recreatable | open post.

It's quite... cold. Nothing like the sort of letters Maman used to write him after he'd moved out to attend the Conservatory. My darling boy, she'd address him. Lumière de ma vie. Mon trésor. If he'd gone missing after an outing, she would have been even more effusive. She'd always been afraid of losing him, and ignorant fool that he was, he'd never understood why.

Another piece of Jasnah's puzzle clicks into place. If even her mother, the person who's supposed to be the most warm and affectionate to her, is like this with her, then maybe that explains a little bit of her withholding nature.

He cringes a bit at the mention of a 'foreign man', concerned for the very first time that he might somehow be in trouble for this. She'd disappeared in his company, after all. It would be understandable to question his motives. —Ugh. Something to ruminate on and face at a later date. Verso gives Jasnah one last lingering glance before he gets up off the divan and settles down onto his pillow on the floor, leaving the message for her to find when she wakes.

For the first time in a while, she wakes with a start. A sharp inhale, a lurch upward like being shoved off some internal, spiritual ledge. Mishim, the third moon, still hangs in the sky, visible through the corner of a window she never meant to leave unshuttered before bed. Damnation. She forgot to have Jochi close it. For a moment she tangles with the blanket she doesn't remember pulling over herself, rubs at one eye as she yawns, disoriented and faintly irritated, only to realize...

It's still night. All the dozing and forced rest and exhaustion have thoroughly scrambled even the threadbare sleep cycle she'd possessed to begin with. She lets the dim room swim back into focus and...?. Verso is on the floor. Asleep? Awake? Impossible to tell. She sits excruciatingly still, listening for any pattern in his breathing, any telltale shift. Nothing she can confidently identify.

Well. Just in case. Jasnah proceeds slowly, silently, as he eases herself upright, and — oh.

Not only is the spanreed is blinking, but there's already a message recorded. Her frown is immediate, comprehension arriving all at once: he must have returned, set the pen to write, and now there's a second message queued behind it.

Leaning forward, she exhales thinly and resets the fabrial. And with a muted scratch, the pen writes: Reaching out via Tashikk and then not even replying? Really, Jasnah. Be decent and give us some sign of life.

She mutters a curse under her breath (storms!) but still doesn't rush to answer. Instead, she turns the pen carefully to standby and reaches for a mundane, non-fabrial pen and scrap paper. She scratches out a line. Rewrites it. Crosses out half a sentence, stares at the remainder like it's personally offended her. Tells herself this care is practical — that any message might be read aloud in a council chamber and that precision matters. All true. None of it quite sufficient to explain how long she lingers over each word.

If Verso is asleep (or awake and wisely choosing not to involve himself) she'll eventually settle on a reply and send it. But otherwise, she's interruptible.

Yeah, he's awake. Verso never sleeps particularly deeply, but most nights spent in Jasnah's company have been even more sleepless than usual—he has things to worry about, plans to make, the sensation of her thumb grazing his ear to play over and over in his head.

When he hears her stir, he does nothing. Doesn't even move. Just lies there, facing away from her, eyes closed. He can hear the scratch of the spanreed—another message?—and then Jasnah's muttered storms, remarkably quiet but still easily decipherable in the silence of night. A moment later, and he hears the flutter of paper, the scratch of writing again.

"And you were doing so well at besting your insomnia," he mutters (hypocritically).

She scratches out another line. It had sounded almost too reassuring. Too eager to soothe bruised feelings in a way that felt profoundly unlike herself. Storms, it's not as though she vanished on purpose. Last time, she would have traded a great deal to return sooner or to find any way to communicate across the realms. That Navani still holds it against her...well. It stings. Less for the fact of it than for the irrationality. For the refusal to account for circumstance.

Anyway. Her chin lifts at the sound of Verso's voice.

In the dim room she can't make him out clearly. He's just a shape on the floor, a darker smudge where his head might be. No hope of meeting his eyes across the distance.

"When did you get back?" She asks calmly.

Oh, storm it. She snatches up the spanreed and writes something quick and brutally simple: I'm alive, mother. Stand by.

Then, lowering the pen, she adds aloud — almost as an afterthought, but not really: "...Any word about the Wandersail?"

"It won't be in port for another two weeks," Verso reports, and although he'd been willing to discuss whether waiting was a viable—perhaps even prudent—option, right now doesn't exactly seem the time. He turns, facing toward her now, although it hardly makes any difference. It's too dark to properly see her, his only image of what she's currently doing created through memory, echolocation, and supposition.

He can hear the sound of the spanreed making quick strokes on paper, so he makes an assumption. "You wrote back already?"

It's the middle of the night. Surely she could have waited for a more opportune time, no matter how impatient her mother's message had sounded.

Two weeks. Her groan carries, edged with disappointment and the grudging recognition that the worst option could indeed be the correct one. As if to compound her irritation, the spanreed begins blinking again. Her lip curls in dark.

"I decided to at least acknowledge the message," she replies, her tone flattening deliberately.

"I didn't want to speak for you," is his excuse for leaving Navani on read.

The gemstone blinks softly in the dark. He doesn't acknowledge it yet, waiting to see if she'll decide to take the message on her own. It is, after all, her mother.

"Kind of a harsh message."

"I appreciate that," she answers — taking the excuse at its face value, folding it up, and tucking it somewhere between her ribs.

Jasnah tells herself it's just as likely that Navani was sitting in a room of five-to-ten advisors, highprinces, other coalition monarchs visiting the tower — there's any number of reasons to cut as deeply but as coldly as she did. Still, it hardly seems appropriate. Not only is Jasnah not a child, she's a queen in her own right. Daughter is so very far down the list of vital, critical identities.

But she does not comment aloud on the harshness of the message.

"I haven't yet asked if they have Windrunners to spare. But if the ship isn't due back soon..." Jasnah trails off, briefly, before switching tracks. Choosing to be decisive. "Two weeks is too long."

"If you say so," is his only reply to that. He isn't necessarily opposed to two more weeks of waiting, but the message from her mother had sounded tetchy. Certainly, it's the kind of letter that would have sent him running home with his tail between his legs. At least, it would have in another world, in another time.

Besides, he's not inclined to argue against traveling via Windrunner.

Still, that's not the topic on his mind at the moment. He watches the light blink for a few more seconds. "You know, I'm a good listener." It feels a bit like taking a leap. Shooting his friend-shot. "If you ever wanted to talk about... family things."

The spanreed blink, blink, blinks. Four or five spheres, scattered on the table, cast their eerie too-blue light — and Jasnah tries to draw some of it with a breath, just in case. Nothing happens. Maybe tomorrow. She sinks back against the cushion, lost to the shadows.

"Family things," she repeats. "You mean my mother. Specifically."

Mm. This isn't going as well as he'd hoped.

Lightly: "Mother problems. Father problems. Third cousin twice removed problems. I've been known to lend a sympathetic ear about them all."

She reaches out in the dark, fitting the edge of her thumbnail against the desk corner. Working her nail into a groove, there, and lifting a splinter.

"She worries. And I suppose I've given her cause to."

Jasnah's nail makes a slight scraping sound against the wood. He can picture what she must be doing with startling clarity. Perhaps he's been spending too much time around her. Observing her, memorizing her.

"We've all done things to make our parents worry." He can recall staying out late, sneaking out of the house, doing the reckless things that young men who feel invincible do. "Is she always that curt with you?"

Older now and wiser, sanded down by years of careful introspection, Jasnah understands that the freeze began with her. Not Navani. Time has given her the clarity to see how resentment knots itself: how a child learns to blame one parent for the other's cruelty. Even so, it was never something she and her mother fully managed to untangle.

"Always? No, no," she waves the notion away in the dark. More often, Navani drifts toward a weary capitulation — like a woman at the end of her tether, still trying to learn how to function as Jasnah's mother, just as Jasnah never quite learned how to be her daughter.

Blink. Blink. Blink. The steady pulse of the spanreed confirms what she already suspects: Navani had been awake, waiting. Still is.

"She thought I was dead, once," Jasnah says quietly. "I don't believe they ever proceeded as far as funeral rites. I was trapped in the Cognitive Realm, after all. It's not as though they had a body to soulcast." She references a royal Alethi funeral custom, where the dead are turned into stone statues and stored in the Kholin crypts.

"It's...understandable," she concludes, measured as ever, working through her humanity aloud, "that she's impatient to hear from me."

Intimately acquainted with the depth of a mother's grief for their child, Verso feels suddenly and unexpectedly empathetic toward Jasnah's mother. Maybe he'd judged her too harshly, too quickly. Or maybe he'd judged her right the first time, and it's only his own familial projection changing his mind now. Either way, he frowns and says, "That must have devastated her."

He eases himself up to a sitting position, then scoots toward the blinking spanreed. One of them is going to have to receive the message eventually.

"Is that why you expected her to read your private correspondence?" Verso doesn't bother explaining that Jochi told him this; he should have figured it out on his own even before that. If Jochi's spanreed was only used to contact Jasnah, then the only way she could have ever expected her mother to see it would be if she were snooping around in her daughter's things. "Because she's worried?"

...Those first few days back had been so odd. Every time Jasnah and Navani had been in the same room together, it was as if they both knew they ought to say something, do something, hug maybe. But no. Both women had thrown themselves into work, cataloguing Urithiru libraries.

Less than a month later, Elhokar had died.

Jasnah hmms, audibly, as she considers his question. "Yes," she eventually answers. "She's done it before — it seemed a rational assumption that she would do it again. I suppose I should be pleased to learn I was wrong."

And that it had taken being approached from a different angle to nudge her towards her daughter's private quarters.

There's no part of Verso that's private, nothing that hadn't passed through someone else's eyes before it got to him. Even still, his mother never read his personal letters. Then again, maybe she just didn't feel the need to, knowing that her hands had molded every groove in his brain and vein in his heart.

He scoots closer still, near enough now that he can make out Jasnah's facial features when the spanreed light blinks. "Want to see what she has to say?"

She bites back a not especially. Mostly because it'd be a lie — she does dearly want to know what Navani's message says, even if she can already predict its general tone and contents. Storms, she wouldn't be surprised if she'd already ordered a pair of Windrunners to the city.

— And, actually, apprehension about that possibility alone prompts her to reach out and turn the spanreed to receive. She pulls an infused sphere near to the page, so she can read.

WE'LL WAIT — the malformed, messy letters are at first a horror to decipher. Her heart leaps into her chest, taking her turn to be worried about what would prompt Navani to...oh. An exasperated exhale, as she realizes Dalinar had taken over the pen. That exhale stutters into a shaky, awkward laugh.

"When I respond," she explains to Verso, resetting the pen, "I want to do so with something actionable. Something decided."

Verso peers over the edge of the end table like a toddler trying to see what the adults are working on. That script is unfamiliar and quite unsettling, but he turns his gaze to Jasnah and watches her laugh, so it can't be indicative of anything truly horrific. An... inside joke, maybe?

"Well, you know what they say," he says, obviously about to say something no one has ever said, "there's no better time for making decisions than in the middle of the night."

...And now he's right there. Scant light from spheres catch on his features, and she tilts herself a degree to the right so she can see him over the table edge. Jasnah doesn't provide an explanation for what he might see. She doesn't know the ideal words or the ideal order to put them in to explain why and how it is that her uncle runs interference between her and her mother.

"Two weeks is a long time to wait when we could have Windrunners here tomorrow," although she touches her side in a brief acknowledgement of the time she's already assured him she'll take to heal before they leave, whatever the manner. "Or, say, seven days."

It's a soft bargain.

"Your optimism is inspiring," he says, droll, "but I think seven days is probably more realistic." Flying will already be unpleasant enough for her without all the pain and bleeding.

A pause. "How's the healing going?" The stormlight healing, not her natural, biological process. She looks no better than she had when they found Ivory.

Jasnah is all composure and curation until, when safe and secure, she allows her frustration to steer her. In this instance, it's a not-at-all-composed growl in the back of her throat. A sharp, emotional reminder that she can try to be as logical as the day is long, but she still comes from a warlike people. Quick-tempered, like her father.

"Poorly," she leans forward and catches one of the loose spheres between two fingertips. Picking it up, she holds it between them. And, after a moment, the sphere's infuest light kind of...flickers. Dim, dim, dims and then reignites with its former intensity.

"It's right there, I can feel it."

So! Progress, because even this failure is rosier than what she was contending with before they rescued Ivory. She even wonders whether some slow trickle of stormlight might actually be hitting her each time, knitting her back together by nano-fractions at a time.

"I can't help but wonder what your healing relies on, being torn from your home like you are. Have you tested it at all since arriving?"

She's not asking for a demonstration. But maybe she's just feeling a little envious that hers relies so heavily on this light and this bond.

"Don't sound too enthusiastic," he says, although not unkindly. If anything, he'd expect her to be curious. To want to come up with a hypothesis and test it in controlled conditions. Anything else would be out of character.

"I haven't tested it, no." But it would be far too convenient for him for it to stop working now, and that sort of thing just doesn't happen to him. "I'm sure it's reliant on chroma, like everything else."

Something he still has, considering he's made of it.

His mouth twitches, then, in the dim light of the spheres. "...Jealous?"

How tempting it is to lie. To bluff. To put on a very brave face, pretend like she's at peace with being just as vulnerable and just as normal as any given non-Radiant. She sits with crossroads a moment longer, dropping the sphere and balancing it carefully on the table's corner edge.

"Yes," she finally admits. "Six years to grow accustomed to something is a pittance in comparison to your timeline, I know, but it's long enough."

So she's jealous that he has a version of the thing she's used to having. Confessing so does feel a little better.

Although he doesn't at all feel grateful for his healing, Verso can understand why she'd feel grateful for hers—it's a different scenario, a chosen and earned ability rather than an involuntary one. She seems quite proud of her special abilities; it must be difficult to go without now.

"You'll get it back," he says decisively, confidently; in truth, he has no fucking idea, but that won't make Jasnah feel any better.

"Besides." He cants his head. "I think you're already plenty impressive even without your special powers." Suck-up of the year, honestly.

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