recreatable | open post.

Her mild smile persists. As if, maybe, she might have been just cutthroat enough to make good on that dare — except she'd never risk the blow back of how it might escalate against her.

She taps the floorboard. Another insistent, eager sign to deal her back in.

"This time," she announces, "if you lose I expect to see your best Torreth impression."

Verso enjoys the evident eagerness—a reflection of his own impatience—but he likes the ridiculousness of her 'dare' even more. He's half-inclined to ask if she doesn't want something more academic and pragmatic, like a lecture on Gestral physiology or an explanation of the seasons in Lumière and on the Continent, but he's reluctant to look a gift horse in the mouth. So, he finishes shuffling with a little flourish (he's getting better at shuffling these cards now) and deftly flicks two cards her way.

"All right," he says, picking two cards for himself and peering at them. "But turnabout is fair play." That is: he expects to see hers if she loses. Much more surprising coming from her. Hell, he'd do a Torreth impression for free.

He places an ace face-up. "The ace," he explains, "counts as eleven, unless it would cause you to go bust." To go over 21, he assumes she'll understand from context clues. "In which case it counts as one."

"Bit uninspired," she complains. "Can't think up a dare of your own?"

It takes two tries to pick the cards off the floor, this time. A crinkled expression of frustration. Then, after a beat, she replaces them with the top card visible: eight, unfortunately. Of the two, that's the one she would have preferred to keep to herself.

Verso's mouth twitches almost imperceptibly. "I'll hit," he says as he grabs another card from the top of the deck. His mouth twitches again. "What about you?"

— That's what she was waiting for. Some...indication, she supposed, on whether they traded back and forth who would make their decision first. She likes this position, going second, eking out a bit more information with which to choose what to do next.

She scrutinizes him a second longer.

"Hit," she says simply. Annunciating whatever Alethi consonant that is with a hard tap of her tongue against the roof of her mouth.

And when he gives it to her, she drops her scrutiny from his face to her new card. Hmm.

It's sort of fun being the recipient of her scrutiny, when it's not scrutiny over his incorrect actions or his immortality. Verso likes having all of her attention like this, on (relatively) his own merit instead of her interest in some nugget of information that he has to share, and he's already scheming how to get her to play with him at least one more time before they disembark.

"Stand," he says, echoing her crisp intonation.

She assumes he likes what he has. Or — of course — the other option: it's simply high enough that he can't risk...what was it? Busting. Jasnah, on the other hand, finds herself in the miserable mindset of having a result too low to stand if he's standing. And just high enough to remind her of how easily she'd gone over in the first round.

Staring at him, with her dignity on the line, she once again crooks her finger in that same slight give it over gesture.

"I'll take a fourth."

She's not happy about it.

Verso raises an eyebrow, but says nothing as he slides her another card. "Stand?" he asks, and I'm just gonna godmode that she doesn't get yet another card because otherwise we'll be here all day. When he flips his cards over, it's with a sense of smug self-satisfaction: the ace, a two, and a six. 19 altogether.

"Your turn," he says, pleased.

Never fear! She was doomed to bust, because fate and the narrative are cruel like that. So before they get any further in the round, upon eyeing her fourth card, she lightly tosses all four onto the floor beside her knee.

"Storms," she curses, "storming...storms."

A four and an eight — her first two cards — followed by a two and (finally) an accursed jack. She went from fourteen to twenty-four in one hit, and clearly feels a bit sour about it. Not, like, bitter-sour. More like petulant-sour. She was really hoping to avoid the forfeit on this one.

Smoothly: "I'm learning a lot about Rosharan curses today."

Because he can figure out from context clues what storms, storming storms is supposed to be. The corner of his mouth turns up. Maybe, if he ever allows her to get on the subject of linguistics, they can compare swears.

He gathers their cards up, setting them back on the stack yet again.

"...At your leisure." You know, whenever.

For a moment Jasnah simply stares at the cards. As if they have betrayed her. Personally. Philosophically. "...So be it," she murmurs. A wager is a wager, and she did agree to the terms. She is honourable about it.

She straightens her spine. Lifts her chin. Folds her safehand behind her back with exaggerated propriety, already slipping into character even as she clearly hates every second of it. And then, she imitates Torreth.

Imperfectly. Awkwardly. Jasnah may be a professional at performing her own authority and presence, but clearly has never spent much time inhabiting anyone else's. Nevertheless, she does try. Earnestly. She has observed this man. She has studied him. She knows his mannerisms, even if she is stiff and strange and bad at performing them. She shifts posture. A puff of the chest, shoulders squared like a man who has never once in his life questioned whether he had the right to take up space. Her expression holds that vaguely constipated concentration Torreth gets whenever he believes everything is someone else's fault. All of it over-acted.

Jasnah drops her voice into a gravelly rumble entirely unbefitting a queen of Alethkar: "Punctuality! These dullards wouldn't know punctuality if it hit them on the head — pick up the pace, boys!"

And then, with the exact cadence he used yesterday while lecturing a sailor who merely coughed: "If one of you dunces so much as sneezes near my rigging today, I swear by the Ten Fools I'll have you swabbing the hull with your storming eyelashes."

She even gestures with her whole arm, Torreth-style. Aggressive and sweeping. But the moment the last word leaves her mouth, she stops. Every line of her body reverts back to Jasnah Kholin, scholar-queen, dignity reassembled axon by axon. And she's grimacing.

Verso practically beams. Or, well, something close to it; 'beaming' implies that there's some sort of inner light shining out, the likes of which he's never had. He's certainly smiling though, grinning wide from ear to ear, as his shoulders shake a little from silent laughter. It was—

Very un-Jasnah. And very cute, although he doesn't dare say that. He has the feeling that she might not appreciate such descriptions.

"Wow," he says, voice trembling a little in amusement. "You're a natural actress." Hardly. She was a bit stiff and awkward, and despite the surprisingly observant imitation of even Torreth's most imperceptible mannerisms, there'd been something just slightly off about it. However, it had been charming as hell.

"I'm beginning to think I should quit while I'm ahead." Clearly the bets won't get any better than this.

Her posture briefly collapses in on herself — not defeated, not dejected, but perhaps just a little bit exhausted from stretching these figurative muscles. Jasnah is self-aware enough, possessing of enough rigorous insight, that she knows what she's good at. And she knows what she's not good at. Intellectually, there's no shame in failing at something that was never in your wheelhouse; realistically, however, there's a flicker of it fighting in the pit of her stomach. It manifests as a brief burst of colour in her cheeks.

Gone, as quickly as it arrived.

Grousing, complaining: "That would be unsportsmanlike, I think."

Quitting while he's ahead. Without giving her an opportunity to avenge herself.

Poor sportsmanship, so says the woman who pouted like a child upon losing. He smirks, an irritatingly pleased-with-himself expression on his face, but he relents nonetheless. Another round, then another, then another until he's so tired he can't count properly anymore, and then it's off to bed. The rest of their days on the sea continue with a similar bent: attending mess, playing a few rounds, switching off who gets to sleep.

It was her turn to sleep the night before they disembark, so he's especially sluggish as they make their way onto Thaylen land, lugging their belongings like he pack mule he's apparently become. It's still early morning, sun not yet risen, and the streets of Thaylen City are all a little fuzzy without the light.

It's a bit creepy, alone out here. He glances behind them at the sound of movement, reluctant to jump at shadows, but— maybe it's just an alley cat (or crab) digging through trash. Nothing there.

"Where did you say we were going, again?"

Damnation, but she's relieved to be off that ship. Feet on firm land. No longer implicated in a fictional marriage with a fictional motherhood ahead of her. Not that she can smoothly reinhabit her true identity. Not yet, at any rate. She wants the opportunity to touch base with Fen, Theylenah's ruler. She wants the opportunity to get her hands on a spanreed and hear something, anything, from her family back in Kholinar. Having been at sea for so long, she has no way of knowing whether or not this was some coordinated attempt.

"That pastry shop I mentioned. It's in the Low Ward. Not far."

Insert here Jasnah's brief, helpful description of said pastry shop, including loose directions. Nothing overtly helpful, as she intends to direct them there herself. But a landmark or three are included in her explanation. Theylen City is a cramped port of industry and trade. It's easy to see that much of its growth and activity is centered on the docks, built inside a huge lait that provides natural protection from highstorms.

"As good a place as any to learn what's been happening on land while we were at sea. I'd rather not go to Theylen City's Oathgate directly."

Her tone is hushed. Private, meant only for him. Which means she keeps her pace close and intimate with Verso, just like how they'd talked together aboard the ship. And her explanations are vague, open-ended. She isn't prepared to out Jochi's pseudonym without having a chance to warn him first. All that matters for now is that the pastry shop is a safe place.

Jasnah takes hold of his elbow. Brief, pausing, holding him in place as she scans the scattershot of alleyways and storefronts that butt against the docks. After a moment, humming a single note to herself, she nudges them both towards a particular crooked path between a customs house and a carpentry shop.

The warmth of her touch lingers against his elbow, and it's that he's thinking of as they round the corner into the narrow pathway, and it's that which distracts him from the figure pressed against the customs house wall, the glint of metal in his hand. It happens before he's even consciously aware of there being someone else there: the sound of unsheathing, then the squelching of blood.

He smells it before he sees it, a familiar, coppery stench. Chroma sparks in his palms, weaponry materializing in his hands, but Jasnah's assailant is already running off after one good strike, blood dripping off of his knife and onto the cobblestone as he absconds. Verso watches his broad shoulders as he disappears, shifting on his feet to follow, but... oh, there's still Jasnah to think of.

The weapons dematerialize the next moment as he turns back to look at her, both hands instinctively settling on her forearms to keep her upright as he glances down at the bright red blood seeping from the wound in her gut, and— he's been here before. Just like this. Holding her like this, watching her bleed, gently cradling her as she died hating him—

He looks back up, eyes wide, and presses his palm firmly against the wound to stem the flow of blood. "You're okay," he lies.

Ever since they stepped onto dry land, Jasnah has been running three tracks of thought in flawless parallel: first — speaking with Verso, describing the pastry shop she remembers tucked behind a tailor, its awning striped in Thaylen blue; second — mentally cataloguing who she must contact first once she gets her hands on Jochi's spanreed set; third — maintaining a thin reservoir of stormlight in her veins. Just enough to keep exhaustion at bay, to soften last night's ache from half-dozing folded over the ship's desk. It's inefficient, wildly so; stormlight held too long slips away, leaks, evaporates. Still, she does it. She needs the edge.

It should soothe. But instead it flickers. Fades. Her eyes should glow faintly; instead they dim. Ivory? Nothing. No presence. No warm tug in the back of her mind. It's like shouting into a deep, black well. Something wicked and fearful grips Jasnah's gut.

She turns, instinct sharpening, but the alley is already bent around a figure too close — far too close — moving with a muffled heaviness, as though the very air around him has been deadened. One of Torreth's sailors. A face she saw only twice at sea. A name she never bothered to learn.

There is no warning hiss of a weapon through air. There is only pressure, then pain.

The knife slips beneath her ribs with a horrifying, efficient intimacy. Angled upward, deliberate as a surgeon's incision. The pain is bright and electric. She tastes metal like biting her own tongue. I have been here before, she thinks, as her mind gives way to a heedless animal panic. Her stormlight surges instinctively to meet the wound...and does almost nothing. A dull shimmer. A faint easing. But it refuses to mend. Refuses to draw. Refuses to respond. She should be flooding with light. Investiture. Instead, she's bleeding.

Her breath stutters. Ivory remains maddeningly absent. Hells! Where is Ivory? Her left hand works weakly at the air, as if she could still summon him.

The sailor is already running; and then Verso is there, and for one obscenely long second, she laughs in confusion. Why is Ivory in Verso's hand? She watches this with a kind of delayed confusion, as though her mind hits a patch of ice and skids. Her knees go soft. She hears herself murmur, dazed, almost apologetic, wrong wrong wrong: "—you should have told me you have a Shardblade."

Her hand presses weakly to her own side, gloved fingers tangling sticky and wet with Verso's. They come away red, and then her balance gives out entirely. She grabs for the nearest anchor — his shoulder — fingers clenching uselessly. The world tilts. A wave of nausea sweeps her vision sideways. Jasnah tries to pull them both into Shadesmar in one final attempt to escape the moment; stormlight flickers in her eyes one final time, but nothing happens.

Under any other circumstance, he'd be excited to feel her fingers against his, but he can't muster up any enthusiasm for it in this situation. The fabric feels wet with blood, and there's no point in her ruining her glove when she doesn't have enough strength to staunch the bleeding, but it's too late now. He watches the stormlight glimmer in her eyes, frowning as his palm digs in deeper against the wound. It hurts, probably, but if there's anything he's learned, it's that sometimes you have to hurt someone to help them.

"Hey," he says, patting her arm insistently to get her attention. There's a faintly glassy look in her eyes that he doesn't like. Then, a little more forcefully: "Jasnah." It's rare that he calls her by name, so he hopes it'll stand out to her enough to cut through what must be a haze of adrenaline.

Authoritative but not unkind, as is befitting an older brother: "You need to heal yourself."

It's what she was trying to do before, he thinks, but perhaps it hurts too much, maybe she's too tired. It doesn't matter. She'd said she could heal, so— "You have to do it now."

"Ivory," she grinds out. The word cracks against her teeth and bubbles on her lips with the wrong kind of warmth. It's both plea and explanation. Ivory, where are you? and I can't sense Ivory. A spike of fresh panic fractures through her ribs. It's as if the bond is gone, missing, broken. The sound she sobs is a messy mixture of grief and horror.

— Then Verso's hand clamps against her side and the breath is punched out of her. Half-gagged, half-groaned. The pain blooms violently outward, all heat and pressure, radiating through her abdomen in sick waves. She can't tell where the panic ends and her body's helpless alarm begins; both feel like they're dragging her down, pulling her under.

If she lets her eyes close for even a heartbeat, she's back on the deck of the Wind's Pleasure, staring at her own blood. That memory hits her like a secondary blow.

"It's not—"

Her head dips forward, forehead catching against the curve of Verso's collarbone. Her entire frame tightens in a stuttering rhythm of failing strength. She can feel the stormlight trapped in her veins, bright and useless, inaccessible. It should be cooling her nerves, steadying her breathing, knitting flesh. Instead it flickers like a dying lantern, fizzing against the edges of her pain and doing nothing. Like trying to inhale and getting only half a breath.

A sourness surges up her throat — not vomit, but mortality clawing upward from the wound itself.

Her voice, when she manages it, is hoarse, thinned by pain and something perilously close to fear: "He — interfering with my stormlight. I can't—"

A litany of expletives tumble out of his mouth, ones she may or may not recognize by now. Putain, fuck, shit. The only thing missing is 'storming storms'. (Maybe one day under less fraught circumstances he'll spare a tempêtes.)

Verso has witnessed a lot of people get hurt over the years. Quite frequently lethally. It's rare that the Expeditions ever made it long enough for the next year's Gommage to wipe them out. Usually, it was a Nevron's doing—cleaved in half by a Dualliste, or gobbled up by a Bourgeon, or burned to a crisp by a Pelerin. When it wasn't a grisly fate at the hands of one of Clea's monsters, it was Renoir. He's learned to compartmentalize the unpleasant feelings that bubble up when he smells blood, feels the warmth of it on his fingers. You get used to it.

—So, just a moment later, a switch flips, and he slings one of her arms around his shoulders, almost clinical as he takes her gloved hand and flattens it against her wound.

All business: "Push in, hard. If you lean on me, can you walk?"

It's a vicious sound that tears out of her, muffled between clenched teeth, when he drags her arm over his shoulders. Every muscle spasms in protest, wanting to curl inward, clamp down, collapse.

Dimly, she wonders whether the assailant will circle back to finish the work. Dimly, she feels Verso seize her hand, drag it to her side, flatten it over the source of that terrible undertow pulling at her insides. Dimly, she forces thought through the pain.

Life before death, she thinks, rhythmically. Mechanically. Strength before weakness.

Her gloved palm slips once on the blood, but she snarls like an animal under her breath and plants it again, pressing down hard. She hunts for tension in a body too shocked to obey her, but she finds enough (barely) to hold.

She leans into Verso with all the graceless necessity of someone who refuses to die in the street. He is her crutch; her anchor; her fulcrum she can lever herself against. Her weight bears down on his shoulder as she forces her spine straight, breathing through a haze that keeps threatening to tip her sideways.

Another flicker of stormlight rises in her like a weak candle guttering in a gale. Then it dies. Completely insufficient to do anything more than slow the tide. She takes one step. It feels like driving a spike through her own abdomen. Another step. Her breath hitches. She does not stop.

"Yes," Jasnah grinds out, the word like a splinter of doubt in her mouth. "I can walk."

Journey before destination.

Even if the journey is one step to the next.

Edited 2025-12-10 03:24 (UTC)

He doesn't mind if she stumbles, just keeps dragging her forward with dogged persistence. There's no indication that he's stressed at all by this, and in fact he isn't; he doesn't feel anything about it now that the initial shock of holding a woman as she bleeds out from the gut has passed. Nothing at all. Just achingly numb, like he's felt for the last 67 years.

Although he considers stopping at a building along the way and asking for assistance, he knows Jasnah will be too paranoid to seek help anywhere but at their destination. So, he pulls her along in what he thinks is the general direction, abruptly-awake eyes on the lookout for any dark figures or blood drips (that aren't coming from her). It feels incredibly stupid to pull a bleeding woman into a pastry shop, but that's what he does, opening the door with his foot because he doesn't have any hands to spare at the moment. He lugs her inside, depositing her in the nearest seat. She'll bleed all over the nice chair, but oh, well. That's a debt they'll have to settle later.

The benefit, he supposes, of coming to a pastry shop is that they're actually open this early in the morning. Admittedly, it's too early for them to be expecting customers, but there's still a kind-faced man who pops his head out of the kitchen when he hears the sound of them bursting in. "Monsieur," he starts, before correcting himself, "Sir." Or should he be saying Brightlord? He still doesn't really understand what determines whether someone gets called that. A question for another time—

"She's very injured," he says, still all pragmatic efficience as he crouches down to take over holding pressure for her. "She needs help." Words Jasnah hates to hear, he's sure. Or would, anyway, if she weren't running on half the blood she's supposed to have.

Jochi Woruvar, proprietor of The Tenth Oven, did not tolerate nonsense before the second bell. Not from drunk sailors, not from overeager apprentices, and certainly not from two strangers crashing into his shop and bleeding all over his spotless floors.

He storms out of the kitchen already scowling, flour dusting his apron and the aggressive curls of his mustache. And his eyebrows. "Storms alive, do you have any idea how ear—" He stops. His eyes hit the spreading pool of blood beneath the woman's chair. Ah. Blood. Too much of it.

His irritation collapses into grim resignation as he advances. The man crouched beside her is taut, alert; the woman herself hangs by a thread, grey-faced, fingers hooked weakly into the man's coat like he's the last solid thing in the world. They make a striking (if grim) pair. Jochi opens his mouth — Get out, you're ruining my floors or Stormfather, what happened? — but the woman moves her lips first.

A whisper: "Blue broams...shine brighter than red."

Jochi freezes. That phrase is not public. It's a private, personal passphrase for spanreed communication. It identifies one particular Veristitalian. It is only used in emergencies. Ten years of letters. Philosophical debates. Political arguments. Coded dispatches. He'd never met her. Only her handwriting.

"Damnation," he breathes. He's already moving: locking the front door, dropping the shutters, sealing the side entrance. When he turns back, his voice is low, reverent, and worried. "Jasnah. You could have warned me."

A quick glance at her companion, Jochi assesses him with a sharp instinct and a curt nod. "Keep her awake. I'll get water. And something clean." He disappears into the kitchen, still swearing under his breath.

And Jasnah? She clings to Verso with the sheer, stubborn instinct of a body refusing to fall. Her forehead rests against his shoulder, not from choice but because gravity has taken over. She shivers — faint, shallow — the kind of tremor that means her reserves are almost gone. Her breath stutters. She tries to swallow and fails. When Verso takes over pressing on the wound, her arm goes slack with relief.

The moment Jochi is gone, she turns her face toward Verso. Barely. Her eyes are unfocused but intent. Searching him, anchoring herself to whatever solidity he offers. The expression she gives him is tiny, fragile, and utterly unprecedented. An apology. Just a faint knit of her brow, the slightest downturn of her mouth. The closest she can come while her blood is spilling onto a baker's clean floor.

"I...should have told you."

Told him she had allies. Told him she'd earmarked a safehouse long before they reached Thaylen City. Told him this place was more than a pastry shop to her, although its owner had never recognized her during the handful of times she'd crossed the threshold. She'll owe Jochi an apology, too. She'd kept both men in the dark, hoarding information the way one hoards stormlight: to feel safer for being the only one who held it.

Edited 2025-12-10 12:29 (UTC)

Truthfully, Verso has no idea what all of this the crow flies at midnight cloak-and-dagger secret code stuff is, but he also doesn't really care. It's far from a priority to grouse at Jasnah about not having told him something; her reticence won't matter if she exsanguinates all over Jochi's floor.

So: "It's okay."

His hands are absolutely covered in blood—literally now, instead of just metaphorically—and he tries not to think too hard about the slick sensation, warm and unnatural, as he holds pressure. He tries not to think about the unnatural sensation of Jasnah swaying into him, either. It must be bad if she can't stop herself from leaning against him.

Since he's never had a wound he couldn't heal, and anything nonlethal on anyone else could usually be dealt with via a healing tint or magic, Verso is far from an expert on medicine. Still, he knows enough to know that the bleeding has to stop, so he says, "We'll have to clean it and soak up the blood." To Jasnah, mostly. Then, calling to Jochi, he asks, "Do you have bandages?" Or, like, a cot? She can't recuperate here on this chair forever.

Last time, the hard part had simply been playing dead — holding still, holding quiet, holding on. Last time, she'd endured the knife in her gut with the taut patience of someone who knew, academically, that stormlight would save her if only she waited long enough to draw it in. Excruciating, yes. Miserable, yes. But at least there had been a clear sequence: endure, wait, heal.

This time is nothing like that.

This time is a fight, not a vigil. There is no cool flood of stormlight waiting beyond a few held heartbeats. Only the frantic scrambling of a body trying to survive without the tool it has grown to rely on. No promise of relief. No guaranteed deliverance. Only him — and the catastrophic, terrifying choice to trust someone else with her survival.

Against every instinct, she makes that choice.

A bleak nod. No words. Her dignity, her control, the careful distance she cultivates. It all evaporated somewhere between the attack and now.

Jochi barrels back into the room with the force. A pitcher of water in one hand, a bundle of fabric in the other, and a pair of flour-dusted kitchen shears dangling from his fingers.

"...'Fraid not," he mutters, already frowning at his own improvised arsenal. "but I've got these. Fresh as of yesterday."

He offers the folded linen, thick baker's couches meant for proofing dough, now repurposed for blood and triage.

"We'll move her to the storeroom," he says, directing the words primarily at the strange man but glancing at Jasnah too, as if she might contradict him even in this state. A subtle tilt of his head conveys the unspoken: when you deem her steady enough to move.

"I don't fancy our chances of getting her upstairs just yet."

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look i couldn't find a way to make him taking another card more interesting

FAIR.

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