recreatable | open post.

Oh. Okay. It's better than what Verso had feared, at least: that maybe they turned on him and locked him in a steel box that they threw in the ocean, or chained him up somewhere, or— look, he's had a lot of time to contemplate things that could one day happen to him.

There's still a lot of ways you can harm someone who can't die. So, of course, his eyebrows raise at her question, slightly wary. "Body mechanics." Very euphemistic. Voice lowered again, he asks, "You mean you want to know what will happen if you stab me?"

Another cautious glance back at the few sailors milling about on the deck. Two of them are leaned against the railing opposite them, shooting the shit. Another is attempting to clean a mysterious stain. All of them look like people to whom he really, really doesn't want to have to explain why his immortality is perfectly normal and harmless.

Honestly, it's not any of her business, but he finds himself in a rather precarious predicament at the moment, not only stuck at sea with her now but stuck under her rule after, too. He pushes off the railing, taking a few steps away.

"Not a conversation to have in front of company, I think." He doesn't put his foot down about much, but he's putting it down about this. If she wants to know the gory details, she'll have to talk about it with him in private.

As if proving why they absolutely should not be having this discussion here, one of the sailors from across the way calls out, "Lovers' spat?"

The subject makes him uncomfortable. And his discomfort is by itself an interesting phenomenon. Does he resent it? Why? Has this backfired on him before? It doesn't occur to her that perhaps her means of approach might be too harah, too direct, too impersonal. The issue isn't with her, she supposes, but with someone else's thin skin.

He insists they retire to their small cabin to contunue. And Jasnah almost argues - or else almost dismisses the topic altogether in favour of staying on the deck. But then the sailor calls out about a lover's spat and Jasnah can't quite keep the faint flush off her cheeks. Anger or humiliation or both.

But what does she do when she encounters a challenge? She scales it. She strides into it head-on. She hooks an arm firmly around his elbow, erasing the space between their bodies - as if daring then sailors to still think the lovers are fighting.

"Back to the cabin, then," she directs. Soft in volume but not in tone.

Back to the cabin, then. He's too hassled by the semi-interrogation to even really appreciate having someone's arm around his, and once they enter the cabin he withdraws to lock the door, then check that it's locked again. Just in case. When he's confident that it is, he turns to Jasnah, arms crossed.

"Yes, I die. Then I get better."

Close enough to dying, anyway. He's been eaten, bisected, poisoned— it hurts, but it doesn't take. Not permanently.

"It's a real annoyance to die"—extremely unpleasant, actually—"so I try not to."

Being killed can confound. Jasnah chews on the memoey as she crosses the room, settling to take a seat on their bolted down trunk. It's not a throne, but it might as well be. Jasnah balances the heels of her palms on the trunk lid, leaning back. Her instincts still want to label him a Cognitive Shadow, but as far as she's aware Verso isn't Invested. And mustn't one be highly Invested when they first die in order to persist like that? Well. Not everyone.

Although she doesn't miss his displeasure, she doesn't let it dissuade her.

"You don't like talking about it. Why is that?"

Does it matter? he doesn't say, because then they'll be having this conversation all night. Going around in circles, debating what is or isn't relevant for Jasnah to know.

Flat: "I don't know what you mean. I love talking about my affront-to-nature immortality."

He's not a fan, one can safely presume. With a sigh, he settles down on the desk bench again. He's fairly sure the nausea is returning now.

"As you can imagine, people haven't always taken the information very well." He frowns. "Guess it's hard to trust someone when they're the only one"—almost the only one—"not affected by the Gommage."

Hmm. Jasnah tracks his movement as he crosses the cabin. Head turning and eyes watching. He reveals more than he means to, she suspects, when he lets slip he's the only one She wonders which parts of him are truest: the musician, carefully teaching piano notes; the charmer, inviting women to dance in storm shelters; the immortal, heated and upset by these revelations.

Jasnah skips straight to the simple, obvious inference. The one he as good as says aloud, she validates: "You've told others before. And it's gone badly."

Quite badly, if his current mood is anything to go by. A different person might try to console Verso. Reassure him that she doesn't see him as an affront to nature. Or that if she doesn't trust him yet, it's got nothing to do with whether or not he can't die. Or that she knows what it feels like to be distrusted in turn when you tell someone something in confidence.

Jasnah isn't a different person. She doesn't enjoy his unhappiness, but she doesn't care to soothe it in some saccharine way either.

"I lied last night. There's another reason I sleep so poorly. Perhaps pedestrian in comparison to staring down the void of immortality," she remembers that word from yes. Void. "But it's a bit more involved than concern for assassination attempts."

Information for information. Vulnerability for vulnerability. It's the only way she knows to make up for whatever discomfort she's caused. If she's upset him by dragging this truth into the light, she'll drag one of her own in to join it.

While Verso prefers coddling, he's accustomed to going without it. Once, he'd come home distraught over troubles with another boy at school; his attempts at charming his way out of the problem had done nothing. Clea had scoffed. Stop crying, Verso, and do something about it. She'd shown him how to throw a punch, and although he'd whined all the next day about his knuckles hurting, the issue had been resolved.

Another one of those memories that he doesn't know the true owner of. Maybe it never happened to him, and it's just something she gave him. Something he stole.

Regardless, reassurance isn't necessary. "More involved than an assassination attempt in your bed?" he asks, implicit encouragement to expand. Or is the truth she's willing to share simply that she lied, and nothing more?

For a long moment — held like a breath — she almost says nothing. Almost lets the half-confession sit there like an ink blot on clean paper. Truth enough.

Her tongue presses against the back of a tooth. A steadying gesture, though she would never name it as such. If she speaks again, it will be more than she has ever offered anyone.

And Verso — Storms! — has shown an inconvenient amount of compassion and humanity. A softness she should not reward.

"I was ill. As a child."

A single, immaculate euphemism. Jasnah straightens, spine lengthening, posture reasserting itself like armour sliding back into place. She corrects herself, like she learned to do after her illness passed.

"Too much time in beds."

She does not say: too much time in restraints, too much time in dark rooms, too much time begging to be believed. Those details gather at the back of her throat like silt. Heavy and unspeakable. She would like — absurdly — to tell him she knows what it is to be treated as something unnatural. To be hidden for the comfort of others.

But she cannot shape the words past the flat, slanted I was ill.

So instead, she gestures with her chin toward the bolted cot, voice returning to its cool, dry equilibrium:

"Soft beds are worse. Perhaps that one will be uncomfortable enough to be tolerable."

Hmm. Verso, of course, imagines this to be a physical illness. Not something he has a lot of personal experience with. Even before the Fracture, he'd so rarely been hurt or unwell. He hadn't known the truth yet, about the Canvas or his circumstances in it, but he'd still felt invincible.

There is someone that he knows who has experienced such ailments, though.

"My sister, the younger one," he says. Alicia. "She was... trapped in a terrible fire. At our house." The one that Verso should have died in. He doesn't know what to do with the fact that Maman spared him yet chose to make Alicia suffer. Face mangled, throat burned so badly that she can no longer speak. If it were anyone else, he'd be disgusted and repulsed that a mother could do that to her own child.

"Her convalescence was— lengthy, and difficult." He can still see her face the day that the bandages first came off, when she'd seen herself in the mirror for the first time. "So I understand. It must have been traumatic."

Whatever she understands in theory — whatever she has dissected in texts or traced through case studies — Jasnah still cannot affix the word trauma to her own past. She has spent a lifetime turning reason andinto a shield and logic as the only reliable tether to sanity. Yet even now, the taste of failure rises in her throat like bile. She meant to be honest. She meant to build a bridge. Instead she misled him, even while trying not to. And in that lapse, she's lost the thread of everything he has offered her about his own impossible longevity.

She wants — powerfully, irrationally — to ask: Did your family know about your condition? Did it start so young? But she swallows the questions whole

What she can offer is something smaller.

"I am... sorry about your sister," she says at last, the words measured but sincere. "A fire of that magnitude..."

A slight breath.

"Were you caught in it too?"

If he had been, she expects no scars. Immortality erases that kind of evidence.

A split second of hesitation, then, "—No."

It's a special kind of dissonance, having been made to be the kind of person who would burn for his sister and then denied the opportunity. From the very first moment of existence, he's failed to live up to the real thing. All he's ever wanted to do is die for love, and it's the one thing he'll never get to do.

"I wasn't fast enough." Not much else to say about that. He shrugs. "So, now you really know why I'm so handsome and tortured."

The moment isn't nearly dire enough to spare him her eye-roll. Between handsome and tortured, she isn't sure which adjective deserves more contempt — both are equally overwrought.

"Speaking of," Jasnah says, her tone flat as ever. Flat as though they hadn't just both unburdened their chests to one another.

She rises with deliberate ease and steps toward Verso seated on the bench, assessing him with the air of a woman preparing to correct a crooked line on a page.

"Let's do something about that." She gestures to the tousled mess of his hair, leftover from that morning — an offense to order, fashion, and basic dignity. "May I?"

Then she extends a hand. Open. Unhurried. Awaiting consent behind closed doors, where there are no sailors to misinterpret or audiences to manipulate. She will not simply impose touch like she did outside their cabin. Not when real contact carries a different weight entirely. And that's a line she draws for herself: real contact versus performative.

Speaking of handsome, then. Or at any rate, something in his handsomeness that begs correcting.

Any heat he'd felt at her interrogation has grown tepid with her admission; vulnerability seems an uncommon thing from Jasnah, so he treats it as such, like being gifted a rare jewel. Although he doesn't verbally acknowledge the question, he tilts his head slightly toward her hand, tacit permission. Not unlike a shelter dog pressing its face against a friendly passerby's palm through the bars of its kennel.

He's quiet for a moment, mulling over her confession. Confessions, plural. First I lied, and then I was ill.

"We could sprinkle crumbs on the sheets," he finally says. "Stuff the books underneath the mattress. Really make it uncomfortable."

Edited (don't look at me using 'rare' twice in one sentence.... i'm running on 5 hours of sleep) 2025-11-24 21:51 (UTC)

It is permission enough.

She steps into his space without fuss or hesitation, and her bare right hand — not the gloved one — slides into the ungoverned wave of his hair. The difference is immediate; direct contact with her freehand is easier, more natural, than her safehand mediated through fabric.

The first pass is diagnostic. She nudges the slept-on waves this way, then that — testing the stubbornness of it, mapping the shape the hair insists on holding no matter her coaxing. Then, with a soft, thoughtful hum, she commits. Her manicured nails skim lightly against his scalp as she combs her fingers through one side with decisive precision. A single, efficient correction.

It's over quickly. Jasnah withdraws, tilting her head as she appraises her work with the clinical satisfaction of someone who has set a misaligned detail back to rights.

Meanwhile, his quip earns him a quiet, inelegant snort. She doubts the bed will matter; she fully expects to fall asleep at the desk again tonight. Exactly where he sits now, their heights skewed by the further few inches she holds over him while standing.

Instead of indulging his joke, she shifts back into the practical.

"How is your stomach?" she asks, tone light but edged with expectation.

Do I need to order you into the bed again?

The real question hangs there. Unspoken but unmistakable. But there's also an undercurrent of...normalcy. Like, look what little has to change now that you've been honest with me. Did it hurt so much?

Verso watches her as she works, the almost analytical expression on her face as she looks at his hair like a puzzle she's seeking the right piece for. Her warm fingers are light against his scalp, and he feels— oh.

His heart speeds up just slightly, andante to allegretto. He likes this, and for reasons entirely unrelated to casual charm and thoughtless flirtation. That awareness makes his face heat, and he prays that Jasnah can't feel it from where she's correcting his bedhead. His only saving grace is that he doesn't have Esquie around to point it out: you are so colorful, mon ami—first you were green, and now you're red!

It's over very quickly, and he clears his throat. "Iron."

Iron he says, and Jasnah steps back as though that is precisely the answer she expected — neither impressed nor dismissive, simply filing it away.

Distance reasserts itself with the smallest gesture. Her bare thumb smoothing along the edge of a neighbouring finger in a quiet, unconscious fidget. The only outward sign that she is still thinking — about him, about what he's withholding, about what she should press.

If she notices the faint flush along his cheekbones — and she certainly does notice — she grants it no acknowledgement. Jasnah interrogates what matters and ignores what doesn't. She decides his embarrassment (or whatever its source) is not relevant data.

Her mind already moves ahead. Evening mess, the necessity of maintaining their cover, how many appearances they must make before they can plausibly retreat into privacy...and breakfast tomorrow. His hair will be ungovernable again. She resolves privately to fix it again. Not out of vanity. Out of calm. Order. A preference to see him steady rather than on edge from her questioning.

Ah, speaking of. She folds her hands behind her back, posture straight.

"If there are things you don't want me to know," she says, "or questions you don't want me to ask, that's fine."

Her eyes meet his with clinical frankness.

"But say so in the moment. I despise prevarication. If you must deny me, deny me plainly."

Verso feels strangely as if he's being chided for stealing from the cookie jar.

"I didn't prevaricate," he says, sounding a little petulant, the echo of a little boy who's been scolded for dishonesty too many times and who has an excuse for everything. Technically, he's right. He didn't prevaricate about this, specifically. It's just everything else in his life that he's prevaricated about, always using twenty words to say nothing when he could use one and say everything.

He has enough sense to look guilty when he says, "I... omitted." But the next moment he follows it up with, "And so did you."

Is it really fair for her to reprimand him when she admitted to doing the same? On a smaller level, yes, but the topics of both of their lies had the same amount of relevancy. Perhaps hers even had more, given the situation they're in. He has no intention of dying and coming back to life any time soon, whereas she'll have no choice but to sleep eventually.

"But I'm sorry if I broke your trust." If one can break something that probably wasn't there to begin with.

Interesting. Perhaps now isn't the right time to suggest aloud that she expects better from someone who has outlived the mortal experience. But the way his indignation filters to the surface! Again...interesting. More human than folklore. A quality that is paradoxically appreciated and annoying at the same time.

Jasnah saves her breath and doesn't defy his assertion that he only omitted. She disagrees naturally, but finds the potential argument boring before it even begins.

"Don't apologize." She retreats back to the trunk, sitting against. "Do better."

Journey before destination. The words of her oath worm their way up from her heart. She can't expect of others what she doesn't expect of herself. Life before death. Strength before weakness.

"And I'll do better, too."

Truthfully, he'd rather just apologize, but he relents with an acknowledging hum.

"There's nothing relevant left that I haven't told you." Nothing relevant. He does believe that. She doesn't need to know everything else; he can sit around and play piano for her and answer questions about Gestrals without it.

But that's the end of that— "So." He places his hands on his knees, leaning forward a bit, no sign of the man who'd just been uncomfortable and irritated. "You spoke to the sailors, like you wanted. What do you think?"

His mercurial change in attitude troubles her less than his petulance did. Perhaps because compartmentalization is a fluent language for her. Fluent enough to understand hoe much heavy lifting the word relevant is doing in that sentence. Nothing relevant. Well. She supposes thaga another crime they've committed together.

Jasnah undoes and then redoes her braid. The earlier whip of the salt air had pulled loose some strands, and fixing his appearance reminded her of her own. And it's something to do with her hands while she answers.

"Hm. Nothing suspicious about the sailors. Although their stories! Fascinating." Then, more to herself: "Particularly the one about the santhid."

Santhids remind her of Shallan. And thinking of Shallan, she hopes the girl truly did make it out of Kharbranth. If she had her spanreeds on her, she could write to Urithiru. Unfortunately, they were all left behind in the palace suite. Frustrating. Hopefully her contacts will maintain protocol and won't correspond with anyone who doesn't know her pass-phrases.

"Something about the captain bothers me." She frowns. "The wrong kind of nosy for his profession. I don't recall seeing him in Urithiru, but if he recognized me..."

Jasnah trails off. She may have omitted the full reason for her insomnia, but that doesn't mean the paranoia wasn't still real.

"Well," Verso says with a shrug, "he's a traveler. Maybe he spent some time in Urithiru."

It's probably more likely than not, actually, if he's the type of man who's looking to sail around the world. Of course, that doesn't seem like it'll assuage Jasnah's concerns.

"And just because he might have recognized you doesn't necessarily mean anything." It could mean nothing at all! Maybe he really is just an innocent sailor who happened to have seen Jasnah once, and now her face has jogged his memory. Not the most helpful when assuaging fears, though, he knows.

"...But if it does mean something"—if she really is worried about a betrayal and assassination attempt—"then it doesn't matter. He won't be able to do anything to you if you aren't alone."

Logic feels useless against the paranoia threading through her thoughts — but Jasnah forces it through anyway. She sits in silence and recites her own private litany of rational explanations: a case of mistaken identity; a glimpse of some outdated sketch; or, just as likely, the well-intentioned fumbling of a widower trying to flatter a stranger.

A few measured heartbeats, and the sharpest edge of her fear dulls. The pedal note remains — but the pedal note is always there.

Her attention returns fully when Verso suggests — implicitly, not explicitly — that she is safe because he is here. An odd pivot. He swings from frustration to...not loyalty, no. Something softer. Stranger. Chivalry? She cannot categorize it neatly, and that alone unsettles her.

Carefully, she interjects: "The Queen's Wit is not a martial position. If something were to happen, no one will expect you to serve as a bodyguard."

It's not dismissal. Just truth. And though she wouldn't say so, she doesn't hate the idea of a shield that is difficult — perhaps impossible — to kill. She likes it very much.

But expectation is different from desire, and she will not confuse the two.

"Lucky that I'm not your jester yet, then."

They haven't even had the job interview yet! It's quite silly that she somehow takes umbrage against being protected because it isn't expected. Like the only reason a person could ever have an interest in someone else's safety is because they're getting paid for it, because they have no other choice.

"I'm a husband traveling to Thaylenah with his wife, and I would be rather remiss if I let anything happen to her."

And if his readiness to offer protection in any way stems from the fact that he didn't protect the person who mattered most when it mattered most— mind your business.

Joke's on him! It's always, perpetually, already a job interview. In one way or another, it's been a job interview even before the job was offered. Maybe she simply didn't know the job yet, but he's always been under scrutiny. Always been under evaluation for whether she did or didn't want to keep his company. It's difficult to discern, but the extent to which she's gone out of her way to spend time with him has been...notable. Long before she knew he couldn't be killed.

There's something about him she likes. Appreciates. A handful of somethings, maybe. But telling him so would qualify for a level of honesty she's got no interest in reaching. Even if she's told him she'd do better.

...But then he opens his mouth and suddenly she's questioning her appreciation.

"You're enjoying this, aren't you." Her eyes narrow on him. "The fiction. The performance."

The bits that bookend the awkward moments where she forces the truth out of him.

Edited 2025-11-25 22:28 (UTC)

That's rather accusatory. And also true, which is less important.

Verso laughs softly, amused and exasperated at the same time. "One of us has to." It would be so uncomfortable, wouldn't it, if they both hated it? Just like it would be boring if they both enjoyed it. The push-and-pull is what makes it fun, and he's more than willing to do his part.

He'd enjoy it regardless, though. With a slight shrug: "I like being someone else." Beats being himself any day.

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