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| Details |
| Author: | Athena |
| Summary: | Finley's training montage 2.0 is interrupted by an unexpected letter as Hana leaves for Outland, and he leaves for Pandaria in turn. But while Finley Boutille has a filed and scheduled flight plan and itinerary, Blanque has other priorites. Romance Plot. 5k~ words. Several Prompt Responses. |
| Rating: | M for Mature 17+ |
Chain: Prompt Responses
March 18th: HALF A TRUTH IS KINDER THAN THE WHOLE
Finley takes the elbow to the face, knowing it will damage his cheekbone. It’s not important, because he wants the opening it leaves for him. A perfect arc. The dagger hits right into the torso, at an angle perfect for slipping between two ribs to the heart.
“Damn,” Bastian says breathlessly. He shakes his head as he lifts up his arm further to inspect where Finley’s knife hit the training leather, sinking in a notable fraction of an inch. “You’re really not fucking around today.” He whistles with appreciation.
Finley pulls the dagger free. It hurts to smile but he does.
Bastian winces at the expression. “Shit, I think I broke something – Megan!” he calls for the priestess, who doesn’t even look up from her well worn Steelbloom romance to wave a healing Light over Finley. The bone starts to mend immediately. Bastian still reaches for Finley’s face, getting as far as a brush of skin before Finley shakes his head with a shrug. It also happens to take Finley out of Bastian’s reach, as he steps his feet together with the action. Bastian’s three inches shorter than Finley, and sometimes that’s all that matters in the difference between their reaches.
“It’s nothing,” he says. It’s not the first time Bastian’s almost touched him in a way that doesn’t fit with the trainer’s sphere of necessary interaction. He has a feeling that Bastian’s been testing the waters, examining Finley’s reaction to it. But to what end, Finley isn’t sure. The trouble with working with SI:7 agents is that so many of them will do things just to test what another one will do or say. It’s that curiosity, that need and want to poke and prod at people that often got them where they are. Maybe Bastian just wants to see if he can make Finley interested enough in the other man that he’ll be more reluctant to go so hard against him in training, and then Bastian will mark it down as an exploit in Finley’s file. “Let’s go again.”
Bastian laughs, and holds up both hands in a sign of surrender. “We could, but I’m getting slower every time. Have mercy on an old man,” he pleads.
Is it an actual sentiment, or is Bastian fishing for reassurance about the difference in their ages? Bastian’s only six years older than him. It’s hardly to be noticed, except that sometimes it does, in their stamina for quick burst fights. Finley can outlast him in sheer recovery time, but this is the first time Bastian’s referred to it.
The Painter would flatter Bastian’s ego. It’s how he’s been trained to respond to people.
Finley eyes him, and sheathes the sword and the dagger both. “There’s not much of a point if I can’t push myself,” he says. “I’ll have to wait until you’re rested.”
A flicker of something – surprise for sure, possibly hurt? – is there and gone in Bastian’s face so quickly Finley registers the awareness after the expression has already shifted into a grin. It’s the possibility of hurt that makes the hair on Finley’s neck stand up in awareness. Hurt personally, or hurt pride?
“You’ve been at it every day for weeks now. What sort of rest are you getting that has you popping back up so fast?” Bastian wheedles. “I’d think with your age and reputation, you’d be spending your nights in enough beds to wear yourself out before you got here.”
It’s a half-false statement. Bastian knows Finley’s reputation is as a rake and flirt, but that as of the past three years, the Painter has stopped before crossing that line into someone’s bed. It’s not a strict rule of his assignment, merely a precaution that Finley agrees with – more secrets get spilled over pillows than anywhere else. Every person he might bed proves a risk for his identity, and for what they think they possess of him. So, no one. Bastian is almost certainly aware of that.
Which means he’s fishing for something else. He’s waiting for Finley to correct him. Or explain more precisely if he’s in anyone’s bed.
The touches. The hurt. The question.
The combination adds up to a realization. Fuck.
“I’ve got other priorities,” Finley answers. Now that he’s watching for it, it’s easier to see Bastian’s interest in the movement of his smile that makes his eyes crinkle more genuinely at the answer that confirms Finley doesn’t have anyone in his bed right now. The drop of Bastian’s hip, the tilt of his head as he steps a little closer, and mirrors Finley’s stance. Clear telegraphing.
“And isn’t that a shame,” Bastian says, lower pitched than his usual speaking voice. A sign of attraction. More than the words people use, it’s a reliable tell for a man. Women’s voices often go higher. There’s nothing in his eyes though, nothing of that look that Hana had, the one Finley had misjudged until it was too late. It’s attraction, nothing more for Bastian. Old, familiar sexual desire.
For a few seconds, Finley feels a rise in himself in response. Light, but it would feel good. A few hours of nothing but touching and being touched, without attachment. It would be so easy. They already know the other’s biggest secret. Finley wouldn’t have to be the Painter at all. Bastian wouldn’t be a risk to his identity. It would just be fucking. Sometimes he really did miss just fucking. See them once or twice, and then it’s over, done with. No attachment, no feelings.
Hana smiles at him underneath the umbrella he bought for the color of her eyes, true and real, with a touch of hurt she can’t hide.
“If one day you hear me in your heart, know that my song is for you.”
His song on repeat, wearing out battery after battery.
Her arms are still around his neck when he lays her down, long enough that he feels the pull of them, and how easy it would be for her to keep pulling him down to her.
“I love you.”
“Your A.H.”
He can’t do it. Even if he can’t be with her, can’t even touch let alone anything else, his heart is sure of one thing – it’s hers. Until she lets go of him, he can’t even begin to let go of her. He can’t be with someone else, not even only his body. Not until she isn’t everything he would be thinking about.
If that ever happens.
He gives Bastian a wry smile. “Maybe. But I’ve got to focus on training. If I don’t, I might die badly enough that no one will be able to bring me back,” he says. It’s true. It’s not the truth, but it’s true enough for Bastian to read it.
Bastian pulls back a little, an acknowledgement of the unspoken. “Then maybe you’ll have more focus after the threat’s been dealt with,” he says lightly. He’s read a not now rather than a never into Finley’s words, which is useful. A fuller rejection might alter his willingness or style in working with Finley’s training, and as much as it twists something in his stomach to manipulate Bastian, the other truth is that Finley does need him.
Finley shrugs noncommittally to Bastian’s offer, and breaks eye contact with the excuse of assessing his own training leathers, letting Bastian be the one who takes the first steps away. It will make him feel like he’s the one more in control, not Finley. Bastian has the mannerisms of a man who likes to feel like he’s in charge. Finley knows the type, and how to please them. He’s played to it most of his life.
After he passed his tests, Finley has been back to train two, maybe three times a month, to keep his skills sharp and the movements fluid with muscle memory. Sometimes he’d work with Bastian, but often it was with whomever was around at the time he could get in. It didn’t matter. He’d felt ready to be what he needed to be, for the House.
Since Quinn MacBride killed him – after the first two days when Avrenne held him in wait before she released him – Finley has been back to train every single day. Not with just anyone around anymore. He only wants the best. Bastian is one of the fastest trainers, skilled in the sort of combat that Finley uses. Even to Finley’s eye, shadows cling to Bastian’s warm brown skin, darken his caramel brown eyes. He’s steeped in them, stepping through the smallest shifts to find weaknesses in less than a blink of an eye. Finley needs that. He needs to become that, and then become better than that.
“Will you disappear one day, vanish without a word like so many I have known?”
Hana knows he died.
He has a feeling that it was the worgen. It would explain why Hana delivered a custom made health potion injector kit under the name “Natalyah Kensington-Whit.” He’d assumed given the worgen’s connection to the Guard that she would take the command to conceal her information about the incident seriously, but he should have known she’d go her own way about it. Everything he’d gleaned from Isla about her instructor in the so-called “science” of the Light suggested a willful woman unwilling to listen to any counsel but her own.
So, of course she told Hana. There was no place for the anger over it to go. The Painter certainly couldn’t express it. He hates that Hana knows. He hates that she hurts over it.
Or maybe he hates that he can’t hold her and tell her he’s fine. He didn’t leave. He wouldn’t just leave like that. He had clung to his body as long as a soul possibly could. He would have become a ghost, haunting the woods, rather than leave without an explanation.
His chest tightens again, even as he takes off the stiff leather gear in the privacy of the changing area by the training yard. He’s been watching her seek the truth of him for the past month, and already she’s surrounded the lies on nearly all sides. It’s like she can tell that there’s a barrier, even get so far as to press her hands against it, but she hasn’t found a door. Yet.
“The more I ponder it, the more I feel you have been pushing me away for reasons perhaps unrelated to your personal feelings for me. I do not know what the reasons might be, and whenever I think to guess, my fears overwhelm until suddenly I can no longer breathe.”
The only person who could give her a door past those secrets is him.
“Or do you simply place your secrets over me?”
Finley puts his hand over his face, rubbing at his eyes. The touch of his beard is still an unfamiliar, unexpected sensation.
He had known when he started this path that he was committing himself to a life of lies. He’d thought specifically of Isla, who couldn’t be told the truth, not with her clumsiness of blurting out information. He had always had a life outside of her knowledge, as the eldest of the wards. When Sophie and Geoff were alive, it was the three of them that watched over Avrenne and the younger children. Now it was only Finley left to watch over them.
“Keep the children safe!”
He hadn’t thought about what it would mean to always have to place his secrets over the rest of the world outside the House. Not like this. Maybe it was just that not since he was fifteen years old had he imagined himself with someone. That idea of that sort of life in his future had been cast out of him by Thomas Boutille’s fist.
Finley stows his weapons and training leathers in the locked cache he keeps there. The transition to the suit already begins the shift to the Painter, even before he needs to put him on. The sensation of the clothing, the layers and ties of it all, belong to the Painter Gentleman, after all. Although, the enchantments are new. Fool him once.
He sets the tiger’s eye gold cufflinks in place, and then affixes the maroon cravat with the tie pin. With the cane back in hand, there’s a faint sense of relief again – security, really. Fallon always had understood what Finley needed better than Avrenne. She wanted him to have a guard with him at all times now. Fallon understood that Finley was the guard.
Esquier.
Now he just has the better tools to use for it. He’d assumed the hidden knives would be enough. But, then he had assumed that if he had ever needed to use it, it would be because an encounter went sour, or there would be a threat directed at Avrenne to intercept. The idea that he could be ambushed, taken unaware entirely as a target, hadn’t occurred to him.
It would never happen again.
He’ll be back tomorrow. Bastian will be waiting. For now.
March 19th: AN UNEXPECTED LETTER
Finley breathes out as he leans against the door of his room. His heart rate is still too high. His chest is so tight he reaches up to the fasteners of the chestpiece to yank them off even before he undoes the ones holding his mask in place.
She’s gone. Hana’s gone.
But at least she’s not dead, or dying.
The letter had made Finley go cold. It had been a goodbye, that much was clear, and the phrase even when I leave this world had made him leap to the worst. He’d told himself that he would only follow her to pick up the letters, that was it. He broke his own rules as he read the words on that one, rushing after her, watching her, fearing the absolute worst.
He still doesn’t know what he would have done if she’d done anything to herself.
“But if you had been too late, if Miss Levesworth was here, and those men had found her, what kind of face would you have made for her, I wonder?”
Ilanya’s words haunted him for the entire time he followed Hana, trailing her out towards the Swamp of Sorrows with a growing fear, until she ended up turning south towards the Blasted Lands – and the Dark Portal.
Finley would be willing to bet he may be the only person in the universe who has ever been so deeply relieved to see someone go through the Dark Portal into Draenor.
She’d meant it literally. She was leaving Azeroth for Outland.
Atta girl.
He’d known nothing would stop her from her goals. He’d felt his chest swelling with pride as he stepped over across the portal’s line, watching her looking around, wide eyed and inquisitive.
“I can’t think of a single reason why I wouldn’t want to go with you,” Hana said earnestly, unaware of all the reasons that Finley will eventually give her. “There are reasons I wouldn’t go, like if it was going to hurt you or your reputation to go with me. But I’d still want to, it’d just be more of a wish than a reality.”
Finley tried to tell himself that she doesn’t still wish it.
He knows she does.
She would never know that it was a reality. He was right there with her. He tracked her all the way to Honor Hold. Watched her secure a room for the night, and only the night. She must intend to go somewhere else tomorrow, which means he has to be there as well. If he had to guess – and he might, if he doesn’t catch her in time – he’d assume Shattrath. She has that contact she spoke about, Marshal Mallow. If that did turn out to be the guy after all. Finley doesn’t know. He never heard the end of that investigation.
He’s missed so much. He misses –
He breathes unsteadily as he strips off the leathers, coated in the Hellfire Peninsula's sulfuric scented red dust. He pulls out the letter again, reading it over as if he doesn’t have the words memorized already.
“In case we do not meet again, know that I will never forget you.”
Her letter has a dreadful finality to it. Like she expects she might not ever come back. He can’t blame her. After all, her mother never did.
Finley closes his eyes. That can’t happen to Hana.
He knows better. He knows that no matter what she is to him, the world can take her away. But the thought of it – an existence without Hana. He can’t breathe when he thinks of it.
It can’t happen.
March 22nd: ANYWHERE BUT HERE
“Will you disappear one day, vanish without a word like so many I have known?”
Finley Boutille has known how to vanish, figuratively and literally, since he was eight years old. There’s a quality of a person that can be so subdued that when it's combined with the innate drive of people to edit out superfluous details it can make even an unusually tall child disappear from what would seem like plain view. Until he belonged to Avrenne, he could have vanished without a word, and believed truly that no one would look for him.
Avrenne would never stop looking until she found him, and no power in the world would keep Isla from chasing him down to cling onto him. Those are truths he’s held onto since he was seventeen.
He never expected to see them in action. Even his temporary death had been enough to prove it. He hasn’t seen Avrenne this murderously furious since the day she discovered what had happened to her father’s official seal.
Finley runs a hand over the final paperwork for his departure tomorrow. Pandaria, where Brigitte “Green” of the MacBrides is hiding to avoid accountability. Or maybe she thinks she can out-wait Avrenne Esprit holding a life debt, because Green’s wife may be clever and cunning, but she’s proven that she’s also fucking stupid. Avrenne’s reputation for being level headed and practical hides a colder truth beneath it, but Green should know better. Then again, speaking of stupid people.
Pandaria is a large continent. He’s not known there. Arguably, he’d be safer in Pandaria precisely because he’d be alone and unknown, and he could roam as Blanque, instead of the painter Finley Boutille. Blanque could have sketched, for Finley to paint later.
That argument had fallen on unwilling-to-listen-to-reason ears with Avrenne. Normally, he could count on her logical empiricism, but he has a feeling that when it comes to him, she still sees the seventeen year old kid who she folded into her responsibility. Not even a growing beard that ages him by nearly a decade has altered that perception. She’s ordered a guard this time.
Finley wonders if Green even remembers Avrenne well enough to know what that means, that Avrenne gave Finley a direct order in the midst of all this business with the MacBride family. He wonders more if Green knows about anything going on at all, and how much information on Avrenne he’s ever passed over to his wife. Somehow, Finley doubts it was much at all. Or she’d have been paying attention enough to Quinn MacBride to never let her get anywhere near Avrenne’s people to kill one of them.
Then again, no one was supposed to know. Finley’s sure of that. Quinn MacBride intended to go out there, kill him, and then maybe arrange for it to look like something else. Accident. Random act of brigand violence. Something, with the coroner they had in their pocket. Had being the operative word. There were some advantages to having a direct in with SI:7, and Himself doesn’t much care for coroners willing to lie about deaths on behalf of anyone except himself. So that was one asset of the MacBrides done.
Technically, two, counting Quinn MacBride because he’d –
His stomach clenches. She was dead. It was over and done with. There was nothing more to think about on it. He’d told Ralaea the truth that night. He had known what he was going to do before he did it. He’d committed to stopping Quinn MacBride, and he had been taught not how to fight, but how to kill. He accepted it.
After that first failed attempt at shaving himself, he tried a barber. He didn’t even make it to asking for the shave. He saw the razor on another across the room getting a shave, and his own hands had shook. There was no way he would let the barber see him like that. But he couldn’t just walk out, so he’d gotten the haircut, because shorter hair would be one less thing to worry about in a fight, if it came to that. He hasn’t worn it this short since before Avrenne was engaged to Green.
It’s been weeks now, and he’s been keeping it at the length, so that it’s become the Painter’s new look. He’s made it deliberate, a refreshing of his appearance, a new look for no reason but the whim of fashion.
He still doesn’t recognize himself in the mirror.
A vanity he didn’t know he possessed struck him when he saw Hana that day in the rain, and he had wondered if she would find the new appearance unappealing. It had caught him by surprise that he’d even think it. He knew that of anything she had – did – find attractive in him, his appearance was unlikely any part of it. He wasn’t exactly the Prince Charming type. All he had going for him there was that he was taller than average. His method of seduction in Society didn’t bank on his looks, it was built on attitude. It was in body language and strategic proximity, in words and careful observation of what they desired to hear.
Still, he’d wondered. Some part of him wanted her to want him.
The same part that was desperate enough to slip past the Painter to provoke her. If she’d only known how much he wanted her to touch him that the threat of stepping on him overrode his sense of strategy. He’d held his breath the entire time he offered her his arm and she had begun to reach for it. He doesn’t know what he would have done if she had taken it. Felt her like a phantom for that much longer, probably. Even if he knew he should have been relieved when she didn’t take his arm in the end, he wasn’t. Then, those tears in her eyes again.
He danced on the razor’s edge of truth talking to her as he did. But, Light help him, hurting her more – feeding those insecurities that gripped her – even if they would hold his lie in place, was beyond him.
But, the day that she will let him go is coming. He knows that. It makes shards of glass in his throat, but he has to swallow them down. She’s busy in Outland, establishing herself, having adventures and meeting new people all the time. She hasn’t written to Finley again. Maybe the last letter really was a true farewell, an acknowledgment that she won’t forget him, but she will let him go. Move on.
She was the only thing keeping him in the Eastern Kingdoms. Now, he can hardly stand to be in the city, without her in it. He’s acutely aware of her absence, as if the sound went out of the world with her. Tomorrow, he goes forward to Pandaria, for the House. It’s a relief, now.
It’s only a continent difference. And yet, Pandaria might as well be its own world away from the rest of Azeroth. The distance between them will be that much greater. If he was thinking strategically, this would be the time to let her go.
Finley can admit that he stopped thinking strategically the moment Hana gave him a broom with his name on it. He’ll see her tomorrow when he checks for his mail.
March 25th: SOMEONE ELSE’S SECRETS
He lost Elle. He hadn’t even realized. He looks over the letters, cursing himself for not seeing deeper. A familiar shaking rage seeking an outlet surges through him. The last time it was like this was after Avrenne got that letter about Green’s betrayal. Finley had missed it all. He’d been so sure of Green’s worship of Avrenne, he hadn’t caught a single fucking thing.
What had blinded him to Elle’s? He knew better than to think Elle was as calm as he behaved. Restraint was not serenity.
He arrives at the answer and shies away from it. But, it’s the only real one. Hana. Not how he thinks about her, but that she left for Outland. That she hadn’t come to him at all, to Finley Boutille. She would have never gone on if she had known Elle wasn’t okay.
It still isn’t her fault. It’s on Finley. He should have asked more. He should have been looking. This was exactly why the both of them shouldn’t have anything to do with him. He was no better a friend than he would have made as Hana’s –
But if he left Elle now, he’d not only break his promise to Hana, he would break something in Elle. He can’t do either, not even if he is sure that Elle would be better off in the end. Hana’s threat to show up with cleaning supplies if he were to hurt Elle hovers again in his mind, a terrible and desperate thought. She’d said neither of them want that. The truth would have disturbed her.
Finley folds himself down onto the pandaren stool chair, letting Elle’s letters rest on the desk again. He tries not to think of the absence of letters where Hana’s might have gone, if she wrote to him in Outland.
The pair of them, each hiding a truth from the other. Each of them telling Finley, of all people, the truth. He didn’t deserve either of theirs, hiding his own from them both. But maybe they could sense that, somehow. That as a man with so many secrets, so many lies to everyone around him, he knew how to keep his mouth shut on other’s secrets and lies of omissions.
He wouldn’t tell Elle about Hana’s.
He wouldn’t tell Hana about Elle’s.
He wouldn’t tell either about Finley’s.
April 3rd: WRITTEN IN THE SKY
He’s lost her.
He’s lost Hana.
She left her place in Shattrath, which she’d been returning to every day since her arrival no matter where else she traveled in the day, and he has no idea where she is now.
When he first realized she was gone, Finley had thought his heart was going to drive itself straight out of his chest until finally his brain caught up with the rest of him. He couldn’t go clamoring after Hana’s whereabouts directly. Even as Blanque, it would be a huge risk if she heard of it somehow from one of the people he might question. She was too clever, his seeker. She’d know. And it would put a sizable hole in that wall around his lies she still hasn’t seen all the way through.
But Hana wasn’t the only one missing.
Marshal Mallow was gone as well, and the obvious conclusion Finley came to turned out to be true. The man hadn’t made any special secret of the fact that he was headed to Shadowmoon Valley with a “girl,” at the inn, and one of the people remembered hearing the name Kaede Levesworth, Hana’s mother’s name, which could mean only one thing.
Except Finley had taken Umber – one of the fastest gryphons money could buy, and Esprit Fallon money went far – out to Shadowmoon Valley and the dwarven stronghold out there, but there had been neither Hana or Mallow. He’d gone even further out, to the draenei and even the blood elves, but they weren’t there either.
Which means he’s lost her somewhere between Shattrath and the Shadowmoon Valley, where hundreds of possible ways to lose her completely existed.
Just the thought of it again makes his gut twist so hard he has to put a hand on himself, the way Avrenne does at times. She can’t be gone.
There’s no way to comfort himself that she isn’t. All his mind will supply as proof that she isn’t is an irrational feeling that if she was, there should be some greater sign of it. The sun should wink out of existence. It should be written in the sky itself. It’s a mad thought. Finley knows that’s not how it works. Someone dies, and the world outside doesn’t change. It’s only him who will, if she’s –
He gasps at the surge of pain in his chest. Breathe, Boutille. Inhale, exhale.
He is supposed to go downstairs to the Golden Lantern’s tavern in less than an hour. He still needs to wash off the scent of Shadowmoon Valley, scrub his skin so clean not even a worgen could pick up the tell. With that worgen of Dinnsfield’s around, that is a real possibility.
Finley builds a wall between his thoughts brick by damn brick. He cannot let any of this show to anyone. Finley Boutille, painter and gentleman, has no reason to be like this. Any sign of displacement of the Painter will give people a reason to ask questions he absolutely cannot answer. He has to bury himself in a mental grave six feet deep, build up a wall all around it, and then put up the flowers and greenery to hide the wall.
And pray to the Light that Hana isn’t the one who needs the grave.