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."
The couches will have to do; he presses one against the wound until it saturates, and then lays another atop it until that one turns pink with blood, too. Jasnah seems to be in and out of lucidity, so he doesn't bother saying things to her that she won't remember, save for a few encouraging repeated you're okays. Every once in a while, he spares a hand to pat her shoulder both in reassurance and as an attempt to keep her in at least semiconsciousness. His palm leaves little red imprints on the nice fabric.
Finally, she's stable enough to be moved into the storeroom; not an ideal situation, but Jochi at least arranges a few large bags of flour for her to prop up against. Probably a humiliating experience for her, but Verso kind of doubts that she'll remember.
"Monsieur," he says again, gesturing Jochi closer. "Stay with her." Then, to Jasnah, whether or not she's cogent enough to fully understand: "I'm going to go find some medical supplies."
Jochi's storeroom is small and dark. High up on one wall, a thin window spills a small faction of the dawn across their makeshift hospital room. As they move her, and as he thoughtfully places bags of flour, Jochi narrates aloud a kind of slow panicked processing of what's happening.
"Last you told us, you were heading to Kharbranth to chase down a lead on the Dawncities! Kelak's breath, what're you doing in Theylen City..."
And.
"What good is it being a storming Radiant if you can get stuck in the street like any common knave. Poor girl."
None of it seems to beg an actual response from either Jasnah or Verso. Most of it seems to be an attempt to calm his own shattered nerves, having lived a very placid life until this very morning. Jochi fusses over arranging her just so on the storeroom floor. Notably, visibly, he avoids her left hand altogether.
Jasnah, meanwhile, sits propped up with her teeth grit and her eyes closed. It's effort enough to breathe through the pain, and Verso is right to doubt that she'll remember much of the finer details unfolding at this moment.
...When Verso beckons Jochi closer, he straightens his knees with a groan and crowds the man up against the storeroom door. Keen to have a quiet chat slightly out of earshot of her Majesty.
"There's a surgeon's practice three streets over. To the west. Tell'em one of my daft apprentices had an accident." And then Jochi mumbles to himself about warning said daft apprentices not to come in today. But before Verso can leave, he blocks the doorway just long enough to ask: "You're...you're Cobalt Guard, right? Gotta be. Lookin' after her like that."
Big, bright blue eyes flicker nervously to Jasnah. Filled with worry.
Verso's eyes snap to Jasnah for a split second, as if looking for an indication of what he should say. But she's half-in this world and half-out of it, and he has to make the decision for himself. "Something like that," he says vaguely, because he's reluctant to trap her into another fiction so soon. Then again, they'll have to come up with something eventually, because Jasnah seems unlikely to explain him as my friend.
He runs to the surgeon, only realizing that his hands are still bloodied—and his shirt, too, from Jasnah listing against him—once he's there and sees the surprised look on the doctor's face. Even more, he only realizes that his hands are trembling when he has to reach out to take the supplies. At least the surgeon is helpful enough to describe what one is meant to do with this sort of wound; he even offers to come and take a look, although Verso insists that he doesn't. Two people seeing Jasnah this way is probably plenty.
When he returns, he clinically and efficiently irrigates the wound with some sort of antiseptic liquid—this is going to hurt, he says—and dresses it with gauze. It should probably be stitched up by a physician, really, but at least the worst of the bleeding has stopped. She eventually stabilizes enough for them to take her upstairs, where she's laid out on a divan. Jochi gives her sips of water while Verso scrubs and scrubs and scrubs long after the blood is gone.
The shirt is another issue altogether. Probably a goner, but he doesn't have anything else to wear, so he keeps it for now.
Jochi suggests letting her rest, and although Verso doesn't know much about the process of healing from something like this for a normal person, it seems like a good enough idea. Jochi has to return to the pastry shop and can't keep an eye on her, so the next few hours are mostly spent sitting at the table adjacent to her, drawing intricate and ornate patterns on the back of their card deck. He looks over every once in a while, just to make sure that he can still see the rise and fall of her chest. Still breathing, at least for now.
After a while, Jochi returns with what he can spare from the bakery. They're little pastries similar to croissants, but not quite; the texture is a little different, less flaky. Or maybe it's just that Verso spent the entirety of life in Lumière eating the platonic ideal of a croissant. The pastries, along with a glass of water for Jasnah, get placed on the endtable.
"Hey," he says softly, nudging her just slightly with a hand. "You should try to eat."
Edited (when i say it's not a croissant and then call it a croissant) 2025-12-10 23:01 (UTC)
On the floor of the storeroom, back pressed to cool stone, muscles knotted with shock and pain, all Jasnah can think about is Hessi’s Mythica. Not the usual reasons — Hessi's petty prose, her casual dismissals of Jasnah's own scholarship, the way she buried insight under piety and self-importance.
No. Jasnah thinks of the passage on death rattles. Hessi had catalogued them like weather reports. Grim, cryptic utterances from dying men and women across cultures. Voices seized, supposedly, by the Almighty Himself, delivering slivers of prophecy in the heartbeat before death. Jasnah had read those accounts with a skeptic's eye, noting patterns and contradictions, making neat marginal notes.
Now, lying here, fingers gone slick with her own blood, she discovers a more practical insight. Of course mortally wounded people speak nonsense. Whatever she muttered while Verso was gone, whatever half-formed phrases Jochi tried to soothe away as he hovered and talked about hypothetical survival rates, it wasn't prophecy. It wasn't philosophy. It was just the mind, jarred loose from its usual order, flailing uselessly against the dark. She has never felt so far from organized thought.
(Well. That's not true, is it?)
Her mind flees from the thought and her teeth grit. She forces a breath through them and lifts a shaking hand to swipe at her face. Hot tears smear across her cheek, carrying a faint streak of red with them. Perfect. She's crying and making more of a mess. Irritated at herself, she digs in. Clamping down on panic, forcing herself to count her breaths, to anchor in the cadence of Jochi's steady voice.
Time warps. Ten minutes, or ten hours. It shudders and folds on itself until her next clear awareness is Verso's voice, pitched with warning: this is going to hurt. Her next conscious moment is the proof of it: raw, searing agony as something happens to the wound. Cloth pressed, skin pulled, pain burning like someone poured molten metal through her veins.
Her next next conscious moment is the strange, floating sense of being lifted. Moved. The world tilts; her stomach lurches; air changes from storeroom-cool to slightly warmer as they pass through another threshold. Voices blur. Footsteps echo. Then...?
Nothing.
What follows is some of the deepest, most complete sleep she's had since childhood. No nightmares. No endless pacing of dark corridors in her own mind. Just a blank, heavy drift, as if someone has finally muted the noise of all existence.
When Jasnah surfaces, it's slow and at the behest of a barely-there touch from his hand. She groans as she pushes herself up onto her elbows, everything in her midsection objecting. The pain is different now. No longer frantic and wet, but a deep, vicious twinge that flares if she shifts too quickly. Her mouth feels tacky, tongue dry, lips cracked. She pulls a faint face and works her jaw, trying to coax some moisture back.
The sight of water nearby is enough to override caution. She reaches for it on instinct only for her body to catch halfway through the motion. Pain spears across her abdomen; she wheezes an involuntary little oof and freezes a handspan short of the cup. When she looks at Verso, it's with an expression that's tired, raw, and just shy of plaintive. She doesn't say please. She can't quite make herself do that. But the request is there, plain as ink on a page, in the way her hand hovers, shaking, just out of reach.
She's well enough to move, at least. She shouldn't be moving—in fact, he reaches out as if to stop her when she does, although he doesn't quite make it to touching her. When she stops, he stops, hand hovering a distance from her shoulder before he lets it drop.
If there's anything he's learned about Jasnah over the like 600 comments time they've spent together, it's that relying on others just isn't something she does. She's fiercely independent, perhaps pathologically so. It must have killed her to play the part of the demure little wife on the boat, but not nearly as much as it must be killing her now to have to request someone hand her a glass of water.
So, he doesn't hand it to her. Instead, he steps over to the end table and tugs the entire thing next to her, so that she can reach it herself. He does, however, hold out a hand a few inches away from hers, ready to steady it if she's too weak to grasp the glass. Spotting her, really.
"Quelle impatience," he scolds. "I'm not a physician, but I don't think stab wound victims should be making sudden movements."
But her posture softens in tandem with the harsh scrape of table legs on the floor. With a loose grip, absent any true tension in her body for fear of how it would hurt, she claims the cup. Convincing herself to drink with moderation is another battle, but she manages it without breaking eye contact. After a second mouthful, she eases back against the divan. Cup in her bare hand. The gloved one is crusted over with her own blood.
"Did you see him?" A hard swallow. Oh, she doesn't like how weak she sounds. Jasnah shuts her eyes and breathes in and tries again. Stronger, this time. "One of Torreth's sailors. I don't believe I ever learned his name."
There are...other things to discuss. Logistics. Next steps. Perhaps even casual, small talk exchanges about how she's doing and how grateful she feels for Verso's presence then and now. But this is the topic that Jasnah lands on, all while trying desperately to draw light from the bowl of spheres sitting on the mantle. Acting like a light source.
About her assailant. Probably about identifying him and tracking him down and maybe even neutralizing him. Of course she is. Jasnah's mind never stops for a second, even after being stabbed.
There's nowhere good for him to sit close by, so he leans a hip against the edge of the divan, by her feet. Lightly, hesitant to make himself at home here.
"You should be focusing on... resting." Again: not a physician, not even close. Still, he feels like the surgeon would back him up on this. "It doesn't matter who it was. He can't get to you here."
A dismissive snort turns into a pained groan. Okay, right, sharp percussive breathing — even the derisive kind — should be avoided. Jasnah shifts uncomfortable where she is, hating the sensation of being laid out like laundry left to dry. She craves an upright posture. Or, at least, the illusion of control captured within such posture.
Another swallow of water. Another attempt to draw stormlight. Another failure. Whatever she's thinking about now, it's all in an effort to avoid thinking about Ivory. If something happened to him—
"Determining who he was will help determine why he did it."
How can she rest? Ivory is missing and she can't heal and someone bided their time that whole storming sail just to make their move now and oh she's feeling queasy again. Another swallow of water.
"And you can't possibly be certain that he can't get to us here."
You, Verso specifically said, not us. Not to brag, but he's not in any danger of being killed any time soon. She does have a bit of a point, considering that he can't really say I'll protect you with any believability anymore. He didn't protect her. He stood there uselessly, just like he did while Alicia inhaled so much smoke that her vocal cords burned.
"You think he's going to bust down the bakery door to get to you?" He raises a skeptical eyebrow. Seems... unlikely. "He attacked you in an alleyway while you were unawares."
Monoco would call that sort of move cowardly. 'Unbefitting of a warrior'. Verso's a dirty fighter, so he can see the value in it—but he still doubts that someone who would do that is going to face her again. Not when she'll be expecting it this time.
The stress of focusing on that is only going to make things worse. To change the subject, he says, "Eat your pastry."
She thinks the prospect of busting down the bakery door to get to her is made all the more likely if whatever happened to Ivory (there it is, that pang of prescient grief) was intentional. So long as she can't use stormlight, they're sitting chickens.
In fact, she's about to underline this specific hitch to Verso but finds herself staring dumbfounded at him instead. Did he just use the imperative tense with her? Granted, she suspects he's used it before too. But just now, just like this, it somehow feels more pointed. More, well, imperative.
Stubbornly — but slowly this time — she leans forward to swap her water cup for the pastry.
"Where's Jochi?"
— The fact that she's asking this question and not already inferring its answer based on circumstances and time of day? Yeah, she's off her game.
Verso watches her pick up the pastry, nodding in approval. Good job following instructions for what is probably the first time ever. First time following his instructions, at any rate. He picks up his, too, his avoidance of at-sea rations coming back to bite him now. Hunger stirs in his stomach for the first time in days. The pastry is good, but he finds himself feeling somewhat disappointed. It's not a 1:1 recreation of the croissants from the little patisserie he loved so much, so it was always going to be a disappointment.
"Well," he says, "a patisserie does need to sell to customers to stay open."
So, obviously, he's selling pastries to customers right now. Vaguely annoyed that she's asking for Jochi when he's right here (but trying very hard to hide it), he asks, "Why? What do you need?"
How does she explain that she's curious to get a more studied look at a colleague with whom she's only ever contacted via spanreed? Or at the very least, stumble through a barely-articulated apology for bringing chaos down on his livelihood.
"I regret putting him at risk."
A shake of her head, and then she takes a small bite. Her appetite isn't there, but she makes a solid effort to appreciate the craftsmanship. Although she's considerably less appreciative of the crumbs. Then again, at this rate, she's little more than a tall smudge of salt water, grime, and dried blood.
— He's not much better, now that she starts to focus on details. Is that her blood on his shirt? Must be. Her throat tightens. She'd be dead without him. Certainly, entirely, unequivocally dead. It would have stuck, this time. She's convinced.
Instead of thanking Verso, she takes another bite. Her mouth twists into a grimace while she chews. Ultimately, the craftsmanship is lost on her today.
"...How bad was it?" She holds her not-croissant in her right hand, but hovers her left over the bandaged wound.
"What, the pastry?" Verso asks, playing dumb. "I actually thought it was pretty good."
He's already polished off most of it, and although it was relatively small, it's still more than he's eaten during their sea voyage between his minimal appetite, forgoing food to give it to Jasnah, and the generally shitty quality of cuisine.
There's a pointed pause, like he's considering not going down this conversational path. It doesn't seem helpful to dwell on it when it's only just happened, but—
She remembers the white-hot instant when an insignificant detail grew to be a killer in an alley. She remembers pain, different to what she feels now, and a headiness that's so so similar. She remembers Verso telling her you're okay.
She remembers the way the knife felt leaving her body. Its sudden negative pressure so unlike the last time, when she'd at least had stormlight to sustain her until she could pull it out. She remembers tangled fingers and a string of words she can only assume were curses. None of it exists in its proper order, she suspects, including a flicker of a sword in his hand...
— Her heart clenches yet again. Did her bond with Ivory somehow break? Is he out there, as close to dead as spren get?
"Not much after we made it to Jochi's. Before that, it's...jumbled."
And most of it is him. Verso's shoulders propping her up, Verso's palm keeping her insides inside, Verso's bad lies that make the better lies harder to spot, Verso's — sword. Yes, again she thinks there was a sword. Her brows knit.
Ugh. She can't finish her pastry. Nausea grips her again, and her solution is to hold out what's left. Almost all of it, minus two small bites. As if she wants him to put it back on the table for her. As if she's hoping the gesture alone will be enough to keep him from insisting he eat more.
Makes sense. The initial surge of adrenaline would have kept her coherent enough for the first part, but it must have worn off by the time they got to Jochi's. She'd definitely seemed less compos mentis at that point, notable for how rare it is for her to not seem entirely in control of her faculties. Entirely in control of everything.
He takes the little piece of pastry, placing it on the edge of the end table where she can still reach it. Maybe in a few minutes he'll encourage her to finish, but not now.
"It all happened so fast."—A burning building, the smell of smoke, the sound of screams. It all happened so fast, he couldn't save her—"...I'm sorry." He hangs his head, shamefaced. "I was too slow." As always.
Edited (when you write something in your mind and then it isn't there in your comment. wild) 2025-12-11 04:28 (UTC)
Reasonable absolution rises to her tongue. You're not a guardsman, or your offer of protection only covered the nights — but even on her best days Jasnah does not waste breath on truths that won't change outcomes. What happened was a chain of failures, each link reaching back farther than the alleys, farther than the voyage, likely all the way to Kharbranth. If blame were to be tallied, she suspects her ledger would be the longest.
Bracing herself for the inevitable flare of pain, Jasnah shift. It's an inelegant, halting shuffle of knees and hips as she angles her body along the divan, making a long, narrow triangle of space beside her. It costs her, but she makes the space anyway. Then a pointed tilt of her chin: sit down. His hovering irritates her. The height difference irritates her. She refuses to crane her neck to speak to him like an invalid petitioning a healer.
"Without you, I would have bled out on the cobblestones."
And that's all she allows herself to say about it.
Verso is reluctant to burden (and/or irritate further) Jasnah with his emotions, so he doesn't say anything more on the topic, even though 'not dead' doesn't seem like nearly enough to have accomplished. There's a lot of suffering in between life and death, and he didn't shield her from it at all. Sometimes he wonders if Alicia wouldn't have preferred to die in the fire, but that's such an awful thought he can't linger on it for too long.
He perches on the edge of the seat, trying not to take up too much space. It's already not nearly spacious enough for someone recuperating from attempted murder.
"I don't think that's true," he says, eyes miserable but mouth curling up slightly anyway. "I think you would have crawled all the way here if it meant not letting an assassin get his way."
What a farce that would have been! Dragging herself, bloodied, through the streets. Her expression sort of sneers. Not at him, but at the absurdity of the hypothetical. She understands how the absurdity is the point, almost to the point of humour. So she smooths her sneer into a thin line and a huff of breath.
One, two minutes pass. A minor eternity, spent focused on staying steady and adjusting to this slight new angle to her posture. At some point, she wants to talk to him about her missing stormlight. But just thinking about the problem makes her heartbeat catch in her chest.
She looks down at her hand. Tightens it into a fist. Imagines holding a spanreed. And she realizes that holding the spanreed won't be the challenge, but rather sitting up at a table and leaning over a steady surface won't be a straightforward task.
"I'm going to need you to contact Urithiru for me."
Verso recognizes that this is probably something Jasnah hates asking him to do, but it is so ridiculously not a big deal in his eyes that it's hard to empathize too much. It's writing a letter. The only thing she'll need to be worried about is his penmanship. Which is excellent, by the way!
"All right," he says, getting up only to crouch and start going through their (minimal) inventory. "Did you bring that magic pen of yours with you?"
"Spanreeds aren't magic," she corrects, "they're science."
Sure, Jan.
"And the one we've got won't suffice. Its not paired to a pen in Urithiru."
...For your own health and wellness, Verso, don't ask her to explain the science behind conjoined fabrials. All that's relevant is that any given spanreed can only communicate one-to-one, not one-to-many. The spanreed in her satchel is paired with a spanreed at a communication hub in Tashikk. There, an intermediary recieves a message and forwards it to another Tashikk-connected spanreed. Spoiler alert, this is also how you jerryrig a Rosharan group chat. Long story still kinda long: Jasnah doesn't trust her bribed Tashiik intermediaries with this kind of message.
"Tell Jochi we need to borrow his. The one he uses to contact me. With any luck, someone will be monitoring my spanreeds back in the tower."
It's a terribly unlikely outcome. But one she'd like to try all the same.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, but unfortunately, Clarke was about 60 years away from saying that when Verso was created, so he's unfamiliar with the quote. All the same, he just shoots her a skeptical look about it being 'science'.
Feeling like a gofer, he heads downstairs to bother Jochi for his spanreed (in the drawer in his bedroom). Once he has the magic—I mean scientific—pen in hand, he procures a sheet of paper as well, settling down at the table adjacent to Jasnah. The reed hovers over the paper, and he asks, "What should it say?"
This is tricky. First, Jasnah considers who is most likely to go snooping among her spanreeds if she suddenly went missing. Navani, she thinks. No one else would have the gall or access.
"Encountered interference en route. Situation contained. Remain in place; no intervention required. Allies," she pauses, "...sufficient."
She does feel a pang of guilt for the possibility of putting her mother through this hell again. All the more reason to unequivocal in her message.
"Whatever else you hear, I am fine. I will report in full once circumstances permit."
She leans her head back on the rounded bolster of the divan. Too telling? Too vague? Surely, if trouble is on its way to Urithiru, this message alone will raise enough alarm bells. And if trouble already found the tower...well. Jasnah's expression blanks.
"Twist the gem. Its partner will light up in my quarters back in the tower. If at any point this one starts blinking? Tell me. Wake me, if you must."
Verso follows her instructions, penning: Encountered interference en route. Situation contained. Remain in place; no intervention required. Allies VERY sufficient.
Close enough. He holds up the paper to show her the missive written out in his nice—if overly ornate—penmanship, then sets it and the reed down.
"Any other errands for Her Majesty?" He's teasing. He doesn't really mind. It feels good to accomplish something useful, to have helped her in some small way even when he failed her in a much larger way.
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no subject
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
Finally, she's stable enough to be moved into the storeroom; not an ideal situation, but Jochi at least arranges a few large bags of flour for her to prop up against. Probably a humiliating experience for her, but Verso kind of doubts that she'll remember.
"Monsieur," he says again, gesturing Jochi closer. "Stay with her." Then, to Jasnah, whether or not she's cogent enough to fully understand: "I'm going to go find some medical supplies."
no subject
"Last you told us, you were heading to Kharbranth to chase down a lead on the Dawncities! Kelak's breath, what're you doing in Theylen City..."
And.
"What good is it being a storming Radiant if you can get stuck in the street like any common knave. Poor girl."
None of it seems to beg an actual response from either Jasnah or Verso. Most of it seems to be an attempt to calm his own shattered nerves, having lived a very placid life until this very morning. Jochi fusses over arranging her just so on the storeroom floor. Notably, visibly, he avoids her left hand altogether.
Jasnah, meanwhile, sits propped up with her teeth grit and her eyes closed. It's effort enough to breathe through the pain, and Verso is right to doubt that she'll remember much of the finer details unfolding at this moment.
...When Verso beckons Jochi closer, he straightens his knees with a groan and crowds the man up against the storeroom door. Keen to have a quiet chat slightly out of earshot of her Majesty.
"There's a surgeon's practice three streets over. To the west. Tell'em one of my daft apprentices had an accident." And then Jochi mumbles to himself about warning said daft apprentices not to come in today. But before Verso can leave, he blocks the doorway just long enough to ask: "You're...you're Cobalt Guard, right? Gotta be. Lookin' after her like that."
Big, bright blue eyes flicker nervously to Jasnah. Filled with worry.
no subject
He runs to the surgeon, only realizing that his hands are still bloodied—and his shirt, too, from Jasnah listing against him—once he's there and sees the surprised look on the doctor's face. Even more, he only realizes that his hands are trembling when he has to reach out to take the supplies. At least the surgeon is helpful enough to describe what one is meant to do with this sort of wound; he even offers to come and take a look, although Verso insists that he doesn't. Two people seeing Jasnah this way is probably plenty.
When he returns, he clinically and efficiently irrigates the wound with some sort of antiseptic liquid—this is going to hurt, he says—and dresses it with gauze. It should probably be stitched up by a physician, really, but at least the worst of the bleeding has stopped. She eventually stabilizes enough for them to take her upstairs, where she's laid out on a divan. Jochi gives her sips of water while Verso scrubs and scrubs and scrubs long after the blood is gone.
The shirt is another issue altogether. Probably a goner, but he doesn't have anything else to wear, so he keeps it for now.
Jochi suggests letting her rest, and although Verso doesn't know much about the process of healing from something like this for a normal person, it seems like a good enough idea. Jochi has to return to the pastry shop and can't keep an eye on her, so the next few hours are mostly spent sitting at the table adjacent to her, drawing intricate and ornate patterns on the back of their card deck. He looks over every once in a while, just to make sure that he can still see the rise and fall of her chest. Still breathing, at least for now.
After a while, Jochi returns with what he can spare from the bakery. They're little pastries similar to croissants, but not quite; the texture is a little different, less flaky. Or maybe it's just that Verso spent the entirety of life in Lumière eating the platonic ideal of a croissant. The pastries, along with a glass of water for Jasnah, get placed on the endtable.
"Hey," he says softly, nudging her just slightly with a hand. "You should try to eat."
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On the floor of the storeroom, back pressed to cool stone, muscles knotted with shock and pain, all Jasnah can think about is Hessi’s Mythica. Not the usual reasons — Hessi's petty prose, her casual dismissals of Jasnah's own scholarship, the way she buried insight under piety and self-importance.
No. Jasnah thinks of the passage on death rattles. Hessi had catalogued them like weather reports. Grim, cryptic utterances from dying men and women across cultures. Voices seized, supposedly, by the Almighty Himself, delivering slivers of prophecy in the heartbeat before death. Jasnah had read those accounts with a skeptic's eye, noting patterns and contradictions, making neat marginal notes.
Now, lying here, fingers gone slick with her own blood, she discovers a more practical insight. Of course mortally wounded people speak nonsense. Whatever she muttered while Verso was gone, whatever half-formed phrases Jochi tried to soothe away as he hovered and talked about hypothetical survival rates, it wasn't prophecy. It wasn't philosophy. It was just the mind, jarred loose from its usual order, flailing uselessly against the dark. She has never felt so far from organized thought.
(Well. That's not true, is it?)
Her mind flees from the thought and her teeth grit. She forces a breath through them and lifts a shaking hand to swipe at her face. Hot tears smear across her cheek, carrying a faint streak of red with them. Perfect. She's crying and making more of a mess. Irritated at herself, she digs in. Clamping down on panic, forcing herself to count her breaths, to anchor in the cadence of Jochi's steady voice.
Time warps. Ten minutes, or ten hours. It shudders and folds on itself until her next clear awareness is Verso's voice, pitched with warning: this is going to hurt. Her next conscious moment is the proof of it: raw, searing agony as something happens to the wound. Cloth pressed, skin pulled, pain burning like someone poured molten metal through her veins.
Her next next conscious moment is the strange, floating sense of being lifted. Moved. The world tilts; her stomach lurches; air changes from storeroom-cool to slightly warmer as they pass through another threshold. Voices blur. Footsteps echo. Then...?
Nothing.
What follows is some of the deepest, most complete sleep she's had since childhood. No nightmares. No endless pacing of dark corridors in her own mind. Just a blank, heavy drift, as if someone has finally muted the noise of all existence.
When Jasnah surfaces, it's slow and at the behest of a barely-there touch from his hand. She groans as she pushes herself up onto her elbows, everything in her midsection objecting. The pain is different now. No longer frantic and wet, but a deep, vicious twinge that flares if she shifts too quickly. Her mouth feels tacky, tongue dry, lips cracked. She pulls a faint face and works her jaw, trying to coax some moisture back.
The sight of water nearby is enough to override caution. She reaches for it on instinct only for her body to catch halfway through the motion. Pain spears across her abdomen; she wheezes an involuntary little oof and freezes a handspan short of the cup. When she looks at Verso, it's with an expression that's tired, raw, and just shy of plaintive. She doesn't say please. She can't quite make herself do that. But the request is there, plain as ink on a page, in the way her hand hovers, shaking, just out of reach.
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If there's anything he's learned about Jasnah over the
like 600 commentstime they've spent together, it's that relying on others just isn't something she does. She's fiercely independent, perhaps pathologically so. It must have killed her to play the part of the demure little wife on the boat, but not nearly as much as it must be killing her now to have to request someone hand her a glass of water.So, he doesn't hand it to her. Instead, he steps over to the end table and tugs the entire thing next to her, so that she can reach it herself. He does, however, hold out a hand a few inches away from hers, ready to steady it if she's too weak to grasp the glass. Spotting her, really.
"Quelle impatience," he scolds. "I'm not a physician, but I don't think stab wound victims should be making sudden movements."
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But her posture softens in tandem with the harsh scrape of table legs on the floor. With a loose grip, absent any true tension in her body for fear of how it would hurt, she claims the cup. Convincing herself to drink with moderation is another battle, but she manages it without breaking eye contact. After a second mouthful, she eases back against the divan. Cup in her bare hand. The gloved one is crusted over with her own blood.
"Did you see him?" A hard swallow. Oh, she doesn't like how weak she sounds. Jasnah shuts her eyes and breathes in and tries again. Stronger, this time. "One of Torreth's sailors. I don't believe I ever learned his name."
There are...other things to discuss. Logistics. Next steps. Perhaps even casual, small talk exchanges about how she's doing and how grateful she feels for Verso's presence then and now. But this is the topic that Jasnah lands on, all while trying desperately to draw light from the bowl of spheres sitting on the mantle. Acting like a light source.
Nothing but a lump in her throat. Where is Ivory?
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About her assailant. Probably about identifying him and tracking him down and maybe even neutralizing him. Of course she is. Jasnah's mind never stops for a second, even after being stabbed.
There's nowhere good for him to sit close by, so he leans a hip against the edge of the divan, by her feet. Lightly, hesitant to make himself at home here.
"You should be focusing on... resting." Again: not a physician, not even close. Still, he feels like the surgeon would back him up on this. "It doesn't matter who it was. He can't get to you here."
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Another swallow of water. Another attempt to draw stormlight. Another failure. Whatever she's thinking about now, it's all in an effort to avoid thinking about Ivory. If something happened to him—
"Determining who he was will help determine why he did it."
How can she rest? Ivory is missing and she can't heal and someone bided their time that whole storming sail just to make their move now and oh she's feeling queasy again. Another swallow of water.
"And you can't possibly be certain that he can't get to us here."
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"You think he's going to bust down the bakery door to get to you?" He raises a skeptical eyebrow. Seems... unlikely. "He attacked you in an alleyway while you were unawares."
Monoco would call that sort of move cowardly. 'Unbefitting of a warrior'. Verso's a dirty fighter, so he can see the value in it—but he still doubts that someone who would do that is going to face her again. Not when she'll be expecting it this time.
The stress of focusing on that is only going to make things worse. To change the subject, he says, "Eat your pastry."
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In fact, she's about to underline this specific hitch to Verso but finds herself staring dumbfounded at him instead. Did he just use the imperative tense with her? Granted, she suspects he's used it before too. But just now, just like this, it somehow feels more pointed. More, well, imperative.
Stubbornly — but slowly this time — she leans forward to swap her water cup for the pastry.
"Where's Jochi?"
— The fact that she's asking this question and not already inferring its answer based on circumstances and time of day? Yeah, she's off her game.
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"Well," he says, "a patisserie does need to sell to customers to stay open."
So, obviously, he's selling pastries to customers right now. Vaguely annoyed that she's asking for Jochi when he's right here (but trying very hard to hide it), he asks, "Why? What do you need?"
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How does she explain that she's curious to get a more studied look at a colleague with whom she's only ever contacted via spanreed? Or at the very least, stumble through a barely-articulated apology for bringing chaos down on his livelihood.
"I regret putting him at risk."
A shake of her head, and then she takes a small bite. Her appetite isn't there, but she makes a solid effort to appreciate the craftsmanship. Although she's considerably less appreciative of the crumbs. Then again, at this rate, she's little more than a tall smudge of salt water, grime, and dried blood.
— He's not much better, now that she starts to focus on details. Is that her blood on his shirt? Must be. Her throat tightens. She'd be dead without him. Certainly, entirely, unequivocally dead. It would have stuck, this time. She's convinced.
Instead of thanking Verso, she takes another bite. Her mouth twists into a grimace while she chews. Ultimately, the craftsmanship is lost on her today.
"...How bad was it?" She holds her not-croissant in her right hand, but hovers her left over the bandaged wound.
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He's already polished off most of it, and although it was relatively small, it's still more than he's eaten during their sea voyage between his minimal appetite, forgoing food to give it to Jasnah, and the generally shitty quality of cuisine.
There's a pointed pause, like he's considering not going down this conversational path. It doesn't seem helpful to dwell on it when it's only just happened, but—
"What do you remember?" he asks first.
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She remembers the white-hot instant when an insignificant detail grew to be a killer in an alley. She remembers pain, different to what she feels now, and a headiness that's so so similar. She remembers Verso telling her you're okay.
She remembers the way the knife felt leaving her body. Its sudden negative pressure so unlike the last time, when she'd at least had stormlight to sustain her until she could pull it out. She remembers tangled fingers and a string of words she can only assume were curses. None of it exists in its proper order, she suspects, including a flicker of a sword in his hand...
— Her heart clenches yet again. Did her bond with Ivory somehow break? Is he out there, as close to dead as spren get?
"Not much after we made it to Jochi's. Before that, it's...jumbled."
And most of it is him. Verso's shoulders propping her up, Verso's palm keeping her insides inside, Verso's bad lies that make the better lies harder to spot, Verso's — sword. Yes, again she thinks there was a sword. Her brows knit.
Ugh. She can't finish her pastry. Nausea grips her again, and her solution is to hold out what's left. Almost all of it, minus two small bites. As if she wants him to put it back on the table for her. As if she's hoping the gesture alone will be enough to keep him from insisting he eat more.
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"Yeah, it's... a little jumbled for me, too."
Every moment interspersed with visions of Julie, or less frequently the other Expeditioners who've wetted his hands with their blood. He only remembers some of their names, their faces. After a while, it all starts to blur together. Maybe he'd even wanted it to. It's easier when he can't remember that Louis had a daughter he'd hoped to get home to, that Céline flirted wildly but was too shy to even kiss him.
He takes the little piece of pastry, placing it on the edge of the end table where she can still reach it. Maybe in a few minutes he'll encourage her to finish, but not now.
"It all happened so fast."—A burning building, the smell of smoke, the sound of screams. It all happened so fast, he couldn't save her—"...I'm sorry." He hangs his head, shamefaced. "I was too slow." As always.
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Bracing herself for the inevitable flare of pain, Jasnah shift. It's an inelegant, halting shuffle of knees and hips as she angles her body along the divan, making a long, narrow triangle of space beside her. It costs her, but she makes the space anyway. Then a pointed tilt of her chin: sit down. His hovering irritates her. The height difference irritates her. She refuses to crane her neck to speak to him like an invalid petitioning a healer.
"Without you, I would have bled out on the cobblestones."
And that's all she allows herself to say about it.
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He perches on the edge of the seat, trying not to take up too much space. It's already not nearly spacious enough for someone recuperating from attempted murder.
"I don't think that's true," he says, eyes miserable but mouth curling up slightly anyway. "I think you would have crawled all the way here if it meant not letting an assassin get his way."
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One, two minutes pass. A minor eternity, spent focused on staying steady and adjusting to this slight new angle to her posture. At some point, she wants to talk to him about her missing stormlight. But just thinking about the problem makes her heartbeat catch in her chest.
She looks down at her hand. Tightens it into a fist. Imagines holding a spanreed. And she realizes that holding the spanreed won't be the challenge, but rather sitting up at a table and leaning over a steady surface won't be a straightforward task.
"I'm going to need you to contact Urithiru for me."
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"All right," he says, getting up only to crouch and start going through their (minimal) inventory. "Did you bring that magic pen of yours with you?"
Spanreed, magic pen, whatever.
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Sure, Jan."And the one we've got won't suffice. Its not paired to a pen in Urithiru."
...For your own health and wellness, Verso, don't ask her to explain the science behind conjoined fabrials. All that's relevant is that any given spanreed can only communicate one-to-one, not one-to-many. The spanreed in her satchel is paired with a spanreed at a communication hub in Tashikk. There, an intermediary recieves a message and forwards it to another Tashikk-connected spanreed. Spoiler alert, this is also how you jerryrig a Rosharan group chat. Long story still kinda long: Jasnah doesn't trust her bribed Tashiik intermediaries with this kind of message.
"Tell Jochi we need to borrow his. The one he uses to contact me. With any luck, someone will be monitoring my spanreeds back in the tower."
It's a terribly unlikely outcome. But one she'd like to try all the same.
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Feeling like a gofer, he heads downstairs to bother Jochi for his spanreed (in the drawer in his bedroom). Once he has the magic—I mean scientific—pen in hand, he procures a sheet of paper as well, settling down at the table adjacent to Jasnah. The reed hovers over the paper, and he asks, "What should it say?"
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"Encountered interference en route. Situation contained.
Remain in place; no intervention required. Allies," she pauses, "...sufficient."
She does feel a pang of guilt for the possibility of putting her mother through this hell again. All the more reason to unequivocal in her message.
"Whatever else you hear, I am fine. I will report in full once circumstances permit."
She leans her head back on the rounded bolster of the divan. Too telling? Too vague? Surely, if trouble is on its way to Urithiru, this message alone will raise enough alarm bells. And if trouble already found the tower...well. Jasnah's expression blanks.
"Twist the gem. Its partner will light up in my quarters back in the tower. If at any point this one starts blinking? Tell me. Wake me, if you must."
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Remain in place; no intervention required. Allies VERY sufficient.
Close enough. He holds up the paper to show her the missive written out in his nice—if overly ornate—penmanship, then sets it and the reed down.
"Any other errands for Her Majesty?" He's teasing. He doesn't really mind. It feels good to accomplish something useful, to have helped her in some small way even when he failed her in a much larger way.
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