of more hurt right now. It already hurts.
He stares at Mordecai. "Okay," he says.
Colson sets his hands by Joelle's hand, not yet touching. "May I touch you to hold your hand steady for Mordecai?" he asks calmly.
Joelle's gaze shifts to Colson's hands. "Okay," he says again.
Permission granted, Colson carefully grips Joelle's hand and tightens his hold until it will keep Joelle's hand as steady as possible, and it may strike the other man how incredibly strong that hold is for all of the way he has ordinarily gently held Mordecai's.
"You can cry or make noise if you feel like it, and that's fine," Mordecai tells Elle as he carefully begins to cut off the glove. He frowns faintly when he sees the reason why Elle was wearing gloves in the first place.
Scabs and bruises cover Joelle's knuckles from wounds not even two weeks old. It looks like he got into a fight with a rough, immovable object.
Joelle's hand jerks against Colson's grip at the word 'cry,' and stark fear seizes his face. "No!" he says. "I can't. I can't, or they'll…"
Mordecai, holding scissors, manages not to injure Joelle when his hand jerks. "It's safe," Mordecai says. "You're in a safe place with friends. No one will hurt you or be upset."
Colson is a possibly reassuring presence of a steady hand and unflappable calm. "It is all right," he says softly.
Joelle stares at the sink, sweat forming on the back of his neck. He quiets, holding as still as he can, breathing gone shallow.
"It's safe," Mordecai repeats. He finishes cutting off Joelle's glove, letting the pieces that can be removed fall into the sink.
Joelle's free hand moves to clutch the edge of the sink, squeezing it so tightly it leaves little wonder how he broke the glass. His wound is ugly, shards speckled throughout in pieces large and small, an unfortunate obstacle to proper healing.
He seems to realize this himself, as he says, on a breathy exhale, "I'm sorry."
"We caught this quickly," Mordecai says. "I never mind helping - this must be much worse for you than for me. I'm going to wash your hand now before I can pull the pieces out." This is another very painful process, no matter how gentle Mordecai himself tries to be.
Joelle's face settles into a faint grimace, and his fingers on the edge of the sink have gone white. Fortunately, it is a very hearty sink, forestalling yet another accident. Despite his seemingly muted reaction, the suffering is clear in his eyes and his breath, the latter catching at every extreme spike of pain.
But he is quiet. Almost violently so.
Mordecai murmurs a prayer for Fortitude and picks up the tweezers. Now, as he actually begins to remove the glass shards, he reaches out with the Light with surgical precision to dull the pain of each individual cut one at a time. The effect is barely noticable at first, because there are a lot of fragments of glass.
Colson holds Joelle's hand implacably steady. "Would you like silence to focus your attention on coping while you are in pain, or would you like a distraction from it to point your mind elsewhere? There is no right answer to the question except that which you truly wish for at this moment," the paladin says. "And you may change your mind at any time."
"Elsewhere," Joelle whispers, watching Mordecai work. He probably shouldn't be watching, but he is.
"Mordecai and I have recently purchased a house in Old Town, Stormwind. It will be a construction tailored to us, and we will start a new garden in it when the building of it has finished. Botany is one of my hobbies, at an amateur level, but it's something we both like to do and have.
"One of the rooms will have a piano, and space enough for dancing, not for a gathering, but enough that four people might enjoy it. I play the piano sufficiently if not exceptionally well, and Mordecai has a remarkable, beautiful singing voice. It's something we used to do together in our first house.
"There will also be a suitable kitchen, as Mordecai enjoys baking, and I enjoy baking with him," Colson says in that Paladin Voice. They're words meant to give a place for thoughts to go, directed into a focus outside of what is happening, but without demanding that the listener participate or decide or answer anything himself. He can simply listen to the words, let them flow around him, or seize on some to react to, however he needs to in the moment.
Mordecai is too focused on what he's doing to blush at the compliment as he drops piece after piece of glass into the sink. Hopefully most of it will get caught in the drain and not the pipes.
Joelle listens with quiet attentiveness, though mileage may vary on how much he remembers later. Either way, his gaze grows distant in the thoughts, though his hand remains tightly clamped on the edge of the sink.
It seems likely, as Colson continues, that these facts have been in fact chosen for the ability to forget them, or not truly hear them. Nothing important contained within them, only the soothing concepts of a domestic image.
"We have stayed in other types of residences in the past few years. When we were first married, I was working with Cobalt Company in Outland, and there is a place called Zangarmarsh with a town of Telaar, a place built on a large mushroom, where it almost always rains, and the world is nearly monochromatic in blues. Mordecai worked in the Shattrath Infirmary in those days, and we would meet each other at the gryphon flightpath, whichever one of us was not working that day. We had an umbrella we would bring with us when we did," Colson continues, the cadence and wording of a man who has spent a great deal of time speaking to people coping with a wound and shock.
Time passes. "I'm going to run your hand under the water again to rinse off the blood and see if I've missed anything," Mordecai says, turning the faucet on again. He guides Elle's hand carefully into the stream of the faucet.
Joelle flinches at the shock of the water, but he still does not make a sound, letting the blood wash away down the sink. From the look of things, Mordecai was thorough in his removal, and all that is left to contend with are the cuts themselves.
And that is a much simpler thing in Azeroth than other places. Colson sends a [Cleanse] through Joelle's hand, a power of the Light that scrubs off everything from magic to disease to poison.
Mordecai turns off the tap and holds Joelle's hand up towards the lights in the room. He sings in a soft, sweet voice:
"When you're weary,
Feeling small,
When tears are in your eyes,
I will dry them all."
Those are not the traditional lyrics to a Divine Hymn - this is another song entirely. The Light gathers around Joelle's hand in a wash of gold, erasing pain and puncture wounds alike.
Joelle lets out a breath as pain and wounds melt away, leaving only the battered knuckles from before, clinging to him like a ring of thorns. His grip slowly eases on the sink, and a dazed calm appears in his eyes.
"Mordecai," he says quietly. "Colson. Thank you."
"You're welcome," Mordecai says. "Could we… talk?" He cleans off his tools and puts them away in his first-aid kit. "Why were you in such a hurry - where were you going?"
Colson inclines his head politely, his out without urgency for Mordecai's first-aid kit to be tucked back into the suit when it's packaged back up.
"Oh," Joelle says, and the pain that returns to his face is somehow worse than what the physical injury inspired. "Theramore, I…"
He stops. Closes his eyes.
"Pennings," he finally says. "I was going… to Pennings. To enlist."
Mordecai motions for Colson to put the kit away and washes his hands one last time. He looks at the pile of glass in the drain.
At the mention of Theramore, Mordecai winces and wraps his arms around himself. "It's… late at night. For that. Do you… um, would you like to talk about it? In the garden, maybe?"
Colson moves to Mordecai's side to put an arm around his shoulders to draw his husband into his embrace, although he regards Joelle with the serious Aspenwood neutral expression.
Mordecai leans into Colson automatically.
"No," Joelle says stiffly, and it looks as though every piece of him is fighting to restrain something. "Talking… It won't help. Not anymore. I need to go, before I… Before I hurt someone."
It doesn't sound like a threat. He seems genuinely distressed by the idea, and he begins to move towards the door.
Colson's hand moves out to only partially block Joelle, more of a request to slow rather than stop. He doesn't seem even remotely worried about being hurt, but then again he's a paladin, and a completely invincible shield of faith is but a thought away. The way he is turned however, puts himself between Mordecai and Joelle, and it seems a conscious choice of body language.
"I will not stop you if you wish to go," he says in that Paladin Voice. "But may I please offer some advice?"
Mordecai makes a faint sound of distress.
Joelle doesn't try to open his mouth. He just nods, and waits.
"Patrol Officer Pennings has been either woken or alerted on duty, and is most likely currently organizing a rapid response to ensure security of Stormwind City, as due course. It may be that she is not in a position to facilitate your transfer this very evening.
"If you feel that you may do harm to a person, especially in urgency and strong feeling, as a healer who has experienced the backlash that can occur in the mixing of those two, I advise you to go home and rest, as best as you can, and see to your goals in the morning after you feel more in control of yourself. Nothing will be solved instantly tonight, no matter how fast you ride to the city, or how soon you knock on your superior officer's door," Colson says calmly.
"You've already hurt yourself once," Mordecai points out in a small voice. "You're 'someone' too."
Joelle bows his head, one hand reaching towards his chest. "You're good people," he says softly. "Both of you. I hope we can still be friends."
But he doesn't wait for an answer, sweeping from the room as if afraid of what it might be.
"Of-of course," Mordecai says, his voice thick as if he might start crying any second. He does not chase after Elle.
Colson does not chase after Joelle, either. He simply turns the priest into a fuller embrace, tightening his hold into a steadiness, his breaths slow and deep, resting a hand gently on the back of Mordecai's hair in comfort.
"We will be." Colson's voice carries to Joelle with the training of a man who had to learn how to call out orders across a battlefield, though the tone is that healer mildness, not the Knight-Captain. "Light be with you."
"Someone might need to use this room," Mordecai says to Colson, snatching up his shawl-like layer with one hand and turning to lean into his husband. "Could - could we go to the garden…?"
"Yes, of course," Colson agrees. With that, he guides them out of the room, turning off the light, and politely shutting the door behind them until all appears as it was before.