recreatable | open post.

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.

Eugh, what a question. An inappropriate question, probably, far too probing, but that's exactly what he would expect of Jasnah. He shifts uncomfortably underneath his blanket.

Over 100 years of life, and he's never vocalized these feelings to anyone in this specific way. Monoco must know, because Verso has told him of his desire to send the Canvas into oblivion, which of course includes himself. They've never discussed the individual desire for it all to stop, though, not really. He's expressed the desire to cure his immortality to various Expeditions, too, as the reason for why he'd decided to help them, but never in any way that had suggested anything more than wanting to live out a natural lifespan.

So, he hesitates. Uncertain. Afraid that Jasnah will see feelings like this as the sign of a weak mind. "I get tired sometimes, yeah."

She does not experience the question as an overstep. Why would she? It is the obvious inference, the next logical node in the chain. Was she meant to leap over it in silence and never verify the conclusion she had already drawn?

Her thoughts flick, briefly, to Shallan. Those early days of wardship. The deception, yes, but also the quieter failure beneath it. The stretch of time in which Jasnah had been so focused on outcomes and inconsistencies that she never stopped to ask a simpler question: why didn't I ask the girl how she was feeling?

She asks those questions now. Lesson learned.

Her mind strays, just as briefly, to the contrast Wit presents. An immortal who clung ferociously to life; who hid from Shards, from notice, from consequence. Does immortality curve back on itself, eventually, until survival becomes indistinguishable from exhaustion? An interesting hypothesis. Also wildly inappropriate to raise here.

So too would be an offer of help. What would that even look like? Dispatching Urithiru's scholars to investigate the mechanics of his existence? Offering, in the same breath, the possibility of ending it? Neither would be kind. Especially not when he has only gestured, obliquely, toward longing rather than declared it outright.

In the dark, she worries her lower lip with her teeth. Life before death, Radiant.

Carefully, she says, "Let me know when you get too...tired. Please."

There. That, at least, feels right. Better than she did with Shallan. Surely. Jasnah knows storm all what she'd do with that information but...still.

Verso doesn't really know what to do with that. Jasnah doesn't seem like the type to offer what she'd undoubtedly consider frivolous comfort and platitudes when someone is feeling low. Once again, he can hear Clea's voice; not his Clea, but the one from outside the Canvas, the third and last time that he'd gotten to hear his older sister's voice, see her face. Sixteen years ago now. What do you want me to do, Verso? Do you want me to pat you on the head and tell you that everything is going to be okay?

He really, really misses Esquie's hugs right about now.

So, he doesn't acknowledge the request beyond a low hum. Instead, he holds his hand up in the dark, another invisible glass raised. "To second chances, right?"

Verso. If you want a hug, you can simply ask. Hers would not rival Esquie's, admittedly. Especially with the current injury. But the option exists for those who can advocate for themselves.

Second chances. Hm. She is, on principle, more invested in iterative improvement than in the fiction of clean slates, but the distinction feels academic at this juncture.

Instead of joining in his toast, Jasnah hunkers down, shuts her eyes, and after a silence long enough to signal that their whispered exchange has reached its natural conclusion, murmurs a perfunctory, "Good night."

She does sleep. Shallowly. Her rest is punctured by sharp, bright fragments of dreams. Ivory's ink-dark presence, a rolling sea of beads in the Cognitive Realm. It's enough that she mutters in her sleep, as if mid-argument with someone who refuses to yield.

At some point Jochi, who has been conspicuously absent, sneaks off to his own bed. The movement likely stirs at least one of them. By morning, he is gone again, ovens stoked, the smell of fresh bread seeping up the stairs like a quiet declaration of normalcy.

Jasnah is awake when dawn comes, though her eyes remain closed. She is pretending. Partly out of awkwardness. In the sober light of a new day, much of yesterday feels faintly ridiculous.

The remainder is everything she's been avoiding saying since the attack — something that, now that the silence has stretched this long, she should probably admit. Ivory is gone and she doesn't know if he's okay. She only needs a little time. And a measure of courage.

And, ideally, a cup of tea. She'll have to figure out her own path to self-advoacy, there.

Pretending or not, Verso makes a concerted effort not to disturb Jasnah as he wakes, putting back on his boots and slipping downstairs with only the soft clicks of his heels and the gentle sound of him conscientiously closing the door to give his presence (and then lack thereof) away. In the bakery, he shoots the shit with Jochi for a little while, mostly about Jasnah's condition—still alive—and anywhere he might be able to purchase some clothing.

When he returns back upstairs, it's with some day-old pastries that Jochi is trying to get rid of. They remind him a bit of gougères, crusty on the outside (albeit having lost some of their crispness due to age) and filled with what seems to be cheese, although it's not any sort of cheese he's familiar with. Just as he'd done before, he arranges the end table close to her—much more quietly, this time—and places the pastries on it.

Then, as he sits himself down at the larger table, he props open An Accountability of Virtue to see what Wema and Sterling get up to next.

Edited (spelled sterling's name wrong. i'm a fake fan) 2025-12-16 19:06 (UTC)

Jasnah surfaces slowly.

Not with panic this time, nor with the sharp, disorienting lurch of pain she half-expects. Instead, it's the dull, pervasive ache of a body that has finally been allowed to notice what it endured. The soreness is deep, muscular, the sort that settles into the bones themselves. Healing has begun in earnest, which is to say: everything hurts.

She keeps her eyes closed at first. Not pretending now. Simply gathering herself. Cataloguing sensations. The faint pull at her abdomen when she breathes too deeply. The stiffness in her shoulders. The smell of bread and sow's cheese drifting close enough to be distracting.

Footsteps. Pages turning. Ah. He's reading.

Eventually, one eye cracks open. The ceiling swims, then resolves. She turns her head a fraction, enough to spot him at the table, propped over that book.

She lets the silence stretch as she watches him. Then, hoarsely, she asks: "Have they fallen into the chasms together yet?"

"Hey. Spoilers."

It's good-natured, though. Playful. Whatever foul mood had befallen him last night, it's either been vanquished or swept under the rug. There's no material difference, when it comes to Verso.

"No—currently, Sterling is watching Wema with Brightlord Vadam and burning with masculine jealousy."

And Jasnah will simply run with the face value of his 'improved' mood. Why shouldn't she? It's not her vocation nor her strength to sit and sift through the illusions a man might put on. Leave that to the Lightweavers.

She yawns — aborting a small stretch the moment it pulls too hard on her wound. Slowly, softly, she crumples back on herself. Tucked on the divan.

"Hm. That could be any or every second chapter."

Clearly, she's not one of those readers who finds jealousy appealing.

"Jealousy," he says, "is a tried and true narrative device."

So what! Maybe Verso enjoys reading about a little jealousy! Maybe, as a deeply jealous man, he finds it relatable and-or desirable. Isn't there something appealing behind the fact that someone wants you, specifically, that badly? That there isn't anyone else in the world that could fill that slot? Being unique and irreplaceable is his greatest fantasy.

"...But I'm sensing you find it lacking."

A tricky topic! Jasnah can only answer what she knows, because she doesn't realize it ~~yet~~ but she is prone to jealousy. Possessiveness, certainly. Just without any catalyst for expressing it. At least not romantically. So when Verso posits his theory — that she finds it lacking — she thinks of it only in the context of being the object of someone else's jealousy.

And yes, she finds it lacking. Among other adjectives. In fact, Jasnah would quite prefer not to be the object of anyone else's anything. Except, perhaps, their regard and respect.

Maybe someday she'll have a chance to investigate the other side of the equation. But, until then:

"...I suppose the jealousy plot does fit with the overall theme of tension between two lighteyed men of different dahn."

If you can't say anything nice, say something else.

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