Hard to explain, isn't it? How she does like hearing about all sorts of things about him — but also how a particular delivery and circumstance can make her kind of a petty bitch about it. Wit's right. Timing truly is the talent that mankind values most. But that line of thinking just risks making her more annoyed, so!
"I do," she answers. And it's true. It's not a backpedal or a correction. Just...fact. Fact, without any justification or explanation for her behaviour. But a fact all the same. "I would."
But what?
"Simply didn't seem fair. Comparing your circumstances to Monoco's."
"Didn't realize you were such a Monoco fan," he says, resisting the urge to roll his eyes. Braid... well, braided, he scoots to the other side of the divan to offer her some space.
"You wouldn't be saying it's not a competition if you'd met him. Everything is a competition to gestrals." Also everything is a competition to Verso, but this ain't about that.
"—But you're right. It wasn't so bad." Just a lot of darkness and dying of suffocation over and over again, whatever. He'd once considered weighing himself down and trying to drown, but that definitely disabused him of that notion. "I never had any bald spots."
Perhaps the straightest route to sympathy doesn't detour through boasting. How can she tell what's serious and what isn't when he introduces so much with the same levity of the damned court jester she's trying to hard to forget?
Jasnah touches the tail of the braid, long enough to hand over her shoulder. Without a mirror, she can't be certain. But his work feels good to her fingertips, gliding over the woven strands. She sits in silence for a long, long moment. Unsure how to thank him. Unsure whether she should. Unsure whether she should feel some kind of way about being a Monoco fan when she hasn't even met the gestral.
Unsure if she should tell him it would be a pity if he'd had bald spots. That thought confirms for her that she likes his hair, signing off on a suspicion that started back on the ship. Curious.
Instead, when she does eventually talk: "You mentioned an academy for the Expeditions?"
His knowledge of this Academy, compared to his academy, is quite lacking, unfortunately for Jasnah. She'd surely love if Lune were here to lecture on it right now, but I have made the executive decision that Verso has not yet met Lune in this thread, so!!
"Guess they decided that if they were going to send out a team of sacrifices every year, they had better come prepared." Because that's what they are: sacrifices. Stone after stone tossed into the water, sinking to the bottom. "I never went. It wasn't around back then; my Expedition was a mess."
She can think imagine nothing of its like. At least in the average war campaign, there's some probability of return. Of victory. How Verso describes it now and earlier, these Expeditions are all will and idealism and hope. And while Jasnah has plenty of the first two, she's never been one for hope. One has hope when they are outnumbered. One has hope when they lack options. Hope is always irrational. How often has hope prevented someone from standing up and doing what needs to be done, because they cling to a wish for everything to be different...?
Hmm. Alright, no, she amends her perspective. Perhaps these expeditions were less about hope than perseverance. It sounds very much like these people wanted to stand up and do something.
"A mess. How?"
Edited (gently massaging the dialogue punctuation. ) 2025-12-15 18:13 (UTC)
He doesn't talk much about his Expedition, really. Expedition Zero. The only Expedition with survivors. It had surely cast suspicion on them, afterwards.
"We didn't know what we were doing. It was just a search and rescue for survivors of the Fracture back then."
He and Renoir had joined up in the hopes of finding his mother. She'd disappeared along with the rest of the Lumièrans who were displaced during the cataclysm. They hadn't known yet— "We didn't even know about the Paintress. Or the Gommage." Hadn't known the truth.
"We weren't prepared at all. We made it to the Monolith, and we ran into an enemy too strong for our forces to fight." They hadn't expected any fighting at all back then, but there Clea had been with her Nevrons, horrible creatures they'd never seen the likes of before. Worse than her monsters, though, were the sharp daggers of truth from her tongue. "Most, um," he stumbles for a moment, "most people didn't make it."
She listens. And gathers pieces of information, points of data, that help her better understand the man sitting near-but-not-too-near to her. She wonders if this curse of his was caught up in the fight at the Monolith. Not for the first time, she wonders whether this means he's some sort of Cognitive Shadow. Dead, but staked back onto a body. The Heralds were effectively immortal, after all, despite having died once.
She doesn't ask. She doesn't address it aloud at all, in fact. She realizes she lost that chance with her outburst earlier. What she does do, however, is reach just far enough to put a hand on his upper arm — a light, barely there touch. Possible only because of the erosion of so many other boundaries since they left the ship. It's not sorry and it's not how terrible and it's not poor, poor Verso. But it's something. A wordless acknowledgement of how cruel probability can be. Not everyone can make it. It's exactly the kind of foolishness she'd protested when Dalinar had wanted to rush headlong back to Urithiru in the brief time it had spent under enemy occupation.
Her grip squeezes for just a fraction of a moment, then her right hand drops back to the upholstery. A lot easier to show a measure of care when she's not picked her way through the dry, thorny boasts.
Jasnah gives him a comforting arm squeeze and— he feels terrible. The reason he'd stumbled over his words hadn't been because he was so emotional over the deaths of his comrades. Sure, it was the first time he'd ever seen someone die, and he'd been horrified at the time. There's been so much death since then, though, that his feelings on it are... muted. Numbed. Watching someone die only hurts for a second now, and then he's instead filled with annoyance that he's going to have to find a place to bury the body.
No, he'd stumbled because he didn't know if he should share that he wasn't the only immortal who walked out of that fight. That's all.
"Well, it was a long time ago. There's been plenty of Expeditions since then." All ended the same way, of course. "They've gotten more prepared year by year."
She doesn't look at him as she continues. Her gaze stays fixed somewhere beyond the wall, beyond the present moment, as if she's arranging facts in careful rows and deciding which are safe to handle. It doesn't even occur to her that he might be sorta-lying. That the weight in his pauses comes from a different place than the one that tugs at her sympathy.
"Preparation is what people call it when repetition starts to feel obscene," she adds. "It's more palatable than admitting you're doing the same thing again and expecting a different outcome."
The words are critical, clinical — and yet she knows, with a quiet, unpleasant certainty, exactly where she would stand if placed in the same circumstances. Faced with the same choices. That, perhaps, is the most disheartening realization of all.
Especially now, with what she has learned of Roshar's Desolations: cycles of enemies, cycles of heroes, grinding forward again and again. Each turn hinging on the moment a Herald broke. What else is a Knight Radiant other than a renewable source of soldiers to meet and match Odium's renewable source of soldiers. Rinse, repeat. Rinse, repeat.
Verso has nothing to say to that. The repetition does feel pointless, most of the times. It's why he'd become disillusioned with the Expeditions. Skipped more and more of them. He'd look at the calendar and know Renoir was out there slaughtering bright-eyed idealists with hopes for the future, and he'd just lay his head down and try to sleep off the hangover before Esquie or Monoco wandered around to tell him he needed to stop binge-drinking alone.
"Just 33 more to go," he finally says with a shrug. Then everyone will be gone. Save for, of course, the Dessendres.
It's such a cold, cold comfort. She can taste it metallic on her tongue. Unkind, unfair, unwarranted. She's basically telling him he has to write off what's left behind. How would she feel if she were the recipient of such a message? How would she feel if she were an impossible distances from home, being told that the security of Roshar simply wasn't her responsibility any longer?
(Storms, is it even her responsibility now?)
She shifts her body, leaning leftwards onto the gentle slope of the divan's head. Taking some stress off her muscles.
"You're here. Now, instead, our problems are your problems."
How shocking to find Roshar's prospects to be a damn sight more optimistic than somewhere else's.
Not for him, no. He wonders if the Gommage is still ongoing with him gone. If there's even a Canvas at all. If Aline only wants to stay here because of him, then it stands to reason that she'd finally leave if he were no longer there, and then Renoir would have no reason to threaten and intimidate her with the Gommage. Then again, if Aline Painted him once, she could Paint him again. It kills him to think that he could be that replaceable. That recreatable [roll credits].
"Yep," he says, and he doesn't know if it's bittersweet or not. Raising an imaginary glass: "To second chances."
— Of course, it does beg the question of what larger part he might play in the fate of Roshar. It isn't guaranteed. Perhaps it's enough to take him as a member of her retinue, a literal shoulder now to lean upon. But she'd be as much of a liar as he is if she pretended like she didn't at least consider how helpful it might be to have an immortal on the playing field. One who can actually maybe fight, unlike Wit. Oh — she's certain Wit had the skills to hold his own in a fight, he simply also had that pesky condition where he couldn't inflict violence on any living thing. The man couldn't even eat meat.
But Verso, well. She hasn't seen him fight, but she did see that sword.
In fact!
"During the attack," she dredges it up, "you summoned a sword. Like—" it's okay it's okay it's okay "—Ivory."
Verso, still kind of blissfully unaware of Jasnah's distress over Ivory because he doesn't really think about Ivory at all (sorry), says, "Not like Ivory." At least, as much as he knows about Ivory. Spren are, as far as he knows, living and sentient creatures. His sword and parrying dagger are nothing more than sharp things he hits stuff with.
"They're weapons conjured from Pictos," he says, like duh, doesn't everyone do this? It's elementary school stuff, Jasnah.
Oh. It kinda sucks when someone makes you feel dumb for not knowing a jargony word. :c
Jasnah chews her lower lip. Pictos? Is that some sort of Investiture? Stands to reason, if Investiture is the cosmic building blocks of all magic. Maybe Pictos is how that power manifest in his world.
"Can you..." she hesitates. Why does she hesitate? Really, she should be issuing a command. "Can you show me?"
In Verso's defense, he really does expect her to know what Pictos are. Surely they have such a basic building block of society here in Roshar. But then she asks him to show her, and— oh. Of course not. It's why she hadn't realized the piano could be moved, either.
He holds out a hand, palm up, curled as if to hold something. The little parrying dagger materializes bit by bit: the handle first, in a show of harmless sparks, and then the blade, and finally the point of it. It's a quick and seamless process, one that seems to take very little effort on his part.
"Pictos," he says, pointing out a small little symbol in the handle. "You etch Chroma into something in a particular shape, and then you can summon or dismiss it at will." Hmm. He thinks. "Guess you wouldn't be able to do it. No Chroma."
She doesn't flinch. Why should she? She had a lifetime of watching men summon swords even before she could summon Ivory. But those had been dead blades — they took ten heartbeats to summon, and couldn't change shape at will. A living shardblade, a spren, could do so much more...
An exhale. She distracts herself with Verso's demonstration. Leaning in, just enough to see the etching. Are Pictos the shape, and Chroma the medium? Chroma.
"The currency on the continent." A nod. That makes sense. Power has value; why put a middleman between the two? Very sensible, given how stormlight sits in spheres. "Are you at risk of running out?"
Of Chroma? Of Pictos? Is that why he's summoned what she assumes is a single weapon, but available in two different profiles? A smaller dagger, so as not to waste whatever he uses to draw the sword version.
"Oh," he says, feeling a little stupid, "I didn't think of that." He just didn't want to scare Jasnah by conjuring a whole fuck-off sword. Or accidentally cut Jochi's upholstery.
Verso takes a moment to think. Could he run out of Chroma? Talking it through aloud: "Chroma is... the life force of everyone in"—the Canvas—"Lumière." Aline was very uncreative when she made the building blocks of Painted people literally be called color. Ah, well. "It's running through my veins, and all around me." A vague gesture with the dagger.
"I assume it's regenerative, but without a link to Lumière..." A shrug. "I guess it could degrade."
Yep. Investiture. It's gotta be, right? All people have some soupy mixture of Investiture in them, she thinks, but it's not so easily accessible as Verso seems to imply. Storms, she wishes she was writing this down.
"But can anyone from your world use it?" Wait, wait, give her a second to sit up straighter from where she'd sorta half-collapsed into rest. "Can anyone do the — the etchings?"
...If his Chroma does degrade, is there a way to boost him with stormlight? Is that perhaps a silly thought? Oh, there, she's chewing her lip again. This subject is really more of Navani's forte. Not hers.
"You should try and conserve it. Just in case." She points a finger at the dagger. Wait, should she ask to touch it? Would it scream, like a dead blade? Don't think about dead blades. "Sorry. I shouldn't have asked you to spend any."
"Nah, it's okay." He's pretty sure he'll be all right on the Chroma front. And, if not, it won't be that bad if he disintegrates or something. Kind of a win-win scenario all around.
Verso dematerializes the dagger, but— "Hey. Want to see something else I can conjure?" He doesn't wait for the answer before he's holding out both hands, something much bigger coming into existence between them. Frets, strings, a long neck, and a body. Yep, it's a guitar, which he also plays, because of course he does. Verso has absolutely been playing Push by Matchbox Twenty around the campfire for 67 years.
— He doesn't wait for her answer, but it would have definitely and unequivocally and enthusiastically been yes. Anything, really, to help move on from the thought of what happens if he does run out of Chroma.
(Is his ability to heal caught up in it, like hers with stormlight? Storms. That would be inconvenient.)
But all of that flies out the window when he materializes a whole stringed instrument. Kind of like a zither, but...longer? Longer, with fewer strings. Fascinating. It does beg the question, however, of what other things he can simply conjure from the air. And begging that question leads her straight to the inevitable conclusion. Oh, yeah.
"...Isn't nearly as cool as this," he says smoothly, sidestepping that conversation entirely.
In an obvious attempt to distract her from that line of questioning, he begins to play—a soft, bittersweet melody, adapted from one of his favorite composers for the piano, of course. Sometimes, once he's squeezed every bit of enjoyment out of playing it on the piano, it's fun to try it all again in a new and different way.
"Go on," he says, playing vibrato, "I won't tell anyone if you gush about how multitalented I am."
Fine. Fine. She will set aside the piano thing. For now.
Her jaw closes, her mouth flattening into a line, and she has the discipline not to speak over him while he plays. Unasked for, certainly — though had he given her half a heartbeat, she would have requested a demonstration herself. Possibly even delivered a verdict. A favorable one. But storms, it's genuinely difficult to compliment a man who compliments himself first. There is some reflexive shutter in her mind that slams closed the moment he invites her to (ugh) gush.
So she says nothing.
She lets the performance stand on its own, rather than encouraging Verso to narrate it. Which is, admittedly, an act of restraint. Because yes, it is good. And yes, once she forcibly pockets her irritation, she finds that she enjoys it. And yes, he is talented — talented in a way she is not accustomed to encountering.
Part of the effect, she suspects, lies in the unfamiliarity of the scale. The way it refuses Alethi resolution, landing instead in cadences that sidestep her expectation rather than fulfilling it. Her mind keeps bracing for conclusions that never arrive, only to be redirected somewhere adjacent.
When he finishes this piece, she exhales softly through her nose.
"Well," she says at last, eyes still on his hands, his fingers, rather than his face. "You may rest easy. I am suitably impressed."
"Suitably impressed," he echoes, laughing. "Mademoiselle, you flatter me. It's a wonder my head hasn't inflated." It probably hasn't because it's already too big. After all, look at all of that hair.
One performance is probably enough for her, he thinks—given that she's only 'suitably impressed'—so he sets the guitar down, propped up against the divan. He'd dematerialize it, too, but he thinks there's a chance she might want to take a look at it. If there's no pianos in Roshar, who's to say there are guitars?
"Once you have a few piano lessons in you"—because that's happening—"then we can start a band."
He's right to keep the instrument around. Her attention follows it — enough to sway her gently to the side, head tilted. All of these instruments requiring two hands to play. Again, she thinks, fascinating. The word may as well be on repeat in her thoughts. It's hard enough to learn swordplay with one's left hand — a sin she insists upon — but what would it be like to manipulate those strings like that. Whole, with access to all your fingers...?
Verso says something. Reluctant, she drags her eyes back to him. Hm? Oh.
"You and I," she gestures between them both. "A band."
She doesn't smile. But she does soften. Whatever other things she won't compliment him for, he's also terribly good at distracting her. Tugging on just the right strings to pull her out of the messy tangle of worry and catastrophizing that happens if she thinks too long and too hard about her current plight.
"Temper your expectations. It might take more than a few. I'm a historian, remember? Not a musician."
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no subject
"I do," she answers. And it's true. It's not a backpedal or a correction. Just...fact. Fact, without any justification or explanation for her behaviour. But a fact all the same. "I would."
But what?
"Simply didn't seem fair. Comparing your circumstances to Monoco's."
Sure. That's what bothered her.
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"You wouldn't be saying it's not a competition if you'd met him. Everything is a competition to gestrals." Also everything is a competition to Verso, but this ain't about that.
"—But you're right. It wasn't so bad." Just a lot of darkness and dying of suffocation over and over again, whatever. He'd once considered weighing himself down and trying to drown, but that definitely disabused him of that notion. "I never had any bald spots."
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Jasnah touches the tail of the braid, long enough to hand over her shoulder. Without a mirror, she can't be certain. But his work feels good to her fingertips, gliding over the woven strands. She sits in silence for a long, long moment. Unsure how to thank him. Unsure whether she should. Unsure whether she should feel some kind of way about being a Monoco fan when she hasn't even met the gestral.
Unsure if she should tell him it would be a pity if he'd had bald spots. That thought confirms for her that she likes his hair, signing off on a suspicion that started back on the ship. Curious.
Instead, when she does eventually talk: "You mentioned an academy for the Expeditions?"
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His knowledge of this Academy, compared to his academy, is quite lacking, unfortunately for Jasnah. She'd surely love if Lune were here to lecture on it right now, but I have made the executive decision that Verso has not yet met Lune in this thread, so!!
"Guess they decided that if they were going to send out a team of sacrifices every year, they had better come prepared." Because that's what they are: sacrifices. Stone after stone tossed into the water, sinking to the bottom. "I never went. It wasn't around back then; my Expedition was a mess."
In, like, five different ways.
no subject
Hmm. Alright, no, she amends her perspective. Perhaps these expeditions were less about hope than perseverance. It sounds very much like these people wanted to stand up and do something.
"A mess. How?"
no subject
He doesn't talk much about his Expedition, really. Expedition Zero. The only Expedition with survivors. It had surely cast suspicion on them, afterwards.
"We didn't know what we were doing. It was just a search and rescue for survivors of the Fracture back then."
He and Renoir had joined up in the hopes of finding his mother. She'd disappeared along with the rest of the Lumièrans who were displaced during the cataclysm. They hadn't known yet— "We didn't even know about the Paintress. Or the Gommage." Hadn't known the truth.
"We weren't prepared at all. We made it to the Monolith, and we ran into an enemy too strong for our forces to fight." They hadn't expected any fighting at all back then, but there Clea had been with her Nevrons, horrible creatures they'd never seen the likes of before. Worse than her monsters, though, were the sharp daggers of truth from her tongue. "Most, um," he stumbles for a moment, "most people didn't make it."
Just him, just Renoir.
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She doesn't ask. She doesn't address it aloud at all, in fact. She realizes she lost that chance with her outburst earlier. What she does do, however, is reach just far enough to put a hand on his upper arm — a light, barely there touch. Possible only because of the erosion of so many other boundaries since they left the ship. It's not sorry and it's not how terrible and it's not poor, poor Verso. But it's something. A wordless acknowledgement of how cruel probability can be. Not everyone can make it. It's exactly the kind of foolishness she'd protested when Dalinar had wanted to rush headlong back to Urithiru in the brief time it had spent under enemy occupation.
Her grip squeezes for just a fraction of a moment, then her right hand drops back to the upholstery. A lot easier to show a measure of care when she's not picked her way through the dry, thorny boasts.
no subject
No, he'd stumbled because he didn't know if he should share that he wasn't the only immortal who walked out of that fight. That's all.
"Well, it was a long time ago. There's been plenty of Expeditions since then." All ended the same way, of course. "They've gotten more prepared year by year."
no subject
She doesn't look at him as she continues. Her gaze stays fixed somewhere beyond the wall, beyond the present moment, as if she's arranging facts in careful rows and deciding which are safe to handle. It doesn't even occur to her that he might be sorta-lying. That the weight in his pauses comes from a different place than the one that tugs at her sympathy.
"Preparation is what people call it when repetition starts to feel obscene," she adds. "It's more palatable than admitting you're doing the same thing again and expecting a different outcome."
The words are critical, clinical — and yet she knows, with a quiet, unpleasant certainty, exactly where she would stand if placed in the same circumstances. Faced with the same choices. That, perhaps, is the most disheartening realization of all.
Especially now, with what she has learned of Roshar's Desolations: cycles of enemies, cycles of heroes, grinding forward again and again. Each turn hinging on the moment a Herald broke. What else is a Knight Radiant other than a renewable source of soldiers to meet and match Odium's renewable source of soldiers. Rinse, repeat. Rinse, repeat.
no subject
Verso has nothing to say to that. The repetition does feel pointless, most of the times. It's why he'd become disillusioned with the Expeditions. Skipped more and more of them. He'd look at the calendar and know Renoir was out there slaughtering bright-eyed idealists with hopes for the future, and he'd just lay his head down and try to sleep off the hangover before Esquie or Monoco wandered around to tell him he needed to stop binge-drinking alone.
"Just 33 more to go," he finally says with a shrug. Then everyone will be gone. Save for, of course, the Dessendres.
no subject
It's such a cold, cold comfort. She can taste it metallic on her tongue. Unkind, unfair, unwarranted. She's basically telling him he has to write off what's left behind. How would she feel if she were the recipient of such a message? How would she feel if she were an impossible distances from home, being told that the security of Roshar simply wasn't her responsibility any longer?
(Storms, is it even her responsibility now?)
She shifts her body, leaning leftwards onto the gentle slope of the divan's head. Taking some stress off her muscles.
"You're here. Now, instead, our problems are your problems."
How shocking to find Roshar's prospects to be a damn sight more optimistic than somewhere else's.
no subject
"Yep," he says, and he doesn't know if it's bittersweet or not. Raising an imaginary glass: "To second chances."
no subject
But Verso, well. She hasn't seen him fight, but she did see that sword.
In fact!
"During the attack," she dredges it up, "you summoned a sword. Like—" it's okay it's okay it's okay "—Ivory."
no subject
"They're weapons conjured from Pictos," he says, like duh, doesn't everyone do this? It's elementary school stuff, Jasnah.
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Jasnah chews her lower lip. Pictos? Is that some sort of Investiture? Stands to reason, if Investiture is the cosmic building blocks of all magic. Maybe Pictos is how that power manifest in his world.
"Can you..." she hesitates. Why does she hesitate? Really, she should be issuing a command. "Can you show me?"
no subject
He holds out a hand, palm up, curled as if to hold something. The little parrying dagger materializes bit by bit: the handle first, in a show of harmless sparks, and then the blade, and finally the point of it. It's a quick and seamless process, one that seems to take very little effort on his part.
"Pictos," he says, pointing out a small little symbol in the handle. "You etch Chroma into something in a particular shape, and then you can summon or dismiss it at will." Hmm. He thinks. "Guess you wouldn't be able to do it. No Chroma."
no subject
An exhale. She distracts herself with Verso's demonstration. Leaning in, just enough to see the etching. Are Pictos the shape, and Chroma the medium? Chroma.
"The currency on the continent." A nod. That makes sense. Power has value; why put a middleman between the two? Very sensible, given how stormlight sits in spheres. "Are you at risk of running out?"
Of Chroma? Of Pictos? Is that why he's summoned what she assumes is a single weapon, but available in two different profiles? A smaller dagger, so as not to waste whatever he uses to draw the sword version.
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Verso takes a moment to think. Could he run out of Chroma? Talking it through aloud: "Chroma is... the life force of everyone in"—the Canvas—"Lumière." Aline was very uncreative when she made the building blocks of Painted people literally be called color. Ah, well. "It's running through my veins, and all around me." A vague gesture with the dagger.
"I assume it's regenerative, but without a link to Lumière..." A shrug. "I guess it could degrade."
no subject
"But can anyone from your world use it?" Wait, wait, give her a second to sit up straighter from where she'd sorta half-collapsed into rest. "Can anyone do the — the etchings?"
...If his Chroma does degrade, is there a way to boost him with stormlight? Is that perhaps a silly thought? Oh, there, she's chewing her lip again. This subject is really more of Navani's forte. Not hers.
"You should try and conserve it. Just in case." She points a finger at the dagger. Wait, should she ask to touch it? Would it scream, like a dead blade?
Don't think about dead blades."Sorry. I shouldn't have asked you to spend any."no subject
"Nah, it's okay." He's pretty sure he'll be all right on the Chroma front. And, if not, it won't be that bad if he disintegrates or something. Kind of a win-win scenario all around.
Verso dematerializes the dagger, but— "Hey. Want to see something else I can conjure?" He doesn't wait for the answer before he's holding out both hands, something much bigger coming into existence between them. Frets, strings, a long neck, and a body. Yep, it's a guitar, which he also plays, because of course he does. Verso has absolutely been playing Push by Matchbox Twenty around the campfire for 67 years.
no subject
(Is his ability to heal caught up in it, like hers with stormlight? Storms. That would be inconvenient.)
But all of that flies out the window when he materializes a whole stringed instrument. Kind of like a zither, but...longer? Longer, with fewer strings. Fascinating. It does beg the question, however, of what other things he can simply conjure from the air. And begging that question leads her straight to the inevitable conclusion. Oh, yeah.
"...Your piano."
The house of cards falls!
no subject
In an obvious attempt to distract her from that line of questioning, he begins to play—a soft, bittersweet melody, adapted from one of his favorite composers for the piano, of course. Sometimes, once he's squeezed every bit of enjoyment out of playing it on the piano, it's fun to try it all again in a new and different way.
"Go on," he says, playing vibrato, "I won't tell anyone if you gush about how multitalented I am."
no subject
Her jaw closes, her mouth flattening into a line, and she has the discipline not to speak over him while he plays. Unasked for, certainly — though had he given her half a heartbeat, she would have requested a demonstration herself. Possibly even delivered a verdict. A favorable one. But storms, it's genuinely difficult to compliment a man who compliments himself first. There is some reflexive shutter in her mind that slams closed the moment he invites her to (ugh) gush.
So she says nothing.
She lets the performance stand on its own, rather than encouraging Verso to narrate it. Which is, admittedly, an act of restraint. Because yes, it is good. And yes, once she forcibly pockets her irritation, she finds that she enjoys it. And yes, he is talented — talented in a way she is not accustomed to encountering.
Part of the effect, she suspects, lies in the unfamiliarity of the scale. The way it refuses Alethi resolution, landing instead in cadences that sidestep her expectation rather than fulfilling it. Her mind keeps bracing for conclusions that never arrive, only to be redirected somewhere adjacent.
When he finishes this piece, she exhales softly through her nose.
"Well," she says at last, eyes still on his hands, his fingers, rather than his face. "You may rest easy. I am suitably impressed."
no subject
"Suitably impressed," he echoes, laughing. "Mademoiselle, you flatter me. It's a wonder my head hasn't inflated." It probably hasn't because it's already too big. After all, look at all of that hair.
One performance is probably enough for her, he thinks—given that she's only 'suitably impressed'—so he sets the guitar down, propped up against the divan. He'd dematerialize it, too, but he thinks there's a chance she might want to take a look at it. If there's no pianos in Roshar, who's to say there are guitars?
"Once you have a few piano lessons in you"—because that's happening—"then we can start a band."
no subject
Verso says something. Reluctant, she drags her eyes back to him. Hm? Oh.
"You and I," she gestures between them both. "A band."
She doesn't smile. But she does soften. Whatever other things she won't compliment him for, he's also terribly good at distracting her. Tugging on just the right strings to pull her out of the messy tangle of worry and catastrophizing that happens if she thinks too long and too hard about her current plight.
"Temper your expectations. It might take more than a few. I'm a historian, remember? Not a musician."
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congrats on receiving my 1,000th comment in this post
throwing a party!!
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first work tag of the new year...
ditto. 🥂
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