recreatable | open post.

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.

"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.

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?"

Spanreed, magic pen, whatever.

"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.

— He's fortunate that the parchment is held just far enough away, and her brain is just fuzzy enough that she doesn't try and track every word of every line. Huh. Instead, she processes the message as a whole. In particular, his handwriting. Too pretty to ever be mistaken for hers, but far far far better than any ward she's ever considered.

She's nearly about to tell him so — pain and exhaustion evaporating portions of her customary filter, so that she almost praises his penmanship. Her mouth opens, the secret is almost out, but then he asks any other errands for Her Majesty? and short-circuits the compliment completely.

"That'll do." For now goes unsaid. "Just — stay. For a bit."

As if she otherwise expects him to cut himself loose. As if she doesn't realize he's been keeping vigil this whole time.

He was never going to leave her—not hours after her stabbing; it has little to do with any fondness he feels toward her and more to do with the fact that it would be an awful thing to do—but he doesn't say so, just pulls back out the deck of cards, a quarter of them already decorated on the back now, and gets to work passing the time by drawing on them. It's detailed, intricate work, and he often leans in close to etch a design just right. He'd never felt the same passion for art that he does music, but that doesn't mean he dislikes it. Not when he's doing it because he wants to, instead of because he feels like he has to.

Verso works in silence for a few minutes, figuring that although she'd asked him to stay, it doesn't mean she has any interest in hearing him talk. She's probably tired. Half-conscious, still. Not enough blood flowing to her brain to tolerate whatever he has to say.

He does, however, eventually say, "There's a physician a few streets over. You should let him take a look at you."

Should, because he somehow doubts that she will.

Idly, she watches him work. Laid up like she is, she only has to turn her head just so to keep a decent vantage on his current activities. Although it does take her a moment to identify what's keeping him busy. Had he looked this intent and absorbed when he'd first crafted their cards?

But eventually the angle of her neck starts to bother her. And with a grumble, she tilts her head in the opposite side as if trying to stretch out a knot. At the same time, she raises her left hand to press into a muscle just there, her posture clearly unaccustomed to half-lying and half-sitting. This motion only serves to remind her that her safehand glove is still caked with dried blood. It crusts and crumbles, and Jasnah sucks in a disgusted breath through her teeth.

So, that's why she's carefully working the glove off her hand when Verso mentions the surgeon. She glances back over at the same time as she's flexing her bare fingers. Remarkably clean, thanks to the glove — which she's laid crumpled in her lap for the time being.

"No," is her plain and simple answer. "If things take a turn for the worse? Maybe, yes. But if someone wants to finish the job, they'll be watching clinics closely."

His eyes only drift over her bare hand for a moment before they return to his work. It's notable, maybe, that she's taken her glove off, but he's not sure what it signifies. If anything. A feeling of comfort with him? (Maybe he's been cousin-zoned so hard that she no longer finds it objectionable to bare her left hand in front of him.) Or, perhaps, she's so tired that she no longer cares.

The surgeon could make a house call for a queen, he's sure, but that would involve admitting that she's a queen—which is another thing he's sure she won't be willing to do. He tables it for now; if she gets worse, she won't have the option to avoid the doctor, because he'll drag her there willingly or not.

There's another pause, silent save for the scribbling of his pencil. Then:

"Want me to wash your glove?" He needs to do his shirt, anyway.

Edited 2025-12-11 20:18 (UTC)

She tracks the point on her wrist where the glove hem had ended, leaving a pinkish smudge on her skin where blood had seeped. It's everywhere, she realizes. Dark, stiff stains in her skirts. Lighter, blush-like smudges tracked elsewhere. Despite having been the first to arrive after her father's assassination, it hadn't been a bloody scene. Gavilar had been killed with a shardblade, and those don't cut the physical body but the cognitive soul. There was no blood. Just burned out eyes.

She supposes it would have been bloody for Elhokar. No one had wanted to tell her, of course, but she had eventually tracked down a witness statement from one of the Bridge Four Windrunners: the traitor Moash has stabbed a spear through the young king's chest once, and then repeatedly through an eye.

She turns her hands around, comparing the dirt on and under her right hand's fingernails to the relative pristine state of her left.

"—Hm?" Verso had asked her something. She waits a second, hoping an echoic memory might fill in the detail. Oh. "Yes. I'd appreciate it."

What a strange paradox it is! To feel a mild jolt of fascination — even at a time like this — because of how mundanely he treats being in the room with her ungloved safehand. Like, his boredom with the idea is half the appeal. Or maybe that's the blood loss talking.

Okay, then. He sets the pencil down and makes his way over to the divan, reaching down to pluck the glove away. It's gone from slick and sticky to flaky and dried now. Deeply unpleasant, he's sure, which is probably why Jasnah took it off in the first place.

He notes the streaks of blood crusting on her skin, so when he heads into the kitchen area to use the sink—provided that sinks exist in Stormlight?? Help—he first wets a cloth and brings it back to her, holding it out.

"Here," he says, handing it to her. "To wash off with."

He absconds to the little kitchenette after that, soaking her glove and his shirt together. He could go back to the sitting room, but sitting casually shirtless near Jasnah while she doesn't even care to look seems like an ego blow that he's not prepared to handle at the moment. She could look now if she really wanted to, if she craned her neck just the right way, but he doesn't have to glance over to know that she isn't. After all, she'd seemed shockingly uninterested in his bathing.

"Jochi has a"—magic pen—"spanreed to contact you," he calls after a moment, thoughtful. Not only is he literate, but he converses with the queen. "He's a friend of yours?"

Jasnah takes the cloth with a soundless exhale — as if the act of accepting help costs her something she refuses to name. She works methodically: fingers, palm, wrist. She even scrubs briefly at her cheek, her forehead, knowing she'd touched her face at some point during the debacle. She doesn't look toward the kitchenette. Doesn't need to. She knows exactly where he is by sound alone.

"A friend?" she echoes, tone dry as she works through how to answer. "Something like it."

She shifts, just enough to brace herself against the back of the divan as she cleans the last of the blood from the inside of her right wrist. Her breaths are shallower now — but controlled. Deliberate. The discipline of someone who refuses to let her own body see her falter, even as it screams for her to slow down even now.

"Jochi is..." She pauses, searching for a word that doesn't imply weakness or affection. The word Veristitalian shouldn't mean anything to Verso, so she avoids it entirely. "A respected colleague. We wrote under the same master."

Another pass of the cloth down her forearm.

"He and I have exchanged arguments for a decade. Philosophy, political theory. He's corrected me when I deserved it. In return, I kept his secret that my sister-scholar was not a sister at all."

A beat. A soft decline of her gaze to the blood on the cloth. Jochi deserves better than being hauled into this mess. Arguably, inviting even Verso into the truth is a step too far.

Of course, what she describes is exactly, precisely, entirely a friend.

Edited (repeated use of the word arguably.) 2025-12-11 21:55 (UTC)

"Exchanged arguments," Verso repeats, pulling his shirt from the water. There's still a faint red stain right in the center, but it's less noticeable than before. He scrubs aggressively at what remains with soap. It's probably never going to come out altogether. A pity; he'd liked this shirt.

"You mean you're pen pals."

She might try to dress it up academically, but he knows a friendship when he sees one. No one keeps up a purely scholarly correspondence for a decade. Even Jasnah.

"I get it." He rubs harder at the stain. "He's your Monoco." No elaboration there.

— Exchanged arguments, tipped one another off about new discoveries, talked crem about other published authors like (ugh) Hessi. Yes, she and Jochi are friends. Two-thirds of a trio, if she's being honest. Ethid will be insufferably wounded to learn she met Jochi in person first.

She's on the verge of clarifying that she and Jochi were only pen-pals — a term she's picked up by deduction, thank you — and that this morning is the first time they've formally met. Not counting those handful of diplomatic visits where she wandered in anonymously to buy bread and assess the man behind the essays. That's why the code phrase had been needed.

But then Verso uses a word she cannot place. She recognizes fragments of his language by now — the soft mon that appears in several of his idioms. But this one feels different. A new configuration. It piques her interest and arouses her curiosity.

"What was that?" She asks, twisting her torso with a faint, pained gasp as she tries to see him in the kitchenette. "Mono—"

The sentence collapses entirely when she realizes he is shirtless.

Her brain stutters. It takes several seconds for her to assemble a reasonable explanation — washing, of course, obviously he's washing his shirt, she'd noticed the blood stains — but in the meantime she is trapped between her upbringing and her intellect. Jasnah Kholin, who once lectured an ardent on the absurdity of modesty codes, now finds herself experiencing an involuntary heat of embarrassment simply because she was not prepared to see those codes utterly violated. As enlightened as she is, she can't quite escape how she's been socialized — to treat a sight like this as a minor scandal.

To look away would acknowledge the reaction. To stare openly would be ridiculous. So she takes the third option: she fixes her gaze on his face with near-heroic determination, jaw set, as though this is all perfectly ordinary and she is definitely not having complicated thoughts about propriety, boundaries, or social norms.

"Monoco," she repeats, controlled, composed, absolutely unwilling to blink first.

Verso turns at the sound of her gasp, eyes meeting hers in a way that's entirely accidental. He wouldn't consider himself modest, isn't shy about a body he's inhabited for a century. He is, however, self-conscious. Always a little too aware of the way he's being perceived. He's certainly being perceived now, but—

Even if she had looked away, it would have meant that she, on some level, felt that there was something exciting—if inappropriate—to look at. If she had stared, well, obviously that would have been flattering. Her choice to treat it as if there's nothing out of the ordinary at all, though, is... disappointing. He wants her to want to look, perhaps foolishly, but it's like he might as well not exist below the neck at all.

He turns his back to her, taking out his disappointment on his poor shirt. Scrub, scrub, scrub.

"Monoco. He's my oldest friend."

Scrub, scrub, scrubscrubscrub.

"He's a gestral."

Jasnah tries — Storms, she tries — to maintain the pretense that there is nothing to see. Nothing to react to. Nothing at all beneath the clean, austere line of her posture. But pain has a way of unmaking facades, and the bandaged side gives a sharp, treacherous throb after about thirty seconds of holding her position.

She inhales sharply and her safehand instinctively presses to her ribs. The motion draws her forward, half-folded, before she can stop herself. None of this is out of interest, she tells herself. Not because the line of his spine is a curious study in hard work, bent over his task. It's all simply because she needs to shift her posture to manage the pain.

The faintest warmth touches her cheeks. Infuriating. Shame and self-doubt.

"Verso." Her voice is calm, but lower than she intends. “Your oldest friend is...a gestral."

She swallows, hissing through another stab of pain as she sits up once more and lets her head fall back onto the divan. No more looking for her, thanks.

As he wrings his shirt out within an inch of its life, he says, "Well, I've been on the Continent for 67 years."

Give or take a few visits back to Lumière. Those hardly count. Those initial visits back had been filled with suspicion, and after that he'd stopped speaking to anyone at all when he returned. In those later visits, he'd just spent all of his time watching this strange Alicia-but-not-Alicia with her foster brother. Maelle, he'd once heard the man call her, voice tinged with fond exasperation. He'd felt horribly jealous in that moment. Once upon a time, he used to talk to Alicia in that tone, too.

But none of that is worth mentioning. Jasnah wouldn't—couldn't—understand. Instead, he focuses on Monoco as he flattens her glove out against the counter to dry.

"And gestrals are immortal, technically." He'd told her before how they couldn't die, not permanently. A quick dip in the Sacred River, and they'd be born again as a patate. A baby gestral.

His point being: of course his oldest friend is a gestral. Every human that could have filled that position is dead.

"But you're right," he says, although she didn't really make a point. "Gestrals can be very annoying."

— Like spren, she thinks. Not for the first time. But now it comes with a pang that runs deeper than what's physical. Some piece of her is missing. Whatever piece used to be filled by Ivory, like plaster over a cracked wall. The hollowness left behind might actually be worse than the hot messy agony of her stomach.

Spren are annoying, too. Even Ivory has his moments.

The cushion of the divan dips as she shimmies lower — just out of sight — as if physically putting the wing-back corner of the furniture between her eyeline and him is ample interference enough. Her two choices are to wallow in premeditated grief for Ivory or fixate on why he's still over there without a shirt.

(Because it's still wet, Jasnah.)

"Is — Monoco, um, annoying?"

Instead of heading back into the sitting room while his shirt dries, Verso sits on the kitchen counter instead, legs dangling as he snoops in the cupboard directly behind him. (Thank god Jochi isn't here, because this is very rude.) Nothing but pots and pans. He closes the cupboard.

"Oh, extremely," he says good-naturedly, almost like it's a compliment. Sometimes, Monoco makes him roll his eyes so hard that he wonders if this will be the time that his face gets stuck like that. "But he's still less annoying than most gestrals."

Although that's a bit like being the tallest dwarf. Again, said with deep affection! Despite everything, Verso loves the gestrals. Even though Verso—at least this version of Verso—technically had nothing to do with their creation, there's a near-familial feeling in his chest when he thinks of them. Like that irritating cousin you can't help but adore anyway.

Swinging his legs impatiently: "You know, I taught Monoco to speak human language." He taught Monoco to do a lot of things, but he's quite proud of that one. The only gestral who doesn't speak in weird Minion-esque gobbledygook. "I guess that you could consider me a professor, too."

It's stolen valor, maybe.

Jasnah doesn't laugh at his claim. She's learned the hard way that even a mild, scornful chuckle will hurt right now. Doesn't mean she doesn't feel a wave of mild scorn when he gives himself the title of professor. A brace of very stubborn, very well-thought arguments crowd the back of her tongue — up to and including I'll judge your professorship on the strength of your student, thank you — but she just doesn't have the stamina to pick a fight.

So she sinks lower, cushioning her head and trying to find a way to lay that doesn't involve a hand hanging over the couch, or an arm crossed over her wound, or an elbow crooked behind her neck. Unusually fidgety, but her fidgeting is committed out of sight.

"Students usually find that total immersion is the quickest route to fluency."

Okay, so she's picking a fight anyway. Implying outright that if he simply spoke exclusively in one language to this Monoco, the language-learning likely came naturally.

"You miss him, don't you."

Not a question. Although Verso has made it abundantly clear that he's uninterested in returning home, she can't imagine it's easy to leave behind your oldest friend. If this feels like an unusual burst of articulated empathy, that's because it is. She's got Ivory on the mind, and it's making her a little vulnerable. And Jasnah's vulnerability always punches outward.

"I do, yeah."

You've grown soft, Monoco would say, pretending to disapprove. In actuality, he'd be glowing with happiness but too embarrassed to let it show. He and Verso have that in common. Maybe all these years with Verso have rubbed off on him.

"He'd be fascinated by this place." There's so much Verso wishes he could tell him, show him. Experience with him. He wants to know what Monoco would have to say about Urithiru, about Rosharan culture. He already knows what Monoco would say about Jasnah. A little scolding you're getting attached again, to which Verso would argue this time is different. "And he'd love meeting all the humans that aren't going to—"

Die, probably within the next few days, weeks, or months. But he's trying to keep the conversation lighthearted here, something to distract Jasnah from her pain, so he stops just short of saying so.

"Well, he'd love it."

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