Past Recollections
It’s strong, warm, always there. It defines our past as well as our present, yet only our future if we allow it. It is a flowing river, yet can cause one to thud like a passing storm. It is our bloodlines. Something noble men seek to purify, poor men struggle to keep and honorable soldiers seek to shed. We all have our origins, and so many have let those origins define them, Sir Joaquin Fletcher is none different. The son of Field Marshal Jonathan Fletcher, Joaquin was raised with red clay coating his boots. The valleys and mountains of Redridge were where the boy was raised, a life that was unusual at best. His father, retired a few short years after his birth, sought to train his son, to become the second in the line of Fletcher’s to join the Alliance. It was an issue that led to many butting of heads. Joaquin’s mother was a Cleric, or better yet a Priestess by trade. Catherine Fletcher met her husband in the early days of his military duties, a stray wolf had latched hold of the man’s wrist putting him in the infirmary. Jonathan, embarrassed to say the least, tried to persuade her into claiming an Orc caused the wound, she declined.
Together the two had a certain balance, Joaquin’s father a strictness built in from many years of service, and a nurtured compassion from his mother’s side. That would lead to many difficulties within young Joaquin’s early life. Studying then training became his daily routine, never able to pick out his own path, he knew from an early age what he was destined to be. A tactician, a soldier. Someone to fill his father’s boots. That had to change. The night before his first stint of training, Joaquin attempted to flee from his home. However, when the Alliance knows your face, and your crimes, your escape will be short-lived. Some might recognize Joaquin’s face from a decade ago, missing papers were planted on every message board from Elwynn to Darkshire.
It was only two weeks before Joaquin was returned home, but the two weeks had bought him enough time to avoid training for another six months. The six month period was a time of tension, finally broken when the talks of war sparked again. Stormwind was in need and the Senior Fletcher was a perfect fit. Jonathan gladly accepted his role as a strategist with the greatest of soldiers in SI:7’s renowned War Room, and Joaquin was grateful for the time to breathe. What came to follow might have been the final jab in the wound for the young man.
If he were to find the woman of his dreams and marry her, surely he would finally rid these expectations of fighting in a war he wanted no part in - Especially with his father now at the helm of the ship.He thought one day he may have just done that. He met a young woman at the inn of Redridge, and from that blossomed a short-lived relationship in which he had held no restraint, but the next training session was soon. And expectations were rearing their ugly head at young Joaquin once more. He rushed himself, and his date. Asking for her hand after only five months. The answer was a wound hard to shrug off. It was too soon, and she was in it - just for fun.
And Joaquin? He was in attendance for the next infantry training SI:7 offered. That was ten years ago, and since Joaquin Fletcher has accepted his fate. He is defined, by word, by name, by blood. He is to fill his father’s shoes. To take military jobs that you won’t read about in the papers. He is often ridiculed for “That one mission where everyone died” and also about his sudden rise in rank, no doubt due to his father pushing figurines with a ruler all day. That being said, a lifetime of training is never forgotten. The man knows how to fight, just not against the bonds that hold him… Yet.
