Unrepentant Sinners

Darius Crowley never goes to church. One-shot, drabble, pre-Northgate Rebellion.

Darius Crowley never goes to church.

'Church' is something old ladies do when they aren't crocheting doilies and gossiping about Mrs. So-and-So's fantastic blow-up at her husband, a fight doubtless involving rolling pins, or cast-iron pots, or matches and criminal negligence (Gilneans make the best lovers and the worst spouses, or so the saying goes; Darius Crowley scoffs whenever he hears this and says that you can't have one without the other). Or else it's an excuse for the crooked merchants to sit together in the same room and fold their hands in their laps, faces shining with all the smug satisfaction they are forced to otherwise disguise. Look at us, those froggy eyes are saying, wealth and virtue in one. Come by tomorrow and I'll charge you twice for a loaf of bread, because the Wall is up and I've a monopoly and if you starve, well, that's too bad for you. Maybe the Light is fooled by an hour spent clapping your hands and singing songs in a whinging falsetto, but that just reaffirms Darius Crowley's opinion that you can't trust the Light for any-bloody-thing.

'Church' is also something that people do when they do not have better plans on Friday evenings, unlike Darius Crowley, whose plans include:

Hunting.

Drinking.

Playing cards.

Rolling around in bed with Arelle, Lady Crowley, who also never goes to church, but whose auburn hair and warm, familiar brown eyes and teasing fingers are all the proof he needs that men can find their own goodness.

This is how he sees things:

If you spend your entire life doing the right thing—or trying to, since this is the real world, and it is imperfect, and sometimes you have a streak of winning hands and sometimes even your hounds seem better at smelling a bluff than you—if you spend your days with your people in the salt-of-the-earth, your mornings leaning over the tills of local stores with shopkeepers who cannot make ends meet, your afternoons with the farmers struggling to sell at market, then you get some reprieve. You do not need also to spend the nights sitting in a wooden pew until your arse cheeks smart like they've been whipped with the flat side of Frostmourne, listening to Father Zavier droning on about Justice and Virtue when you know he's railing all the sisters in the confessional.

If you take up arms for the smallfolk like no nobleman is expected to do, not because you want to secure their loyalty in some mad bid for the throne but because they are yours and you are theirs and you can no longer separate yourself, your family, your history, and your land from them, their families, their histories, and their lands, then you do not need to recite the Eighteen Blessed Valedictions of Father Faol. This would be overkill. Everyone would hate you and curse you and mock you as a prig. Virtues in your past are not precisely like gold in your vaults, and the Light does not sweep away shadows like a celestial broom, but Darius Crowley thinks that sometimes you get to take a day off from do-gooding derring-do.

In Stormwind and Lordaeron he has heard that things have changed, that paladins and priests no longer moan and gnash their teeth about sins and hellfire and the weakness of flesh and also apparently evil magic (magic is evil, at least a little, Darius Crowley thinks, but then, not as evil as a two-hundred-percent mark-up on wheat and wool). Instead they talk about love and compassion and forgiveness and things that Darius Crowley values above all else but doesn't want to run his mouth about. You don't find grace in the speaking. If you forgive someone, you offer them your home and your hearth; if you love someone, you marry her and she bears you your children, or else you give him your loyalty, and your loyalty is like a blood oath—to obey and serve and die.

Anyway, one doesn't preclude the other, he thinks. You can, for instance, love your former friend (Genn Greymane) with all your heart and still want to burst into his palace and kick his teeth in. If everything could be solved by kicking someone's teeth in, this would be a merrier world. Grom Hellscream: kick his teeth in. Arthas: kick his teeth in. Demons of the Legion: kick... well, maybe they don't have teeth, but find out if they do and, in that case, kick them in.

That is Darius Crowley's philosophy. Love your friends, respect your citizens, and trounce your enemies by kicking them in the face while wearing steel-toed boots.

Maybe they should let him preach in the Church of Light. And the message of his sermons would be, 'If men fought with their fists a bit more, perhaps they'd fight to the death a little bit less.'

Author's Note: Just playing with a shorter character-study (I guess you could call it that) based around trying to figure out who Mr. Crowley was in between the raising of the Wall and his own uprising. He's never struck me as a particularly typical nobleman in the source material—he acts as if he were raised by wolves or something (ha). Telling the truth and being honourable. It is sheer madness.