recreatable | open post.

For the briefest moment, Jasnah goes still beneath his arm. Not in rejection, but in calculation. Even among loved ones, Alethi sensibilities consider public displays of affection... excessive. Undignified. Something reserved for the foolishly besotted or the very young. Given Verso's performance, she realizes he's opted for the former

Her hesitation, then, is not born of reticence but of manners. Of training. Of a lifetime of knowing exactly how much is too much in a society obsessed with restraint.

And yet — after a heartbeat — she exhales and steps into the role with deliberate grace.

"Yes," she says, voice settling into a quieter, more domestic register. "Thaylenah. We've business there. And our original transport has been hauled on land for unscheduled maintenance."

She inclines her head to Torreth in polite acknowledgment, the picture of a competent wife overseeing her husband's wanderings and enduring his enthusiasm.

"We don't require luxuries. Only a cabin with a lock, and a captain who values punctuality."

Her posture realigns around the false intimacy, composed once more...although Verso can feel, in the subtle rebalancing of her shoulders beneath his arm, the way she tucks her body against his, the conscious decision she's made: the composed queen choosing — just this once — to look convincingly improper.

"Punctuality," Torreth huffs, before turning around to hurry his men along. "These dullards wouldn't know punctuality if it hit them on the head."

"Ah, with a captain of your caliber?" Verso says, tsking. "Maybe they're just trying to prolong the time spent in your company."

"It'll be thirty clearmarks per person," is all Torreth has to say to that. Verso's eyebrows shoot up for just a split second before he forces them back down. That's— a little more than he expected. Even more than Jasnah warned him of. It makes sense; if Torreth is independently wealthy enough to take a trip around the world, anything less is probably a pittance.

Negotiate, she'd said. "We were hoping for something more in the range of, uh, fifteen." He isn't exactly giving 'stern haggler' here, and Torreth picks up on it—the suggestion actually gets a laugh.

"He's funny," Torreth says to Jasnah. "But funny doesn't pay your way—"

"Understandable," Verso cuts in. "You're a shrewd businessman. But might I wager a guess that you're also a family man?"

Torreth squints, like he isn't sure where Verso is going with this.

Solemnly: "You see, we would pay thirty. It's only that we're trying to save everything we can... for the baby."

Jasnah's inhale is silent, sharp, and profoundly controlled. Internally, her thoughts snap like brittle reeds: A baby? A BABY? Of all the ludicrous...

But none of this reaches her face. Alethi propriety clamps down on her like armour: no outward display, no ridicule, only the faint tightening at the corner of her mouth that might, in another woman, be mistaken for nausea.

Torreth's eyes swing to her, wide with sudden, intrusive curiosity.

Jasnah gives Verso half a heartbeat of incredulous side-eye— quietly murderous — before she slips seamlessly, impeccably, into the lie.

Her gloved hand comes to rest on her abdomen with the barest, stiffest approximation of maternal instinct. The gesture is so begrudgingly executed it almost becomes convincing. Like a woman embarrassed by public sentiment, not irritated by her husband's theatrics.

"We're...being careful," she says, composed to the point of frost. "Travel can be taxing. And we don't trust those new gates the Knights use..."

Verso should practically hear the 'you are going to suffer for this later' radiating off her.

Torreth softens instantly, the big man's bluster collapsing into something almost tender. "Oh. Well. Congratulations, then." He clears his throat, suddenly earnest. "Twenty-seven for the both, ah, the soon to be three of you."

Jasnah forces a small, polite nod — the type expected of a woman navigating both propriety and mild discomfort. Truthfully, she's a bit miffed he didn't go lower.

She draws her sphere purse from her satchel, counting out the spheres with a speed and precision that borders on belligerence. Twenty-seven exactly. No extra, no tip, no lingering warmth. She almost drops them into Torreth's waiting hand, but...well, she did say she was going to follow Verso's lead. So she keeps careful hold of the money, as though dutifully waiting for her husband's agreement.

Verso waits just a shade too long before realizing that she's the one waiting on him. "Oh," he says, before clearing his throat and doubling down on his performance. "Go on, mon trésor."

After Torreth does the same counting of the spheres, he turns to his crew and gestures to the pair— "We've got passengers on board, boys! That means speed it up already!"

Honestly, it all works out pretty great (for Verso, anyway). He places what he considers to be an incredibly polite and nonintimate hand on Jasnah's arm as they board the ship, keeping it there as Torreth shows them around the vessel and introduces them to his quote-unquote good-for-nothing layabout crew. Verso's pretty sure he catches a hint of affection underneath that derision, though.

The cabin area is hardly luxurious, but it'll do. Has a lock, just like Jasnah requested. There's a desk bolted to the floor, a chest for them to put their belongings in, and a small bed that Verso has already accepted he's not going to be sleeping in. Torreth leaves them with a suggestion that they make it to the mess deck for dinner, provided that they don't mind the gruel his chef serves. Verso's not sure whether that one is just affectionate ribbing or if it's really going to be disgusting, but that's a problem for future Verso, because he's actually not feeling particularly hungry.

Now that the ship is unmoored, he's finding himself feeling a little— ill. It's been decades since he traveled on a sailing vessel; he's always just jumped on Esquie's back, no sea legs required. As he stuffs his pack into the chest, he can already feel himself growing a bit pale.

"How long is this journey, again?"

Jasnah closes the cabin door with a soft click — locks it, tests the latch once, twice, then finally turns to him.

Verso looks...green. Not dramatically, not comically — just that slight, unmistakable pallor of a man whose stomach has suddenly remembered what boats do.

Jasnah takes him in with one long, appraising sweep of her eyes. Not unsympathetic. Not indulgent. Just... evaluating him the way she might evaluate a piece of her mother's laboratory equipment that is making an unfamiliar sound.

She crosses to the porthole, glances out at the dark swell of water against the hull. She hasn't been on a boat since the last time she left Kharbranth, and that had ended in a dagger to the chest. His poor constitution might be just the distraction she needs from that memory.

"Five days," she says. "Six, if the winds shift unfavorably." She turns back to him, folds her arms.

Her tone softens — not warm, but level, practical, the voice she uses when someone is about to faint during a lecture.

"You're seasick."

Because she is neither cruel nor unobservant, she gestures to the bench bolted to the wall beside the desk.

"Sit. Breathe through your nose. Do not lie down - you'll make it worse. You've done well so far. Rest a moment before you disgrace our cover story even further."

His peaky expression won't save Verso from the eventual comeuppance he deserves for fictionally impregnating her.

"I prefer in the process of sea leg acquisition," he says, trying and failing not to sound nauseated. God, it's very similar to how he'd felt when he'd eaten poisonous mushrooms for the first time, dizzy and vaguely feeling like he's going to throw up.

Verso listens, at least, sitting down on the bench and curling over slightly, taking deep breaths in through his nose. It helps a little. Five days of this is going to be torture, though. With any luck, he'll adapt. If not, well, he might need that bed after all if all he's going to be doing is lying around and trying not to vomit.

Then the rest of what she's said catches up with him, bit by bit— "What's the matter with our cover story?" Eugh. He closes his eyes. "It worked, didn't it?"

Jasnah watches him fold over his own knees, the picture of a man heroically resisting the urge to disgrace himself on a borrowed floorboard. Her expression remains perfectly composed — though the corners of her eyes tighten in a way that suggests a very specific flavour of irritation.

"It's inconvenient," she says at last, voice clipped but not cruel. "That's what's the matter with our cover story."

She gestures vaguely — almost disdainfully — toward her own abdomen.

"You have spoke into existence a pregnancy I neither requested nor required. After all your talk of gentlemany charm, I didn't expect you to require such...negotiation tactics."

No heat. No injury. Just the cool precision of a woman who is pathologically and compulsively compartmentalizing her complicated feelings about this part of their shared lie.

She sits next to him and folds her hands neatly in her lap, ship tilting gently beneath her without affecting a single line of her posture.

"But yes. It worked." A small nod, as if granting him that victory costs her nothing. Then, the faintest, driest warning:

"Now breathe. If you vomit on me, our marriage ends immediately."

Right, Verso resists the urge to say as he takes another deep breath of salty sea air, you're definitely the one suffering right now. If he says that, then Jasnah will probably start to lecture him (more than she already is), and while he's usually able to withstand quite a bit of chiding, he's not up for keeping in his vomit and his feelings at the same time.

He does as requested, sitting there in silence, elbows on his thighs, breathing in and out. This goes on for a few moments before he feels— not well by any means, but well enough to crack open an eye and glance sidelong at her.

Dry: "You would condemn little Geneviève to a broken home?"

Jasnah watches him breathe through another wave of nausea. When his little quip finally lands, she turns her head just enough to level a look at him — dry, steady, almost fond in its disbelief.

"Geneviève will be perfectly fine," she says, voice cool but threaded with the faintest, unwilling amusement. "Considering she's fictional. My concern is whether you will be.'

She rises then, smoothing the front of her borrowed vest, reclaiming her composure with practiced ease. Jasnah busies herself with stowing their meagre belongings in the trunk. So much of her things were left behind in the palace suites.

She then preoccupies herself with reorganizing the papers she'd stuffed thoughtlessly into her satchel during their escape. Minutes pass in companionable silence, as she tidies with her back to him until she realizes...Oh!

Jasnah is laughing quitely, sincerely bewildered.

"In the rush, it seems we left with a full complement of romantic epics," she observes drily, waggling a novel in the air over her shoulder.

Verso places his arms on the desk and rests his head atop them, doing his damnedest to endure the seasickness with something resembling dignity. He can imagine Monoco chiding him for lacking the endurance of a warrior (while at the same time rubbing his back, because Monoco is a secret softie). Esquie would probably be unhelpful, saying something like you look green, mon ami; I didn't know that humans could be green. (Which would end up being inexplicably helpful, because at least it would make him laugh.)

Ugh, he misses them. His only true companions in this world, out of his reach. As hypocritical as it is, he finds himself hoping that they haven't been erased from existence.

When Jasnah speaks up again, he tilts his head to look her way, cheek pressed against his forearms. "So we did." Look, they'd been moving fast. He'd just packed up what he had and left. "The reading of which is strictly verboten, to my understanding."

All these books and he's not even allowed to read them. Very cruel.

Jasnah glances toward the stack of books he's smuggled aboard and something in her expression softens in a way that would be imperceptible to anyone who hasn't spent the past day studying her.

"Verboten," she echoes, arching a brow. "For now. Whatever that means." It sounded different than the othet words she didn't recognize.

She moves toward the porthole again, adjusting the scarf at her brow, but her voice carries that quiet undercurrent he may be learning to recognize — her version of gentleness, wrapped in formality.

"It is not your reading I object to," she says. "Only the attention it would draw."

A beat.

“Men when read are...remarkable. Memorable." The tiniest, faintest wry pull at her mouth. Yes, Verso she finds you both of thise things. "And we cannot afford memorable."

She turns back to him, arms folding — posture impeccable even as the ship lists.

"In another circumstance," she adds, softer now, "I would be happy for you to read. It is a skill too rare to waste."

Her gaze lingers on the books — then him — before slipping away again, queenly composure snapping back into place.

"But until we reach Thaylenah, you will simply have to endure the injustice." A pause, barely-there amusement. "Try to consider it an act of restraint rather than cruelty."

'Restraint'. Well, self-denial is one of his strong suits. Might as well tap into that. Besides, he's in no state to read, anyway. Although the nausea is slowly dissipating to something more manageable, imagining trying to focus his eyes on tiny text for any period of time makes it come back with a vengeance. No, he's pretty sure he won't be enjoying any nice, relaxing evenings as he reads romantic erotica by lamplight for at least the next five days.

Verso's quiet for a moment, then: "I knew you found me remarkable."

Smug, self-satisfied. There's nothing that lights up his achievement-oriented, people-pleasing brain quite like being remarkable. He feels well enough to sit up for the first time, so he does, eyes following Jasnah.

"You would have loved Lumière. It used to be a bastion of art and culture." And every man there can read. He's really not special.

He can practically see the moment she weighs three possible replies: puncturing his ego, indulging him, or treating the statement with such cool objectivity it becomes its own kind of compliment.

She chooses the third.

"You are remarkable," she says, tone level as a ledger. "It would be irresponsible not to notice."

But then she turns slightly, studying him with a new, sharper curiosity.

"Lumière," she says. "If literacy is universal, then I assume your society doesn't divide knowledge into feminine and masculine arts the way Alethkar does."

A soft tilt of her head, measured and intent.

"There is no distinction? No spheres of study barred to one gender, no trades reserved for another?"

She steps closer to the desk, fingertips brushing the edge of an emptied satchel.

"For us, scholarship, mathematics, history — all belong to women. Warfare and politics to men." A faint, displeased exhale. "It is an inefficient division of talent."

Her attention returns to him, steady and searching.

You are remarkable, Jasnah says, and there's that blooming again. Most of the nausea is gone now, and although he'll never admit it aloud, that's partially due to being the enthusiastic recipient of her very hard-won praise.

"No," is his response to her not-quite-a-question, "there's no such divide in Lumière. You're right, it would be inefficient—with the Gommage, everyone has to pitch in how they can." Preparing for an Expedition means studying history so as not to repeat the known mistakes of any other Expeditions; it means invention and innovation; it means learning how to kill a monster before it kills you.

"And before that..." A shrug. "Everyone was welcome to indulge in art, man or woman. Some of my favorite pieces were composed by men."

Men who only existed outside of his little Canvas of a world, but all the same.

"Like that waltz you were fond of. Johann Strauss wrote that."

Jasnah listens to him speak of Lumière and Strauss with that poised, contemplative silence of hers — every word he offers becoming a small piece of evidence she folds neatly into the larger architecture of her thoughts.

"No such divide," she repeats quietly. "Efficient indeed."

She turns her gaze toward the porthole again, though her attention is clearly elsewhere — reaching across worlds. Of course Lumière would allow it. Of course a society forced to survive would abandon such ornamental distinctions.

On Roshar, the split between the feminine and masculine arts had never been organic. It had been engineered. Centuries of pruning back women's access to shardblades. Wielding a shardblade required two hands, so society dictated that women could only use one. Religious tradition meant fewer could challenge the systems that kept those blades — and the power that came with them — firmly among men.

She feels that familiar wariness coil through her — not quite anger, not quite grief. Just recognition.

Jasnah looks at him again — colour returning to his cheeks, posture no longer hunched quite so desperately around his stomach. Strauss. The waltz.
For a passing moment, she feels the faint tug of something unexpectedly...pleasant.

If he weren't in such a state, she thinks, she might have asked him to hum again. Or insisted he make good on his dance lesson.

But the moment passes — replaced by the subtle, crystalline click of her returning to herself. Her gaze flicks instead to the tiny, sadly narrow ship's bed.

Then back to him.

"Given your current... condition," she says, voice smoothing into something wry, "you should take the bed tonight."

A beat. Just long enough for the implication to settle.

His condition. Somehow, Jasnah manages to make seasickness sound like leprosy.

"Are you worried about me?" The corner of his mouth turns up again. "You're the one with child, remember?" comes very quickly after. Never mind that said child is fictional—he wouldn't dream of doing anything to jeopardize his petit bébê. Geneviève is his world!!!

"I'll be all right," he says, being so brave about this. It's the perfect opportunity for his martyr complex to rear its head. "It won't be my first time sleeping on the floor." It'll be his first time getting jostled around on the floor as the ship sails, and he'll probably vomit a million times, but he'll deal with that issue when it arises.

"Besides," he adds with a half-shrug of his shoulder, "it would reflect poorly on my job performance if I let ma reine roll around on the floor all night." Sure, he technically hasn't begun the trial period, but— despite his casual congeniality, he's well aware that there's someone who matters here (Jasnah) and someone who doesn't (him).

Jasnah fixes him with a look that is equal parts disbelief and appraisal — as if she's just discovered that seasickness has somehow knocked loose whatever thin layer of self-preservation he normally possesses.

"Worried?" she repeats, crisp. "No. I am attempting to prevent our cover story from collapsing under the weight of your melodrama."

But the dryness in her voice carries an undertone — light, cool, unmistakably fond for a half-second. She glances pointedly at the narrow bed, then at the floorboards he's all but volunteering to die upon.

"Do not be absurd. You will take the bed."

She unlaces the satchel at her hip, pulling out the last of her folded papers, a charcoal pencil, and the worn map of the Shattered Plains — materials she clearly intends to pore over for hours.

"I will be working," she says simply, arranging the desk to her liking. "And I prefer to do so without stepping over a prone body every time the ship lurches."

She drops her gaze, setting her charcoal to parchment and making minor marks along a border.

“So take the bed, Verso,” she finishes, tone decisive and brooking no negotiation. “Your bravery is noted. But it's also unnecessary."

"Well, as long as it's noted," he says lightly, standing (a bit unsteadily) and removing his jacket, draping it somewhat haphazardly over one side of the bench. He shucks off his boots, too, although that's all he removes. Verso wouldn't usually stay so buttoned up in bed, but he's becoming more and more aware of Alethi propriety each day, and he'd rather sleep fully-dressed than offend her.

He doesn't verbally acknowledge his capitulation, but he wanders over to the little bed, perching on the edge of the mattress. As he watches her at work, his head tilts.

"You must plan to sleep eventually." She can't just stay up doing work all night, whatever that might entail.

Jasnah barely glances up from her papers when he speaks; the charcoal continues its deliberate sweep across the page, marking faultlines, contour shifts, hypothetical gates. Notational marks, not drawings. Her initial silence is not dismissal — just the inertia of a mind already three steps ahead of her hand.

"Eventually," she finally concedes. A single word, quiet, unembellished.

Her attention lingers on the map a moment longer before drifting toward him. Not enough to interrupt her work. Just enough to see him settling on the edge of the bed like a man preparing to weather a storm alone.

She returns to her notes.

There is something steadying about the work. Lines becoming meaning; meaning becoming plan. Something that makes the tight coil of apprehension around her ribs loosen by degrees. The familiar rhythm of analysis was always safer than the vulnerable in-between moments, and safer still on a ship where the walls breathe and sway like a creature in sleep. Where she knows she has precisely only one ally

And the truth — one she does not intend to elaborate on — is that she has never been one to surrender to unconsciousness easily. Especially not when the ground shifts beneath her feet. Especially not when someone may have wished her trapped in Kharbranth.

Her charcoal pauses mid-stroke.

"I don't sleep well on boats," she says simply.

No elaboration. No vulnerability. Just fact.

And the charcoal resumes its path, sure and unhurried, as though that were the end of the matter.

Oh. He's settled back on the mattress by the time she speaks again, staring up at the ceiling and trying (but failing) to focus on anything but the sway of the ship in the water. Jasnah had seemed quite done with the conversation, as if dismissing an irritating servant, so he'd figured that was the last time he'd hear from her for at least several hours.

Verso doesn't sit up, but he does shift onto his side so that he can look at her. Turned away from him, busy with whatever etchings she's making with that charcoal. There's not a single hint of vulnerability in her voice, but it must be a vulnerable thing to share, he thinks. Trouble sleeping is rarely good.

For a moment, he's quiet, considering what he should say. If she wants him to say anything at all, or if she only wanted to toss that out into the ether without having to receive a response. Finally, he lands on, "I'm an insomniac, too." Shared ground. People always feel better when they aren't alone.

"I'll share my reason if you share yours."

Jasnah's charcoal stills just for a breath. The faintest disruption in the rhythm of her work. Not enough to register as surprise. Just... pause. Calculation.

She doesn't turn to look at him. She doesn't soften. But the air between them shifts, the way it does when she hears something she didn't expect and refuses to let it show.

Insomniac. Shared ground. Too much like an invitation.

She resumes her linework, steady as ever, but her voice, when it comes, is quieter — stripped of its usual certainty.

"Information is a currency," she says, aligning her ruler with almost exaggerated precision. "I won't spend it without assurance of return."

A small beat.

"So. No." But then, gentler than the refusal should allow: "You first."

Just Jasnah, weighing value, waiting to see if he can meet her where she's offered the smallest fraction of honesty.

Verso can't help but laugh. Jasnah, he's quickly learning, is ridiculous. Endlessly difficult about giving up even the smallest amount of ground. He shouldn't find it as charming as he does, and yet.

"So, I'm just supposed to donate my currency out of the goodness of my heart," he notes, although not unkindly. Just pointing out a little hypocrisy there. "Luckily, I'm feeling generous."

There is a pause, though, just long enough to be obvious that he's considering what to say next. How much to share. "I used to get these nightmares," he finally decides on. "But now I don't even get those. Most of the time, I don't dream at all." And when he does, it's rarely pleasant. "It's just this... oppressive void."

Pure nothingness. Like being trapped in a smothering dark cave. Or in a coffin underground.

Jasnah's charcoal gives off soft sounds. She works as she listens, as if one makes the other easier. Simpler.

"Void," she repeats, quietly.

The word lands in her ear with the wrong kind of resonance. Shades of a history she's studied, and a theology she disassembled, and a force she has seen — too closely — trying to devour the world from the inward out. There is an instinct, sharp and intellectual, to interrogate it. What kind of void? How literal? How dangerous?

But she resists. He is not Alethi. He is not invoking the Voidbringers. And she will not project her world's horrors onto his honesty. Her charcoal touches down again, resuming its meticulous path.

"That is... unpleasant. A mind accustomed to thought — even as a dream — does not easily tolerate nothingness." Another quiet beat, her eyes still on the parchment. "And I see why sleep doesn't come easily."

She finishes the line she was drawing, sets the charcoal aside, and finally turns her head just enough to regard him, eyes steady. Jasnah flicks her fingers together, like dismissing charcoal dust, before idly untying her makeshift headscarf. A slight inhale. She leans a hip against the worktable. A slight loosening of her posture. She rubs her gloved knuckles against the base of her ribs.

"Since you've shared your context..."

Context, and something honest. Whatever her test was, he passed it. Even if his answer stings of something both strange and familiar.

"My last journey by sea ended in an assassination attempt." A soft, critical hum. "I was abed at the time."

Oh.

His own reasoning feels suddenly silly. Juvenile. Childish nightmares and then nothing at all. Unpleasant, as she'd said, but unpleasantness is simple enough to withstand. Her own barrier against sleep is much more real; it's paranoia, yes, but paranoia with basis in reality.

No wonder she'd been so irritated that their journey would be by sea.

The fear of death isn't one he can relate to, but it is one he understands. The Expeditioners would start out cheerful, but they'd always turn to melancholy and morosity before long. I don't want to die, they'd say. Don't let me die. He swallows down the bile in his throat.

"Want to talk about it?"

"Not especially."

It's clipped, clean, almost polite in the way closing a book can be polite.

"It wasn't the first attempt. Nor the last, if I'm correct about the Oathgate 'malfunctioning' back in Kharbranth."

But the attempt on the ship had been closest. Steel in the dark. Blood on wet planks. The sickening calculation of how much stormlight she could afford to burn, and when to burn it, so as to trick her assailants into thinking they'd succeeded. Quite apart from Jasnah's personal experience, her brother had been assassinated. And her father, too, years prior. Storms! The night the assassin in white came for King Gavilar, Jasnah had been busy meeting with a hired killer of her own: ensuring Liss that she would pay double for her to turn down any contracts against her family...apart from the contract Jasnah herself contemplated against her sister-in-law. Perhaps the paranoia also stems from a guilty conscious.

Jasnah actually looks haunted for a moment. She rakes bare fingers through her long, loose hair. Nose wrinkling briefly at the disorder. As if somehow she's more bothered by losing some of her controlled appearance to the disguise. The honesty might be easier than the muss.

"Rest. There's no merit in reopening old wounds."

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