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[recreatable]

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[elsecall]

...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.

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"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.

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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.

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"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?"

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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.

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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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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.

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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."

But for now, she should probably sleep.

[elsecall]

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.

[recreatable]

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.

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"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.

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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."

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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.

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"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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A hard, sharp breath escapes her — almost a laugh, to her own irritation, prompted by the sheer absurdity of his claim. The idea of him, across the room, sparing even half a thought on entertaining her is laughable. Or perhaps the real absurdity is how neatly he evokes all the good, familiar pieces of someone else.

Jasnah watches him in silence. Or rather, the suggestion of him: outline and shadow, softened by the stormlight haze. As she leans forward to gather the spheres — palms bracketing them, rolling their light together — she prepares to drape a handkerchief over the cluster and plunge the room into a gentler dark.

Maybe it's because her thoughts have strayed to the storyteller. Maybe it's because she doesn't want the night to end just yet. Either way, the offer slips out before she can stop herself.

"Can I tell you a story?" Storms — somewhere across the Cosmere, Hoid's ears have surely pricked, a grin spreading for no reason at all. "Just one. And then I'll lie down."

No promises about sleeping.

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If Verso were aware that Jasnah thought he evoked anyone at all, he'd mumble something about not being in the mood for a story and lie down for a miserable night of rumination. Luckily, though, he's not, so he's instead endeared and flattered by the offer of a story. He opens his eyes to the dark, although there's now nothing to see but blackness. "I'm listening."

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A dull creak as she settles her shoulder against the divan's back — still seated upright, but hands now folded in her lap. Notably, she'd tossed the cloth over the spanreed too.

"Pick one," Jasnah prompts him. "I have one story about the Wandersail's namesake and another about the third moon. Mishim."

The former might be a bit more depressing than the latter. But has a wonderfully poignant moral to it.

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Both sound on paper like something he'd want to hear. Stories about ships and moons! Somehow, though, he imagines that Jasnah wouldn't be interested in telling the sort of story he generally likes hearing. Whimsical, fantastical, adventurous. Tales of deep escapism and wild imaginations.

Ruining whatever plans she (and you) probably had: "Tell me a story about you."

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— Joke's on you, Verso Dessendre. You're missing out on a story about how a queen tricked one moon so she could sneak into the sky and have a one night stand with another, different moon. And then have a moon baby.

But instead, suddenly under the microsope lens, Jasnah stiffens where she sits. Not far from where Verso leans his head, her fingers tap-tap-tap on the upholstery. Mildly symptomatic of her racing, calculating brain — searching for a story worth telling without shredding up some part of herself in the process.

"About me," she intones. Buying time. "I think you overestimate how interesting stories about me might be."

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"Feel free to embellish at your leisure," he replies easily, and although it's dark, there's enough wry amusement in his tone to know that he's smiling. The stories aren't interesting because of their content, not really. They're interesting because they're about Jasnah.

Mmm. Sooner or later, this is going to be a problem.

That rumination, too, will have to wait. "You tell me yours, and I'll tell you one from the Continent."

[elsecall]

His offer of a trade tips her over the edge. All right. Her fingers still. She reaches for the blanket from where it lies crumpled at the end of the divan and draws it around her shoulders with a soft, brief sigh. Movement meets stiffness; she pauses, then settles.

Jasnah doesn't preface the story with when I was a child. She simply begins, voice low and precise, as if recounting a minor historical aside rather than something faintly mortifying — trusting him to infer the context of her youth without being told it.

"A story about stories, then. I used to write fiction." A pause, like a test. As if daring him to react poorly. "I love folklore even now, you know, but I also always found it unbearably didactic. Too many gods intervening at the last moment, too many lessons delivered by divine coincidence. So I tended to rewrite them. Fewer Heralds. No Almighty hand on the scale. Heroines who solved their own problems."

She exhales through her nose, a ghost of a huff. Here she is, after all, struggling to solve her own problem. So reliant on someone else.

"I had notebooks full of them. Shelved behind the conventional texts on philosophy and mathematics and languages. For a long time, they were for my eyes only. And for my cousins' and brother's ears."

Her voice softens, almost despite herself. How it always does when the subject turns to Adolin and Renarin and, yes, even Elhokar.

"They were young enough to listen without interrupting. I would read to them in the evenings, when our parents were occupied. It was the perfect opportunity to edit aloud as I went. Cutting indulgent phrasing, sharpening my dialogue. Elhokar used to carve little figures while he listened. Whittling is, of course, considered a masculine art. But they were dreadful. Misshapen men with axes too large for their bodies. It seemed important, so I told him they were marvelous anyway."

The moment threatens to linger. Too tender, too close to grief. So she moves on, briskly, deliberately.

"Anyway. One afternoon, an ardent found one of my notebooks."

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'Poorly' isn't how he reacts. Although she can't see him in the dark, he raises an eyebrow, curious. Fiction wouldn't have been his first, second, or third guess at the type of writing Jasnah enjoys doing. Technical writing, nonfiction accounts of history, opinion pieces—they'd all have been more likely considerations.

—He thinks, for a moment, of the Writers. They aren't a Maman creation, and so he has no real experience with them, but Clea had spoken of them the times that she entered the Canvas and deigned to talk to him. Told him that the fire Alicia had been mangled in, the one that he was supposed to die in, had been set by Writers. Some sort of power struggle between them and the Painters, a war that she had to fight on her lonesome. Is that what Jasnah would have been, if she were from Paris?

But she isn't, and neither is he.

"You are a good writer," he quips. "You know how to build suspense."

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Yet another quiet, not-quite laugh slips past her. Of course she understands suspense. Even now. Literary theory had been folded into her education early, and eager child that she was, she'd practiced it at every opportunity. The world had felt larger then. Full of branching paths and conditional futures. Possibility, everywhere.

"He had been sent to catalogue the family library.", she continues her story. "I was careless. I left a notebook on my desk instead of returning it to its place." The words carry a faint edge of remembered irritation. "It was...one of the less conventional stories. And because my father could not read it himself, I believe this qualifies as the first time my work was read aloud by someone who was not me."

A pause. Maybe he can hear the dull sound of her picking at the upholstery.

"That particular tale involved a young woman exposing a corrupt highprince, defeating him in a duel, and winning his Shardblade. Not through divine favour, but through preparation, training, and a willingness to do what was right."

Yes. Saying it aloud now, the throughline is almost embarrassingly obvious.

"There were," Jasnah continues carefully, "concerns raised about tone. And propriety. And apparently the dangers of impressionable young princelings encountering the idea that authority might be earned instead of granted. The ardent took issue with the fact that she won."

The punishment, she explains, was efficient, although not especially cruel: "I was assigned several weeks of supervised prayer under the Devotary of Purity. My notebooks were confiscated for the duration. But my mother did return them all afterward. Quietly. Without comment."

Only later in life did she realize Navani was likely working outside of Gavilar's purview in that instance. But the damage had been done. After that, Jasnah had confined herself mostly to history. Although, as a Versititalian, she still dabbled more in folklore than other historians did.

"And yet," she adds, almost idly, "Renarin still asks for that story. Even now. He insists it was unfinished. I suppose some things leave a longer wake than we intend."

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It's a charming little tale. Surprisingly adventurous. It says a lot about Jasnah, though, about the sort of things she prizes. Success through hard work, and knocking highprinces on their asses. In the dark, he smiles.

"Was it unfinished?"

It had seemed to tie up neatly in a bow with her winning of the Shardblade, but perhaps there were story threads left unraveled?

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"I didn't think so."

For her, it had been enough that the heroine successfully (and, perhaps, literally) made her point.

"But Renarin..." Jasnah trails off. How to even broach the subject of her younger cousin? Slight and sickly and so so so observant. Sometimes, he said things that made others around him wince and cringe. But Jasnah always appreciated his honesty. Usually, Renarin hated being touched — and she could empathize with him on that front, so they developed a secret signal for one another. For those rare, important times when either actually needed a hug.

"Well. Renarin's arguments to the contrary, and the many alternate endings they spawned, might be another story onto itself."