"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."
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."
"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.
It's less effective in the dark, but she nevertheless cuts him a shadowed look. She knows he's got no storming clue whether she will or will not reclaim her abilities. She knows he's only saying so to be...what? Supportive, maybe. Jasnah chokes a little on the hollowness of it.
"I know," she levels her response. Why be coy or shy about her skills? She was impressive before she'd said her first Ideal. Had already been building her reknown, for better or worse.
"But I appreciate you saying so, all the same. Thank you."
True to form, the night makes honesty a little easier.
Verso laughs, because of course her response to flattery is 'I know'. Nothing has ever been so quintessentially Jasnah. Fortunately, he finds it charming instead of grating (although he's sure Jasnah would be certain to tell him that she doesn't care if he finds it charming or not).
"She said she'd wait." We'll wait, actually. Whoever 'we' is. "You can pen a reply in the morning."
It's tempting. Tempting to lie back down and let her consciousness drift, safe with the knowledge that he's back. And that he likely won't be sleeping while she does. Mercenary, maybe, to take comfort in someone else's insomnia. But she does all the same.
...Did she sleep more before stormlight broadened her constitution? Maybe. Probably. Thoughtful, she uses a fingertip to roll the infused sphere back into the pile with its fellows. The light casts just far enough to sorta-kinda see him sitting. Present and near.
"I don't believe the wait was intended to stretch to morning," Jasnah counters. "I'll just..."
She reaches for the spanreed once again and commits. Well, sorta.
May want to requisition Windrunners for return trip. Will update again in the morning.
Verso watches Jasnah completely disregard his suggestion to chill the fuck out with a flat expression. It's the middle of the night. Surely, the wait is perfectly fine to stretch to morning now that her mother has confirmation of life.
"—You're impossible," he says, shaking his head but good-natured all the same.
"It's barely anything to write," she protests — turning the paper towards him, in its frame, and letting him see the length of her message even if the angle likely leaves it hard to decipher. "Not even a paragraph. Not worth deferring."
But, yes, she is indeed impossible. And strong-headed. And maybe, just maybe, she defied him because she needed to defy him. Just a little. A small, surgical reassertion of her agency.
Verso laughs again, dry and under his breath. Jasnah would probably not like to hear it, but she's ridiculous. Difficult for the sake of being difficult. As if to prove that she doesn't have to listen to him, like that's something a queen needs to do.
"Put the spanreed down." Before someone gets hurt!! Hypocritically, he says, "It won't kill you to stop thinking for a few hours."
It's just that no one — no one — generally dares address her like this. Well, not since Wit left. Wit, who was always scheming ways to turn down the roiling of her thoughts for even a half-an-hour.
At least after her earlier misstep, she swallows down the urge to knock him (gently, but correctively) on the temple with the spanreed pen itself.
"It's not as though you'll be sleeping, either," she levels at him — calling out aloud what he'd never actually said, but the pattern of which she's lived every evening for this past week. Once, maybe, he'd managed to trick her into dozing off on the false assumption that he too was going to sleep.
"Of course not," he says lightly, shrugging his shoulders a little before leaning back against the divan, knees pulled up toward his chest. It's not anywhere close to comfortable, but hardly anything has been for the past week or so. Shooting her a lopsided grin in the darkness: "All of these entertaining things I say aren't off the cuff, you know."
He lets his head loll back enough for the tips of his hair to graze the fabric of the divan, eyes closing. "I have to spend my nights scheming up ways to make you laugh." Which are nearly all unsuccessful.
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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."
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"Family things," she repeats. "You mean my mother. Specifically."
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Lightly: "Mother problems. Father problems. Third cousin twice removed problems. I've been known to lend a sympathetic ear about them all."
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"She worries. And I suppose I've given her cause to."
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"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?"
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"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."
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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?"
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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.
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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?"
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— 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."
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"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."
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"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.
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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.
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"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.
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"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?"
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"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.
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"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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"I know," she levels her response. Why be coy or shy about her skills? She was impressive before she'd said her first Ideal. Had already been building her reknown, for better or worse.
"But I appreciate you saying so, all the same. Thank you."
True to form, the night makes honesty a little easier.
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"She said she'd wait." We'll wait, actually. Whoever 'we' is. "You can pen a reply in the morning."
But for now, she should probably sleep.
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...Did she sleep more before stormlight broadened her constitution? Maybe. Probably. Thoughtful, she uses a fingertip to roll the infused sphere back into the pile with its fellows. The light casts just far enough to sorta-kinda see him sitting. Present and near.
"I don't believe the wait was intended to stretch to morning," Jasnah counters. "I'll just..."
She reaches for the spanreed once again and commits. Well, sorta.
May want to requisition Windrunners for return trip. Will update again in the morning.
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"—You're impossible," he says, shaking his head but good-natured all the same.
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But, yes, she is indeed impossible. And strong-headed. And maybe, just maybe, she defied him because she needed to defy him. Just a little. A small, surgical reassertion of her agency.
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"Put the spanreed down." Before someone gets hurt!! Hypocritically, he says, "It won't kill you to stop thinking for a few hours."
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At least after her earlier misstep, she swallows down the urge to knock him (gently, but correctively) on the temple with the spanreed pen itself.
"It's not as though you'll be sleeping, either," she levels at him — calling out aloud what he'd never actually said, but the pattern of which she's lived every evening for this past week. Once, maybe, he'd managed to trick her into dozing off on the false assumption that he too was going to sleep.
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He lets his head loll back enough for the tips of his hair to graze the fabric of the divan, eyes closing. "I have to spend my nights scheming up ways to make you laugh." Which are nearly all unsuccessful.
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