recreatable | open post.

In fiction. Yes. Precisely. When she'd gestured for more, she had hoped for more literary criticism. Like, what did he think of the highstorm as a precipitating event? Did he also find the binary choice of respectable suitor and passionate suitor nauseating? But no. He sounds more like he's defending the notion of intimacy itself. And... fair. Now that she reflects on the way Wit used to interrupt her work or her discussion with a tender-but-abrupt kiss on her safehand fingertips...? Less overlap; too much shortcut. Jasnah's expression darkens as she starts to unwrap that thought.

Best not to ruminate on that. She gives her head a curt shake, banishing the idea that maybe it had been some deficiency in Wit and not in her.

Yes. Time to move on quickly. She rallies her heart and her brain.

"Clearly, the safehand reveal is a staple in Alethi epic romance." She clears her throat. For once, she tries not to sound too curious. "What would be it's corollery in Lumière?"

"I'm not actually a romance novel aficionado," he points out with a laugh. "I prefer adventure stories, remember?" Lest she forget that she was the one who pointed him to the tawdry romance section and not the naval adventures. Said something about getting a cultural education.

But he has read some romance novels for the sake of edification. Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre. One can't rightly call them Lumièran when they came from the outside world, but it makes no significant difference. They still follow Lumièran cultural standards— or perhaps Lumièran cultural standards follow them.

"But I guess..." He taps his fingers against the desk, contemplative. This is an academic discussion, but it still feels a little flustering to talk about alone in here with Jasnah so near him. "It would be the first experience of intimacy between two characters." Jane Eyre saving Mr. Rochester from the fire, the way he'd held onto her hand in gratitude and been reluctant to relinquish it. The buoyant happiness she'd felt afterward, so feverish she couldn't sleep. "The touch of a hand, or a kiss."

A moment, and he realizes he's inadvertently suggested that somehow that's what her reveal is to him. He still hasn't quite categorized what it is to him, but he knows it isn't that. Not when even Jasnah calls it a perfectly ordinary limb. "As a story beat, anyway. I'm not sure, uh, culturally."

And – yep, right around now she starts to feel a sort of itch in her safehand. Like she should be hiding it away again. Vorin convention is bone-deep, it would seem, even when she doesn't believe in it. So instead, she conspicuously folds both hands together in her lap. Right fingers curled tightly over left.

She's starting to feel a little irritated with herself, frankly. Having made a point of learning swordplay with her (gloved) left hand to prove a woman can 1) participate in a masculine art and 2) use her safehand to do it, it seems silly to entertain any anxiety over the current situation. A situation she caused for herself.

A little too caustically: "Yes, yes. Adventure stories. Are they all somehow devoid of sentiment by virtue of being adventure stories? I doubt it."

Oh. The mood shifts, something in the air turning stale. Verso gets the distinct feeling he's done something wrong. To be fair, he always feels a little bit like that, but the feeling strengthens as he watches her cover her left hand with her right.

"Yeah," he says, forcing the most lighthearted tone he can muster. "All rough-and-tumble. Not a teary eye to be seen."

Should he apologize? He's not sure what to apologize for, but it feels like he needs to do something to fix this. The responsibility, as always, falls to him. A beat passes in awkward silence, and then he grabs the now-empty bowl he'd brought for her.

"I'm going to take this back to the mess." An excuse for her to cover her hand while he's gone.

Jasnah is very likely the most accomplished scholar of her generation. And she's determined to be a shrewd, consequential leader. But she might as well be one of the ten fools when it comes to catching and comprehending the effect she has on him when her mind is off digesting thoughts that are barely relevant to his existence.

Well. Barely relevant other than how he continues to inconveniently catalyze these thoughts in her.

So Jasnah pins him with an odd, confused stare. Why is he quitting their conversation when it's as yet only half-held? He was sharing opinions! She was learnin things. Her frown threatens to deepen into a scowl. She doesn't want him to leave yet. But it also doesn occur to her that she could ask him to stay, ask a different question, or implore him to return wait and return the bowl tomorrow.

"Fine," she intones. And when she waves a hand to dismiss him, she hesitates for only a moment before deliberately using her safehand. "Go."

He drops the bowl off in the empty mess, passing by Torreth on his way back with a somewhat miserable look; "Didn't take my advice, did you?" Torreth calls after him, which he blatantly ignores.

When he returns, he only lets himself glance briefly at her hand to see if it's been covered, before quickly looking elsewhere, as if the peeling wood on the wall is fascinating. "So," he announces after a moment, "I'll keep watch tonight while you sleep."

...Alone again. Jasnah doesn't much mind the solitude, although she can't bring herself to pick the novel up again. Instead, she scratches a few shorthand notes about the sailors' stories. But her heart isn't quite in it.

She touches the paper grain with the edge of her left thumb. It's unusual to go bare-handed with anyone – not just men. And paranoid abd preoccupied with her own appearance as she is, Jasnah has hers gloved more often than not. Before he returns, she stares hard at the knuckles and nails and the lines on her palm. Then, with a heavy breath, she pulls her glove back into place.

But makes a silent, private promise to practice this immodesty more often. With him at least. Someone who might find it unremarkable. Maybe it'll help her find it unremarkable too.

By the time he returns, she has tidied away her pen and ink. The book (and her annotations) is back in its pile with the rest. She's standing by the porthole, watching the first moon rise, when he reminds her of their little trade-off. His offer to be here while she sleeps. Or his offer to be here while she tries, at any rate.

Temper cooled (because it was never about him anyway) she eyes the bolted down cot. At least no one can accuse it of being too soft.

"Verso," she almost almost almost hesitates on his name as she sinks down to first sit on the cabin bed. "What's a dog?"

And why does their fake family need one?

Verso, she says, and his shoulders stiffen slightly as he waits for the scolding that doesn't come. In fact, she doesn't seem to be irritated at all anymore, although he can't help but notice that she did cover her hand. The relief he feels from her not being upset with him bubbles over, and he can't resist the urge to— laugh. "What?" A dog? That's what she's asking about right now?

Maybe it's her way of distracting them both from the fact that she's allowing herself to rest. He doesn't point out how out of place the question is, just sits on the bench, turned around so that he's facing her.

"A dog is—" Wow, another thing that's difficult to explain. Hard to imagine a world where they don't exist. "It's an animal. Small, sometimes really small and yappy." He approximates the size of a little toy bulldog. "Sometimes bigger, maybe yea high." The size of a Beauceron. "We keep them as pets. Companions."

Surely, the question is appropriate. It's something about which she's curious and it (shouldn't?) tread so closely to his immortal that she risks rebuffing him again. Hopefully. Jasnah will need to plot a more delicate approach to learn more on that topic, sure, but for now? Dogs.

She ignores his laughter. If she doesn't acknowledge it, it might as well not exist. Unlike the internally sourced shame over revealing her left hand to him, she finds nothing wrong with filling in the gaps of her ignorance.

However, she doesn't ignore his explanation. Sounds like an axehound. Although she's never had one as a pet, Elohkar had a brace of axehounds when he was younger. Truthfully, she didn't much see the appeal.

"I see," she answers. "Best not to include one in our cover. If we must have a pet, say axehound.”

There it is again. Helpfulness articulated like a command.

"Oh. Well, a hound is a sort of dog, so—" Maybe it's just another one of those little eccentricities of Roshar, like wine. "They're probably the same."

Don't tell him. He's had a hard enough day as it is.

"And," he adds, leaning his elbows on his knees, "we don't have to have a pet." In this fictional family of theirs. The corner of his mouth twitches again. "I just thought it might be nice. You know, keep the children company..."

He's teasing. Trying to show that everything is still exactly the same now that she's bared her safehand, that he's not going to be weird about it.

Fortunately for him, she doesn't know enough about dogs to shoot the appropriate holes into his 'they're probably the same' theory. Unfortunately for him, he's in for a rather spike-y awakening sometime in the middle future.

Jasnah's mouth holds its stern line a moment longer. Torn between two competing options: first, explaining how meaningless it must be to add to this fiction and, second, letting him add to it precisely because it's fiction.

Instead of saying anything immediately, she engages in the grand awkward experiment of...laying down and rolling into her back. Now, she can look sternly at the ceiling. Her shoulders shimmy uncomfortably. Her hands...Storms, what should she do with her hands? They settle stiffly at her side.

"One child on the way. One axehound."

It's not a negotiation. It's a rehearsal. See, Verso keeps dropping new details in her lap. Storms! What if he'd said the thing about the dog in front of Torreth. Whatever this fiction is, they need to agree on its details.

(It isn't lost on her that fiction remains the ghoul of the day. From lies to literature to cover stories.)

She turns her head, cheek smushed against the hard barely-a-pillow. A tremulous alarm bell deep in her instincts chides that she's likely never looked less queenly than right now. That's a problem. Quickly, she straightens her neck and looks at the ceiling again. Presence matters. Perspective matters.

"... Any other details I should know before breakfast tomorrow?"

That is, has Verso improvised anything else on the spot?

Sure, one axehound. Just wait until Verso accidentally refers to it as fluffy.

Flat: "If anyone asks, my favorite color is gold." Like the sun, like the accents on the Expeditioner uniforms, like the crown on Esquie's head. He has not actually shared this particular detail with Torreth (or anyone else). He's barely shared anything at all! A master at using lots of words to say nothing, Verso has mostly been pushing the conversational topic back to Torreth. His son, his daughter, his apparently very annoying brother-in-law.

"I can actually keep it together, you know." It's not sharp, just a little fondly exasperated. "You don't have to worry about our cover story."

Then, a little more sincere, he adds, "I'm not going to do anything to jeopardize your safety here."

Softly: "I believe you."

Or rather, she wants to believe. Wants it to be true. Wants to trust that he won't muck it up through no fault if his own but simply because he's been thrust into a strange land with strange people and strange ways. Her time lost in Shadesmar was a little of the same. And Wit has told her so many stories of other planets (careful, anonymized, sanitized of information he thought she needn't know) that she can at least drum up enough empathy imagining how she might struggle if suddenly dumped on, say, Scadrial.

So, yes. She isn't so pessimistic or blind to Verso's character thus far that she hasn't adjusted his label to something nearer to ally in her mind. It isn't the first time he's gently pledged himself to her safety, although she's equally certain it's got little and less to do with loyalty. Although what mind of madman chooses GOLD for their favourite colour?!

Even so, she files it away. The previous Wit had silver braiding on his uniform. Maybe Verso would prefer gold.

When her mind roiled like this, the previous Wit would tell her one of his careful, anonymized, sanitized stories. Something to help her chew down the day's problems, although he claimed there was never any moral to the tales. Sometimes, ahe slept.

Maybe Verso would...

"The waltz." She remembers the word. She annunciates it with care. "The one you hummed while dancing..."

But then her mouth gums up. She won't ask for what she wants, but she'll bait a hook.

"Are there others?"

"Others?"

It's times like these when he remembers how vastly different their worlds really must be. He can't imagine not knowing dozens of waltzes by heart. Sonatas, etudes, nocturnes. Sometimes, music is the only thing that makes him feel sane.

"Yeah, there are plenty." Instantly and thoughtlessly rattling them off: "The Emperor Waltz, another by Strauss. Several by Tchaikovsky—Waltz of the Flowers, the Sleeping Beauty Waltz. The Valse Triste."

He's not certain that he's accurately picking up on what she's putting down, but he thinks he might be. "...And," he ventures, "there's this song I used to play for my sister. Whenever she was sick or upset or— had trouble sleeping."

Jasnah lies very still on the narrow ship's cot, her hands eventually settling and folding neatly atop her stomach, eyes fixed on the wooden beams above her as though studying their grain will keep her spine rigid and her thoughts orderly. It doesn't. Nor is it particularly conducive to sleep.

At his list of titles — strange names, sharp consonants, florid vowels — her brow furrows lightly. Emperor. Flowers. Sleeping Beauty. They sound less like musical forms and more like myths she has yet to categorize.

But when he reaches the last one — a song for his sister — something inside her stills. As though he has placed a careful weight in the room and she's afraid to move lest it shift.

"Hmm." A soft sound. Almost thoughtful. Almost gentle.

"It seems..." Her voice dips, less precise than usual, as though she were reaching for words in the dark. "It seems you have many more to choose from than I realized."

The cabin is yet lit by the goblet of glowing spheress. The stormlight contained within gives the room a soft blue cast. She considers breathing some in just to dim the space, but resists.

"Did it help?"

The one for his sister. When she was sick or upset or had trouble sleeping. Like a clumsy chicken vying for flight, Jasnah takes a few practice runs at the question she actually wants to ask.

"Not to brag," he says, bragging, "but it did. Yeah."

She's not looking at him, but the smile in his voice is evident. There's nothing in the world he speaks of with more warmth than Alicia. Clea had seemed a bit put-out when she came, like she didn't like the idea of yet another responsibility that was certain to be thrust upon her, but Verso had been overjoyed to be a big brother. Like he'd always been waiting for her his entire life, to make him into something he was meant to be.

"It's not really a waltz," he admits. So maybe he shouldn't have brought it up among the waltzes at all, but it had seemed more relevant to the goal here than any of the others. "More like a... lullaby."

A pause. He leans back, palms pressed against the bench. He knows what it sounds like when someone is dancing around the thing they really want to say. (I hate prevarication, he kindly doesn't remind her of saying.) If she's too embarrassed to ask, he'll gladly take on the burden. "The difference will be more obvious if you listen to it. Mind if I show you?"

A lullably. Jasnah doesn't answer immediately. She's thinking about... she's thinking about Evi, actually. Adolin and Renarin's mother. Her uncle Dalinar's first wife. Dalinar had married her for political reasons. Namely, to secure the plate and blade that then passed to their children. Jasnah only thinks about her now because she wasn't Alethi. Nor had she ever quite adapted to the cold, buttoned down ways of her husband's people. Evi had been overly affectionate with her children. It's why Adolin was more physically affectionate than most Alethi. But, most importantly for this moment, she also sang her boys lullabies. Jasnah was already a teenager by then, but she'd been around for some of those rambunctious years. She'd basked little in Evi's glow, fascinated by a woman whose homelands didn't require big sleeves or hidden hands. Evi had seemed...kind. Warm. Motherly. So very un-Alethi. Jasnah stops that train of thought cold before she can think too long or hard on how she died. How she actually died.

Instead, shifting her shoulders, she weighs then cost of agreeing to his offer - the one he so generously phrased as mind if I show you? As if Verso was skimming dangerously close to understanding what she needed in that moment. Plausible deniability. And, yes, prevarication.

"No, by all means." She doesn't mind. Of course she doesn't, considering how she asked without asking. She's managed to dodge the word please yet again.

"Show me."

It's a little like a dance, isn't it? She doesn't ask, putting him in the position to offer. Putting her in a position to command it. Something decompresses along her spine.

Verso almost says something snarky like if the queen commands it, but Jasnah might take it the wrong way, might shrivel up and turn away if he teases. So, he leaves her command unnoted.

He fumbles a little at the start. There's no piano in front of him to rely on, and he's halfway across the room from Jasnah. Were he singing Alicia to sleep, he would sit on the edge of her mattress and stroke her hair. Obviously, that's not going to happen here, considering that he doesn't want her to quite literally bite his hand off.

"All right," he says, shifting in his seat. "It goes something like—" His finger taps a gentle metronome against the wood, as he hums a soft, slightly wistful song.

She makes the most of their narrow, hard cot. She tries not to recoil from the thinly padded mattresses when it makes her think of another bed. She catches herself looking for meaning in the wood grain, so she shuts her eyes. Her mind drifts to Herdazian lullabies, a curated collection of which she once read while looking for folkloric mentions of Voidbringers in Rosharan history.

With a soft and exasperated breath, Jasnah tries to simply listen.

His music seems to follow a convention and cadence just different enough to what's familiar that she finds herself getting lost in the notes she things ought to happen but never do. Or maybe that non-resolution is intentional. Either way, he's right that she can hear the difference from his waltzes. His. She suspects he's named composers in the garble of vowels and consonants when he talks about music from home, but ultimately Jasnah labels them all as his: music genres - comma - Verso's.

Again. She tries so hard to simply listen! But questions sneak in between notes and measures. Would it annoy him to know she finds the predictable beat of his makeshift metronome more comforting than the song itself? Or would he preen if she complimented his sense of rhythm? Were the lullaby's origins from before or after his sister's difficult recovery?

(Would her own time in seclusion and darkness been improved if anyone had thought to inject melody into her treatment?)

She doesn't speak. She doesn't really sleep either. But she does rest. However long it takes for him to tire of humming, she listens. She latches on to his voice in a way that absolves her from any effort spent decoding meaning or subtext or negative space.

For her, at any rate, it's a starkly companionable silence. And if she manages to dip briefly here-and-there into a light snooze...? Well. Good job, Verso.

He keeps humming until the song ends, and when it ends, he starts up again. The humming continues through several more songs, until he's relatively certain that she's fallen asleep (or is at least relaxed enough to look as if she's sleeping). For the rest of the night, he busies himself as best he can.

Since reading is apparently still off the menu, he conjures his parrying dagger with chroma and practices knife tricks instead. Carves a little V into the underside of the desk. Every once in a while, he starts up humming again, just in case Jasnah has woken.

He's used to insomnia, but all night is a long time to stay up, especially without anything to entertain himself. By the time sun rises, he's got his arms crossed on the desk, temple pressed against his forearms, humming a significantly more sluggish tune.

Jasnah lasts longer in the cot than she expects.

She lies there as the room slowly pales with dawn, listening to his increasingly sluggish humming, her eyes still closed, her hands folded in identical positions whenever she wakes from the brief, sharp jolts of half-sleep. Once or twice in the night she had startled — just slightly — shoulders tightening, breath catching, as if surfacing from a cold depth. Nothing so dramatic as thrashing or gasping, but unmistakable signs that whatever dreams she skimmed were not kind.

By the fourth such startle she had begun keeping her breathing shallow, as if refusing to descend far enough to dream again. But, eventually, she reaches the limit of how long she can pretend the mattress is tolerable.

With a soft exhale, Jasnah pushes herself upright. Her hair, ordinarily so immaculate, has flattened oddly on one side and rebelliously lifted at the crown on the other. She smooths it once, twice, then presses her lips together and smooths it a third time with far less patience. The result is no better. The state of her appearance prickles at her nerves like raw wool on skin. She hates this grimy, lived-in feeling.

She stands fully then, and crosses to where Verso has all but collapsed forward at the desk. There's a stripped-down sincerity to the way he's slumped, temple resting on his arms, humming something that barely qualifies as melodic anymore. Something tender steals over her as she witnesses how he's made good on his promise. Her sleep might have been poor, but it had felt markedly less...paranoid.

Her knuckles rap gently on the desk. A dull thock thock thock. Then, rather matter-of-factly:

"I'm going to find a sailor willing to provide a basin of water and soap."

The rap of Jasnah's knuckles makes his head hurt a little bit. He stops his off-tune humming, raising his head to look at her. She looks incredibly fetching like this, with her asymmetrical hair, a few rebellious strands sticking out. It's nice to see her look something less than perfectly presentable for once. He feels the ridiculous urge to reach out and mess her hair up more, which of course he instantly squashes.

He's tired enough that he's only sort of half-listening to what she says, not out of a desire to willfully tune her out but because he's still blinking himself back into awareness. "Soap?" he says ploddingly, staring at her as he tries to make his brain useful for anything other than imagining what it would be like to tousle up her hair.

"Oh," comes after a moment. "All right. —Although I'm not sure those sailors look as if they've seen soap recently."

Before she can turn around and leave, he adds, "Hey. How did you sleep?"

He stares at her. She stares back, unflinching. And while she can't begin to guess what's happening behind those light grey eyes of his, she does kinda...pull a face as he chugs up to speed with the morning's first conversation.

Only to roll her eyes. Yes, no, he's right to call the sailor's hygiene into question. It doesn't bear explaining that uhm, actually she only needs a hunk of something whose constitute axi can be coaxed into becoming soap. She'll start by asking for soap, though, because she'd rather not expend the stormlight if she doesn't need to.

Gathering her hair back into the scarf she's been wearing any time she steps outside the cabin, Jasnah pauses and entertains his question. Sleep, huh? How did she sleeps?

"Not bad."

Relatively speaking. She still slept like shit — plagued by disquieting thoughts and dreams the moment her subconscious wrestled control away from her logical, ordere conscious. But, compared to other nights? Not bad.

She doesn't thank him. But she does flash him a tight-lipped smile before walking out the cabin door.

So, apparently they're not speaking any more about last night. Good to know. She's gone before he can say do you want me to come with you, and he sits there alone in the room for a moment, feeling a little disoriented. But he's nothing if not adaptable, so he stands and follows after a second, catching up with some long strides.

Running after her as she marches away isn't exactly great optics. "By the time we dock, the entire ship is going to think our marriage is over," he points out casually.

Oh, was there something else to say about last night? If he's waiting on a thank you then he'll be waiting a damned long time. Verso made good his word and rendered the service he said he would render. And now it's on Jasnah to weigh the cost-benefit analysis on whether she dares to partake in that service again. Not tonight, though. Tonight, the cot is his. Silently, unilaterally, she's decided they'll have shared custody.

She's a few feet past their door, paused at the foot of a narrow staircase up to the deck, when he invokes the status of their marriage. Jasnah turns, drowning at him.

"...Why do you say that?"

Oh. She really doesn't see the same risk as he does. But she's willing to hear him out.

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