recreatable | open post.

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."

With a shrug:

"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.

"...Your piano."

The house of cards falls!

"...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."

Come on, she could at least golf clap.

"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."

Yeah, he probably should temper his expectations, but he's not going to. It's been decades since he had someone to play music with; he's not expecting a four-handed duet on the piano right away, but it might be nice to provide her with a little accompaniment. A metaphor, maybe, for the greater state of his life. He's been playing alone for so long that even a discordant harmony will do.

"Ah, but what you forget is that I'm an excellent teacher." He grins, playing up the ego—although he does consider himself a pretty quality teacher. Verso knows the piano inside and out. There's no one else in the world who has played it for as long as he has.

"Besides, you're Jasnah Kholin." With a pointed look: "I was under the interpretation that there was nothing you couldn't do."

Her brows draw together in thought. The grin, the flattery, the carefully baited confidence: she registers all of it, and then sets it neatly aside.

"There is," she says, evenly, "a meaningful difference between being good at everything one does and doing only the things one is good at."

A pause. She meets his gaze this time. Steady and unembarrassed. Bluntly self-aware.

"I fall very firmly into the latter category."

Then, after a beat, she adds more quietly, "Time is finite. For some of us, who have to pick and choose our crafts diligently."

Her attention drifts back to the instrument, to the place where his hands had been a moment ago.

It's not the first time someone has suggested that his immortality might make him fortunate. After all, he has all the time in the world; he can explore any craft he might like. He once spent three years getting really into Solitaire. He can't help the slight twinge of irritation he feels, though.

"Well," he says, slapping his thighs and getting up, "infinite time isn't all it's cracked up to be."

And that's the end of that conversation.

"I'm going to go see if Jochi has any pillows and blankets around." So he doesn't have to shiver on the floor like a dog.

— Somewhere, somehow, she has put her foot in her mouth. The realization arrives belatedly, irritatingly. She does not immediately understand how. The exchange had felt...congenial. Earnest, even. A rare thing. And yet the way he closes himself off so abruptly suggests a misstep she cannot quite isolate.

Had she not simply said something true?

Jasnah scowls, half-persuading herself that if she had not alluded to his condition, he would have found the omission as slighting as the inclusion. A mercurial man, then. Unreasonably so. It is a wonder she manages to swallow the sharper retort pressing at the back of her tongue. That he does not, in fact, know what infinite feels like. Not yet. Not after a paltry — what? — century and change? Damnation, he is almost normal compared to—

She cuts the thought off and swallows.

Why does it matter? It is not as though he is vanishing. These moments, these almost-ordinary conversations, are not so fragile that a single misstep will shatter them. There will be others. There will be time.

Jasnah watches him for a long moment, then does what she does best: she names the regret, dissects it, and files it away where it can do no further damage.

"...A good idea," she says at last. "It's getting late."

Leaving a conversation with Jasnah with a bad taste in his mouth tanks his mood considerably. He'd been trying to be charming. Tried to delight and entertain her the way he used to delight and entertain his parents' friends, a little boy putting on a show for someone he wanted to impress. Now he feels somber for reasons that— admittedly, have very little to do with Jasnah, but she's the unlucky person who happened to spark the feeling in him.

He takes one of the pillows from Jochi's bed and finds a thin blanket in one of his drawers. When he returns to the sitting room, he lays them out on the floor. Although he doesn't offer to stay up tonight, he does set up his sleeping area between Jasnah and the front door. He leaves the guitar around, just in case she wants to study it.

"Don't worry," he says dryly, on his knees and fluffing the pillow. "Any assassins come in, they'll trip over me first."

The room goes quiet after he leaves. Quiet in that particular way that only settles when someone else has been setting the rhythm of it.

Jasnah's gaze drifts, unhurried, until it finds the guitar where he left it propped within reach. She does not touch it at once. That would be indulgent. Instead, she lets a few measured breaths pass, as though weighing whether curiosity has sufficiently justified itself.

Then, very deliberately, she extends two fingers and plucks a single string.

The note is soft and brief. It vibrates through the air and fades quickly, leaving behind an echo that feels disproportionate to its volume. Jasnah stills, listening with the part of her mind that inventories phenomena. Pitch. Resonance. The way wood carries sound. She plucks another string. Then a third, a shade firmer.

"Hm," she murmurs, to no one at all.

Her fingers retreat at once, folding back into stillness as though they had never moved. When Verso returns, the guitar sits exactly where he left it. Innocent, though it's likely he heard.

She watches him arrange himself on the floor with a careful, almost methodical attention. The placement does not escape her. Between her and the door. Deliberate. Protective, even now. Her gaze lingers on the thinness of the blanket, the uncomplaining way he settles. Something in her posture eases.

Meanwhile, she fights with her blanket. Tugging it higher with mild irritation when it tangles. For a moment, she wishes for a book within reach. Or maybe her glove back. She does not ask for either. It had been easy to ask for help earlier Impossible, now, to reconcile that with the cool distance in the room. That she had let him undo her buttons, brace her weight, braid her hair. Storms, what had she been thinking?

"...Good night, then," Jasnah says at last. Mildly mortified now that the spell has broken.

It feels awkward in the room now, the (albeit minimal) warmth she'd been radiating sucked out of it. Verso hadn't realized how much he'd been craving being the recipient of another person's fondness, but now that he's lacking it, he feels a bit lonely. He wonders if he should apologize for reacting so poorly to what she'd said, or if that would just make things worse. He's used to being left out in the cold, so he eventually decides not to say anything as he removes his boots and belt for bed.

He crawls underneath the blanket, settling himself down on the pillow. This feels very familiar, honestly. Like lying on his thin bedroll in his shitty hut outside the Gestral Village. Only difference is that he can't see through the roof of Jochi's apartment, and Jochi's apartment also has a door.

"Well." A little uncharacteristically clumsy. "Bonne nuit, mon amie."

Of course Jasnah watches. She has maneuvered herself onto her side — uninjured flank pressed to the divan — so she can look outward rather than straight up at the ceiling. One palm props her chin, though the blanket has crept high enough to hide everything but the tips of her fingers and the bow of her mouth. Half-concealed, she observes as he removes his boots and belt and claims the floor with an air of practiced resignation.

She does not waste much energy on guilt. Why should she? He is not the one nursing a gut wound. Any rational observer would assign the couch to the injured party. Practically speaking, she ought to take Jochi's bedroom instead. But this is where they have landed, and here is where she will remain. Like a stubborn little rockbud, clinging to stone and weathering the storm. (Granted. Perhaps a small amount of energy is being wasted on guilt.)

Verso says a few more words she does not understand. From beneath the edge of her blanket, she shapes them silently with her mouth: mon amie, then monaco, because to her ear they still sound related. Curious.

Storms, she is exhausted. And yet sleep no longer comes as easily as it did earlier. Idly, she tries once more to draw in stormlight. Nothing. She exhales, faintly irritated. After a long stretch spent facing outward, she gives in to pique and flops onto her back anyway, earning a soft, pained whine as her body protests the movement. She can feel the hours stretch ahead of her.

Ah. Yes. A good, old-fashioned round of not sleeping together.

Verso ignores the sounds coming from Jasnah's side of the room. Or, well, he very much listens to them, but he does nothing about them. What is he supposed to do? It sucks that she's uncomfortable, but he can't un-stab her. He should have been fast enough to prevent the stabbing in the first place, but he wasn't, so here they are.

He turns restlessly, too. First toward her, then away from her, then flat onto his back. Restfulness is not a state that's easy for him to come by, especially after an eventful day. Still, he lets the awkward sound of their combined tossing and turning stretch for five minutes, fifteen, thirty.

Finally: "Hey," he whispers, like a kid at a sleepover. He doesn't have to ask if she's awake, because he can hear that she is. Her breathing hasn't changed. "Sorry about, uh." He doesn't elaborate any further. "It's a... sore subject." But it's not her fault.

Jasnah passes the time by remembering. Recalling. Reciting.

There is one book she returns to, again and again. There are passages she knows by rote now, worn smooth by repetition. Like Dalinar, and like her father before him, she searches for guidance in the words of a dead king, turning over Nohadon's wisdom as if it might yet reveal a shape she has missed.

A man's emotions are what define him, and control is the hallmark of true strength. To lack feeling is to be dead, but to act on every feeling is to be a child.

She lets that one go. If she lingers too long, her thoughts sour. Another, then.

Expect honor from those you meet, and give them the chance to live up to it.

Better. More difficult, but better.

Jasnah is not inclined toward apologies, but she wonders briefly whether she owes one now. First, she would need to know what she was apologizing for. And why.

Verso speaks before she can settle it.

She tenses at the sound of his whispered hey, listening to the quiet that follows. There is a sour, uncomfortable twist in her gut that he apologizes first. And, layered beneath it, relief. Gratitude that she is not the one who had to break the silence.

"I don't believe it's..." He searches for the phrase, then borrows it back. "'All it's cracked up to be'. I've seen where infinite time takes others. I'm grateful you're still sane."

She thinks, unbidden, of an ancient Herald in Urithiru who does nothing but repeat the same warning, over and over, to anyone who will listen. But that comparison feels glib. Evasive. How could she know what Verso's time has been like? He has offered so few details. Deliberately, she suspects.

"I should have spoken more carefully," she says at last. "I'm told I can be too clinical on these topics."

Nohadon had also written, Let your actions defend you, not your words. Jasnah has tried to live by that tenet all her life. Yet she is learning slowly, against her instincts, that perhaps Verso needs her words more than her actions.

I'm grateful you're still sane garners a soft, amused exhale. Ascribing sanity to him because of outward appearances feels a bit premature. Besides, ask him in a thousand years if he's still sane. Or a millennia. He has no idea how to tolerate any of that when he didn't even want to be born.

"Clinical, you?" he teases gently. "Never."

Yeah, Verso would probably venture to say that she can be 'too clinical'. At the same time, it's not in his nature to ask for more than what he's been given, so he doesn't take the opportunity to say that he would appreciate a little more human warmth. You get what you get and you don't get upset. Or, more accurately for Verso, he gets what he gets and he just sighs about it until someone asks him what's wrong.

Somehow ending up reassuring her, he says, "It's okay." Assuming she won't have any interest in discussing feelings further, that's all he says, turning over in his makeshift bed.

Jasnah does not immediately answer. She lies still, eyes tracing nothing in the dimness, letting his it's okay settle instead of cutting it open for inspection the way she wants to. It would be easy to keep going. To point out that sanity is not a fixed state but a process, contingent on context and support and agency. Or, in Wit's case, on magically offloading one's excess memories into a kind of external Investiture hard drive.

She does none of that. Frankly, tiptoeing too close to the topic of anyone's sanity is a delicate operation.

Instead, after a beat (long enough that he might think the conversation has ended) she says, quietly:

"I wasn’t trying to diagnose you one way or the other."

A pause. Then, more carefully, as if testing the phrasing before releasing it: "I meant it as...appreciation."

The word sits between them, a little naked.

She exhales and adjusts the blanket minutely, the movement small but deliberate. When she speaks again, her voice is steadier.

"You remain curious. You have not calcified." A faint huff, almost dry. "those are not trivial achievements, given your circumstances."

She could stop there. She probably should. So she does. Whether it is true or not hardly matters. She sees only the tip of his iceberg, at best, and these are the conclusions she draws from the scant evidence she has. If he chooses to take offense, he has only himself to blame for the narrow version of himself he has elected to share.

Verso feels somewhat calcified. He can remember dragging more and more bodies to the tree in the battlefield, placing markers in the ground where they were buried. Saying a few words, even, because it felt like the right thing to do. He can remember sliding down the tree trunk and sitting there, exhausted from the manual labor, feeling— jealous, of all things. Horrifically jealous and terribly ashamed for it.

But he'll take the compliment anyway.

"I wasn't complaining," he says, "but far be it from me to hold you back from discussing my achievements." Even though he's not sure curiosity and remaining decalcified are achievements at all. No one gives you a trophy for those things.

Mmm, and he wonders if he should just leave it at that. He turns over again. "Immortality is a lot like lying awake at night, waiting to sleep. But no matter how long you wait, sleep never comes." A feeling he thinks she will be able to relate to. "It can be tiring."

She cannot see him in the dark. All that's available to her is the occasional sound of his movements, his voice, and the ephemeral knowledge that he's out there. A scant few feet away. It might as well be an ocean of floorboard.

Jasnah fights with herself. She knows what she wants to ask but she doesn't know if she wants him to answer. She thinks about two years spent under rubble. She thinks about a man whose best friend is a...well, whatever in Damnation a gestrals is. She can't picture one. She thinks about what it means that he doesn't want to return home.

"Do you wish it would?"

Come. Sleep, that is.

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