Although the gestrals themselves were never inanimate, the concept of being dolls that have had life breathed into them isn't so far off. He'd rather not get into that, though, for obvious reasons, so he says his favorite thing: "Yeah, I don't know."
He wishes—not for the first time—that he could explain everything, but he doesn't know how to without digging himself into a deeper hole. If he explains that the gestrals were purposefully designed, then he'll have to explain how he knows that. And if he explains that he knows that because his mother is the Paintress who designed all of the humans in Lumière including himself, then he'll have to explain that he's just as close to a doll as the gestrals are. And if he explains that, then—
It gives him a migraine just thinking about it.
"I'll stand." And when Jasnah finally decides to stand herself, she'll find that he has a seven and two sixes. He's pretty pleased with this hand.
"It isn't a Rosharan art," she says at last, easing into the silence with the measured calm of someone who — just now — feels safe enough to indulge her special interests unrelated to knives, plots, or the statistical likelihood of being murdered in a foreign city. "It's from an entirely different world. Where we use stormlight, they use something called BioChromatic Breath. And when you mentioned Chroma before..."
Her voice tapers as she glances down at her cards, considering them with the same faintly critical focus she brings to so many things. Two threes and a ten. Unsatisfactory. She draws again. A two — bringing her neatly to eighteen. That will do. She turns her hand face-up, satisfied.
"I suppose," she concludes lightly, "I wondered whether there might be some overlap after all."
Her satisfaction evaporates when she realizes he's beaten her by one. That earns him a quiet-but-earnest Storms, said beneath her very normal, very not BioChromatic breath.
Pleased with himself, he gathers the cards up again and begins the shuffle. She might like to learn if she doesn't already know how, he considers, but he saves that particular lesson for when she's healed. And maybe when they've got cards made of actual stock, too. He'd consider himself an expert in playing cards, and even he has a little difficulty with shuffling such flimsy ones.
Handing them back, he asks, "How did you learn so much about other worlds?"
Jasnah finds that she enjoys the quiet cooperation of it. He shuffles; she deals. It takes only two rounds for the rhythm to settle in, the deck passing back and forth between them without comment, each anticipating the other's turn as if they'd practiced this together for years rather than minutes.
When he asks how she's learned so much about other worlds, she pauses only briefly. There are two answers, both true, both incomplete. She chooses the simpler one.
"By sitting with worldhoppers and asking them many questions."
The third and final round begins. She deals with practiced economy, then turns her top card face-up.
"Ah," he says, although that isn't really much of an explanation in his eyes. It's the only one she's giving, so he might as well accept it for now. Choosing not to interrogate goes both ways.
"And here I thought I was special." With a mild little smile, he sets down his cards. Nine on top, eight underneath. Not the best hand, but not the worst, either; it's too high for him to risk busting on their final game, playing pragmatically. "I'll stand."
He is special — though Jasnah strongly suspects he wouldn't care for the particular ways in which that is true. Most off-worlders she's heard about arrived by intent: they located Cultivation's Perpendicularity, prepared themselves, and chose to cross. Verso, by contrast, seems to have been...deposited. An anomaly of circumstance rather than ambition.
She deals herself a third card. Only then does she stand, turning her hand to reveal a five and an eight alongside her seven. An expression flickers across her face. Smile-adjacent, carefully restrained. The look of a woman suppressing a boast. She's pleased with the outcome, but she is trying, very earnestly, to be a gracious victor.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Her three cards mark time against the curve of her knee.
"I have a request," she says, cutting her own satisfaction short with a small, deliberate clearing of her throat. "Unconventional. Presumptuous, really. But would you let me amend my wager after the fact?"
The thought has been needling at her ever since his critique of what she'd asked for before. A chapter, read aloud. It no longer satisfies her. She wants something else now.
"It's not very sportsmanlike to change your wager once you've already won," he points out as he flips his cards over, a bit of a sore loser. His soreness is alleviated only by the fact that this is a game of chance, too, and that letting Jasnah win now (did he let her win?) means she'll want to play with him more in the future.
"But," he continues, "you've piqued my curiosity."
Which cuts through all accusations of poor sportsmanship, obviously. He's a little worried that now she's going to request he chop a limb off in front of her—he's not opposed, necessarily, but he doesn't really feel like bleeding all over Jochi's floor and then having to clean it up—but he shoves that down in favor of finding out what she wants.
She waves away his mild accusation of unsportsmanlike behaviour. Who does he think she is? A Windrunner? Her oaths have little to nothing to do with honor. Well. Aside from the First Ideal. She can already hear Dalinar lecturing her on journey before destination and the many ways this might obliquely violate it. Fortunately for Jasnah, Ivory was never such a stickler.
(He's fine. He'll be back. Just wait.)
"You and I can understand one another," she begins, framing her change of heart by pointing out the obvious. "I assume it's due to some quirk of Connection."
She does not linker here. Explaining Connection is a headache and a half. Tl;dr — outsiders can, intentionally or not, hijack Connection to a place they're visiting and effectively speedrun language acquisition. Jasnah assumes that's what happened to him.
"But your native tongue still surfaces from time to time," she continues. "Whether you notice or not." It's obvious to her; she's less certain it is to him. She lifts the seven of diamonds between two fingers. "For example, the characters in the corners are unintelligible to me. I infer the value only because I can count the shapes."
That is likely a sufficient preamble. Ultimately, her request is no more or less intrusive than the original. It's simply...different. Different, and longer-term. Although it's the kind of broader knowledge Wit would always deny her when she asked.
"I would amend my boon to learning your language." She lifts a hand before he can object. "I'm a confident autodidact. I would need only the alphabet and a few sample passages to begin."
Verso's eyebrows raise, primarily at the idea that she doesn't even know the numbers he's written down. He's even more surprised that she didn't say anything up until this point. It seems like it would be intolerable to Jasnah not to know something for even a second longer than she has to.
"All right," he says, easy acceptance. It's probably more useful than having him read a chapter of some boring book aloud, albeit not by much. The only person she'll be able to converse in this language with is him, and he has no problem translating anything she might not understand for her.
But that's the whole problem, he assumes. She'd still have to depend on him to translate instead of just knowing. She'd have to admit that she doesn't understand something.
"You can start by calling me Professeur Dessendre."
"Professeur." She echoes in a tone that somehow automagically clarifies that she is not currently calling him by the word but is instead merely tasting it out on the tip of her tongue. Odd, round, soft sounds.
"A title of some sort?" She ventures. Because she knows his house name already. (And, yes, that's how she thinks of it. Having a second name necessitates it being a house name.)
Jasnah reaches out and pats the divan — the empty expanse of it next to her, wordlessly inviting him to get up off the floor if he'd prefer.
Verso gathers up his cards and hers, putting them back in the deck and placing it beside her on the divan before he settles down on the other side of it. "It's the word for teacher. You'd be la professeure."
He considers, for a second, making her call him something embarrassing instead. But she's trusting him with her education here, so he doesn't have it in him to pull the wool over her eyes. Not about this, anyway.
"Or, technically, I guess you'd be la reine. Queen."
Slow, steady, her eyes track him as he moves from floor to seat. Always on a knife's edge between fascination and indifference. Leaning a little nearer to fascination, clearly, when she repeats the words, mouth moving silently: professeur, again, deaf to the different ending; la reine, for the first time.
"You'll write those down for me, won't you?" At some point. Not now, but — soon. "The beginning of Roshar's first ever interplanetary dictionary."
A little too ambitious. She suspects such things already exist, but in that nebulous social circle of worldhoppers who so often keep to themselves and try not to 'spoil' the relative innocence of different planets. Like how you can get tinned food in Shadesmar, traded with distant other peoples, but those goods have yet to make it the Physical Realm.
"I'll give you a writing credit," she half-smiles.
Interplanetary, she says, and he sort of makes a face at that. He already has a frame of reference for different worlds; the Canvas is one in its own way. What he lacks an understanding of is different planets. The Dessendres had owned an armillary sphere, but more as an art piece than out of an interest in astronomy. Maybe if he'd looked a little closer, he would have noticed that the stars in the sky didn't match any star charts.
It all sounds a little far-fetched, but Jasnah is the expert here.
"A writing credit," he repeats, a little amused. "I was under the interpretation that men weren't allowed to write."
"—Not allowed isn't quite right," she concedes. "Discouraged. Shamed, if they do."
Jasnah shifts on the divan as she speaks, careful of the lingering ache in her side, the movement small but deliberate.
"It's only the Vorin nations who cling so fiercely to male illiteracy," she continues, gaze forward, voice even. "Elsewhere on Roshar, it's quite different. Azir. Shinovar. Herdaz...."
Her hand lifts, palm up, as if setting those cultures on an invisible scale. Then it lowers again, resting near her thigh, planted against the upholstery. She isn't interested in replacing one set of rigid norms with another, but she's interested in progress. Urithiru is uniquely positioned for that. Cultures mingling, assumptions rubbing raw. It creates opportunity. Friction is not inherently bad.
"The ruse we maintained aboard the ship need not follow us back to Urithiru," she concludes. "There, I encourage you to read and write openly. People will object. They will whisper. They may even be offended."
Her eyes sharpen, not unkindly.
"Storm them. You'll be in good company. My uncle is learning to read and write," she adds. "The church excommunicated him for it. Among other things."
Verso's not sure it's such a good idea to publicly get on the wrong side of— well, everyone. Jasnah seems to like the idea of causing objections and whispers and offense, though, so he's hesitant to argue. He's very dependent on her goodwill, after all.
"'Storm them'," he repeats, amused. It sounds so much milder to his ears than putain, merde, va te faire foutre. Almost childlike, although he doesn't dare say it. "That's charming." Especially coming from Jasnah's mouth.
"If you wanted to curse like that, you would say tempêtes." With a conceding cant of his head, he adds, "Although we usually use more... colorful words."
— Join her little social rebellion, Verso. Suffer the slings and arrows of public opinion, sure, but cement yourself as her right hand man. Or left hand man, if you play your cards right.
"I'm listening."
You can't just promise more colourful words and not elaborate. There's plenty other oaths and profanities she could use, though most of them are similarly childish. They're just also incredibly religious.
Edited (the strikethrough didn't work!) 2025-12-22 23:26 (UTC)
Ooh, this feels a little wrong. He definitely shouldn't be teaching a monarch curse words. But it isn't like he hasn't said them in front of her before, isn't like she hasn't cursed herself. It's just that Lumièran curses feel so much more crass than Rosharan ones; it makes this all feel a bit. Inappropriate.
"They're... a bit more vulgar than yours," he says sheepishly, as if a disclaimer.
Which to teach her? He supposes he'll start with a favorite. "There's, ah, merde. It means..." Do they use words like 'fuck' and 'shit' on Roshar? That seems a little too coarse to ask. "It means you're very displeased. Or that something is poor quality, or that you're in trouble. La merde."
"Merde," she repeats. Easily, readily, with the same composure she brings to any borrowed term that's proven useful. Profanity, she's learned, is a kind of cultural magic; without the weight of lifelong taboo, it lands oddly light. "Merde?" She tries again, more carefully this time, hunting for the softened R that ghosts beneath his pronunciation. Harder to produce than to recognize, she notes. Merde, indeed.
Her thumb finds her chin as she considers it. Poor quality. Filth. Refuse. Something debased. It sounds, she thinks, not unlike crem — the muddy residue left behind by highstorms. Shut your cremhole. You cremsucking idiot. This tastes like crem. An entire linguistic genre. Not especially obscene, unless one finds mud itself offensive.
"Nale's nuts," she offers at last. "That one is considered fairly vulgar — though I try not to swear by the Heralds if I can help it."
Jasnah, honey. One, this is not a competition. Two — and more importantly! — if it were, you would lose.
Oh. He likes the shape of her voice around the word. Merde. It does feel a little inappropriate, but in an exciting way, a way that sends a little shiver up his—
"'Nale's nuts'?" Boner killer, but still very cute. He can't fight the amused grin forcing its way onto his face. Fairly vulgar. Hardly; it's adorable. "I'm scandalized."
A pause, and then— "There's also putain." Is he just telling her this now so that he can hear her say it? Maybe. "Or putain de merde, if you're really pissed."
Well. That's...not quite the reaction she was hoping to cultivate. Still, if the cost of her failed vulgarity is one of those grins — unfiltered, irrepressible, unguarded, breaking across his face like something he didn't bother to restrain? She'll consider it a tolerable exchange.
So be it. If anything, this only reinforces her working theory: profanity derives its force from lived context more than syllables. Without the sediment of experience, it's just sound.
She proves the point by repeating him again, lightly, almost experimentally: "Putain"
Well, this one's harder to explain. It's easier to say how it should be used, rather than its literal meaning.
"It's similar to your 'storms', I think." Except way less cute. "Versatile. Like... punctuation." Certainly used very frequently by Lumièrans!
"Literally, I suppose it's an— impolite word for someone who... sells companionship." Which he is trying very hard to politely describe. "But it's really just a word that means you're displeased."
The word lands without ceremony. Confident, comfortable, not in the least bit bothered to say it. It is, after all, just a word. And one she's heard often.
"Yes. I'm familiar. It's a popular choice. Usually deployed as 'godless whore.' Say, perhaps, when someone's losing an argument."
She doesn't bother adding with me. The implication is obvious enough. Privately, the pattern arranges itself with the same weary clarity it always does. The insult is never about behaviour; it's about containment. Categorization. A word meant to punish women for visibility, for autonomy, for existing outside someone else's comfort. At least, in her experience.
Aloud, she adds almost conversationally: "Interesting how your language and mine arrived at the same destination."
Then, after a beat, as if she can't resist a bit of her own commentary:
"I prefer storms."
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Yes. He means whore. Verso grimaces at Jasnah's reaction, even as unbothered as it is. Clearly, Lumière is far different from Alethkar. Why wouldn't it be? It's an idealistic fantasy of what life should be like; a world where women like Jasnah are celebrated rather than denigrated. It's easy to forget that isn't her experience here.
"I think I prefer it, too."
If only because it won't offend her. Putain is so far removed from its original meaning that he hardly relates the two, but he still makes a mental note to try to avoid saying it around her. Probably the polite thing to do, anyway. She is royalty.
"...Well, that's probably enough language lessons for one day."
For a moment, she considers pushing back. Pressing past his easy dismissal and steering the conversation somewhere safer. His language, but more of it. Not the profanity, but the structure of it. Its alphabet. The way meaning nested inside sound. There were any number of scholarly avenues she could take, neat little paths she knew how to walk without stumbling.
And with a precision she almost resents, she recognizes the impulse for what it is: avoidance. Another detour, carefully chosen, leading away from the truth she has been skirting since yesterday morning.
So she stops.
She leans her shoulder into the divan, turning just enough to face him more directly without tugging at the wound. It's an awkward angle, half-committed, but she holds it. Her hand drifts between them, and she taps a fingernail once, twice against the deck of cards. A small, grounding sound.
"Ivory's gone."
The words leave her all at once, like air forced from a bellows. Final. Draining.
"Or—" she swallows, the correction catching slightly, "it's like our bond is gone. I can't hear him. I can't find him. I can't hold stormlight." Her jaw tightens. "And without him, I can't even look into Shadesmar to check."
He's at a loss. His understanding of what Ivory is is lacking at best, and it's difficult to know exactly what this all means. Is Ivory physically gone? Or perhaps it's merely a splintering of their spiritual link—?
"I didn't know." Obviously, he would have been more concerned if he realized Ivory had been gone this entire time. Usually, he just assumes Ivory is secretly hiding in her collar, listening to all of their conversations. He hasn't been wrong yet. Until now, that is.
"...Maybe he got scared and fled," he says, even though that sounds sort of stupid. Also sounding stupid, he asks, "Do you want me to go look for him?"
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He wishes—not for the first time—that he could explain everything, but he doesn't know how to without digging himself into a deeper hole. If he explains that the gestrals were purposefully designed, then he'll have to explain how he knows that. And if he explains that he knows that because his mother is the Paintress who designed all of the humans in Lumière including himself, then he'll have to explain that he's just as close to a doll as the gestrals are. And if he explains that, then—
It gives him a migraine just thinking about it.
"I'll stand." And when Jasnah finally decides to stand herself, she'll find that he has a seven and two sixes. He's pretty pleased with this hand.
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Her voice tapers as she glances down at her cards, considering them with the same faintly critical focus she brings to so many things. Two threes and a ten. Unsatisfactory. She draws again. A two — bringing her neatly to eighteen. That will do. She turns her hand face-up, satisfied.
"I suppose," she concludes lightly, "I wondered whether there might be some overlap after all."
Her satisfaction evaporates when she realizes he's beaten her by one. That earns him a quiet-but-earnest Storms, said beneath her very normal, very not BioChromatic breath.
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Handing them back, he asks, "How did you learn so much about other worlds?"
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When he asks how she's learned so much about other worlds, she pauses only briefly. There are two answers, both true, both incomplete. She chooses the simpler one.
"By sitting with worldhoppers and asking them many questions."
The third and final round begins. She deals with practiced economy, then turns her top card face-up.
Seven.
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"And here I thought I was special." With a mild little smile, he sets down his cards. Nine on top, eight underneath. Not the best hand, but not the worst, either; it's too high for him to risk busting on their final game, playing pragmatically. "I'll stand."
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She deals herself a third card. Only then does she stand, turning her hand to reveal a five and an eight alongside her seven. An expression flickers across her face. Smile-adjacent, carefully restrained. The look of a woman suppressing a boast. She's pleased with the outcome, but she is trying, very earnestly, to be a gracious victor.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Her three cards mark time against the curve of her knee.
"I have a request," she says, cutting her own satisfaction short with a small, deliberate clearing of her throat. "Unconventional. Presumptuous, really. But would you let me amend my wager after the fact?"
The thought has been needling at her ever since his critique of what she'd asked for before. A chapter, read aloud. It no longer satisfies her. She wants something else now.
If he'll permit it.
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"But," he continues, "you've piqued my curiosity."
Which cuts through all accusations of poor sportsmanship, obviously. He's a little worried that now she's going to request he chop a limb off in front of her—he's not opposed, necessarily, but he doesn't really feel like bleeding all over Jochi's floor and then having to clean it up—but he shoves that down in favor of finding out what she wants.
"I'll hear you out."
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(He's fine. He'll be back. Just wait.)
"You and I can understand one another," she begins, framing her change of heart by pointing out the obvious. "I assume it's due to some quirk of Connection."
She does not linker here. Explaining Connection is a headache and a half. Tl;dr — outsiders can, intentionally or not, hijack Connection to a place they're visiting and effectively speedrun language acquisition. Jasnah assumes that's what happened to him.
"But your native tongue still surfaces from time to time," she continues. "Whether you notice or not." It's obvious to her; she's less certain it is to him. She lifts the seven of diamonds between two fingers. "For example, the characters in the corners are unintelligible to me. I infer the value only because I can count the shapes."
That is likely a sufficient preamble. Ultimately, her request is no more or less intrusive than the original. It's simply...different. Different, and longer-term. Although it's the kind of broader knowledge Wit would always deny her when she asked.
"I would amend my boon to learning your language." She lifts a hand before he can object. "I'm a confident autodidact. I would need only the alphabet and a few sample passages to begin."
A pause. A faint, intent look.
"Continued consultation, of course."
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"All right," he says, easy acceptance. It's probably more useful than having him read a chapter of some boring book aloud, albeit not by much. The only person she'll be able to converse in this language with is him, and he has no problem translating anything she might not understand for her.
But that's the whole problem, he assumes. She'd still have to depend on him to translate instead of just knowing. She'd have to admit that she doesn't understand something.
"You can start by calling me Professeur Dessendre."
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"A title of some sort?" She ventures. Because she knows his house name already. (And, yes, that's how she thinks of it. Having a second name necessitates it being a house name.)
Jasnah reaches out and pats the divan — the empty expanse of it next to her, wordlessly inviting him to get up off the floor if he'd prefer.
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He considers, for a second, making her call him something embarrassing instead. But she's trusting him with her education here, so he doesn't have it in him to pull the wool over her eyes. Not about this, anyway.
"Or, technically, I guess you'd be la reine. Queen."
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"You'll write those down for me, won't you?" At some point. Not now, but — soon. "The beginning of Roshar's first ever interplanetary dictionary."
A little too ambitious. She suspects such things already exist, but in that nebulous social circle of worldhoppers who so often keep to themselves and try not to 'spoil' the relative innocence of different planets. Like how you can get tinned food in Shadesmar, traded with distant other peoples, but those goods have yet to make it the Physical Realm.
"I'll give you a writing credit," she half-smiles.
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It all sounds a little far-fetched, but Jasnah is the expert here.
"A writing credit," he repeats, a little amused. "I was under the interpretation that men weren't allowed to write."
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Jasnah shifts on the divan as she speaks, careful of the lingering ache in her side, the movement small but deliberate.
"It's only the Vorin nations who cling so fiercely to male illiteracy," she continues, gaze forward, voice even. "Elsewhere on Roshar, it's quite different. Azir. Shinovar. Herdaz...."
Her hand lifts, palm up, as if setting those cultures on an invisible scale. Then it lowers again, resting near her thigh, planted against the upholstery. She isn't interested in replacing one set of rigid norms with another, but she's interested in progress. Urithiru is uniquely positioned for that. Cultures mingling, assumptions rubbing raw. It creates opportunity. Friction is not inherently bad.
"The ruse we maintained aboard the ship need not follow us back to Urithiru," she concludes. "There, I encourage you to read and write openly. People will object. They will whisper. They may even be offended."
Her eyes sharpen, not unkindly.
"Storm them. You'll be in good company. My uncle is learning to read and write," she adds. "The church excommunicated him for it. Among other things."
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"'Storm them'," he repeats, amused. It sounds so much milder to his ears than putain, merde, va te faire foutre. Almost childlike, although he doesn't dare say it. "That's charming." Especially coming from Jasnah's mouth.
"If you wanted to curse like that, you would say tempêtes." With a conceding cant of his head, he adds, "Although we usually use more... colorful words."
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Or left hand man, if you play your cards right."I'm listening."
You can't just promise more colourful words and not elaborate. There's plenty other oaths and profanities she could use, though most of them are similarly childish. They're just also incredibly religious.
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"They're... a bit more vulgar than yours," he says sheepishly, as if a disclaimer.
Which to teach her? He supposes he'll start with a favorite. "There's, ah, merde. It means..." Do they use words like 'fuck' and 'shit' on Roshar? That seems a little too coarse to ask. "It means you're very displeased. Or that something is poor quality, or that you're in trouble. La merde."
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Her thumb finds her chin as she considers it. Poor quality. Filth. Refuse. Something debased. It sounds, she thinks, not unlike crem — the muddy residue left behind by highstorms. Shut your cremhole. You cremsucking idiot. This tastes like crem. An entire linguistic genre. Not especially obscene, unless one finds mud itself offensive.
"Nale's nuts," she offers at last. "That one is considered fairly vulgar — though I try not to swear by the Heralds if I can help it."
Jasnah, honey. One, this is not a competition. Two — and more importantly! — if it were, you would lose.
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"'Nale's nuts'?" Boner killer, but still very cute. He can't fight the amused grin forcing its way onto his face. Fairly vulgar. Hardly; it's adorable. "I'm scandalized."
A pause, and then— "There's also putain." Is he just telling her this now so that he can hear her say it? Maybe. "Or putain de merde, if you're really pissed."
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So be it. If anything, this only reinforces her working theory: profanity derives its force from lived context more than syllables. Without the sediment of experience, it's just sound.
She proves the point by repeating him again, lightly, almost experimentally: "Putain"
A beat, thoughtful rather than shy.
"What does that one mean, then?"
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Well, this one's harder to explain. It's easier to say how it should be used, rather than its literal meaning.
"It's similar to your 'storms', I think." Except way less cute. "Versatile. Like... punctuation." Certainly used very frequently by Lumièrans!
"Literally, I suppose it's an— impolite word for someone who... sells companionship." Which he is trying very hard to politely describe. "But it's really just a word that means you're displeased."
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The word lands without ceremony. Confident, comfortable, not in the least bit bothered to say it. It is, after all, just a word. And one she's heard often.
"Yes. I'm familiar. It's a popular choice. Usually deployed as 'godless whore.' Say, perhaps, when someone's losing an argument."
She doesn't bother adding with me. The implication is obvious enough. Privately, the pattern arranges itself with the same weary clarity it always does. The insult is never about behaviour; it's about containment. Categorization. A word meant to punish women for visibility, for autonomy, for existing outside someone else's comfort. At least, in her experience.
Aloud, she adds almost conversationally: "Interesting how your language and mine arrived at the same destination."
Then, after a beat, as if she can't resist a bit of her own commentary:
"I prefer storms."
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"I think I prefer it, too."
If only because it won't offend her. Putain is so far removed from its original meaning that he hardly relates the two, but he still makes a mental note to try to avoid saying it around her. Probably the polite thing to do, anyway. She is royalty.
"...Well, that's probably enough language lessons for one day."
throwing a party!!
And with a precision she almost resents, she recognizes the impulse for what it is: avoidance. Another detour, carefully chosen, leading away from the truth she has been skirting since yesterday morning.
So she stops.
She leans her shoulder into the divan, turning just enough to face him more directly without tugging at the wound. It's an awkward angle, half-committed, but she holds it. Her hand drifts between them, and she taps a fingernail once, twice against the deck of cards. A small, grounding sound.
"Ivory's gone."
The words leave her all at once, like air forced from a bellows. Final. Draining.
"Or—" she swallows, the correction catching slightly, "it's like our bond is gone. I can't hear him. I can't find him. I can't hold stormlight." Her jaw tightens. "And without him, I can't even look into Shadesmar to check."
She stills, fingers resting on the cards.
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He's at a loss. His understanding of what Ivory is is lacking at best, and it's difficult to know exactly what this all means. Is Ivory physically gone? Or perhaps it's merely a splintering of their spiritual link—?
"I didn't know." Obviously, he would have been more concerned if he realized Ivory had been gone this entire time. Usually, he just assumes Ivory is secretly hiding in her collar, listening to all of their conversations. He hasn't been wrong yet. Until now, that is.
"...Maybe he got scared and fled," he says, even though that sounds sort of stupid. Also sounding stupid, he asks, "Do you want me to go look for him?"
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first work tag of the new year...
ditto. 🥂
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