recreatable | open post.

It's weird of him to be into this. He recognizes that on some rational, pragmatic level. On an emotional level, though, it feels like she's touching him, willingly and readily, and— it has been an extremely long time since he felt another person's fingers against his for any reason other than practicality. He swallows.

"Cool, huh?"

As in fascinating, interesting, exciting. The finger still feels warm and alive. It presses back against hers, playful.

"One time I made one of my fingers crawl into Monoco's bedroll. I didn't know he could scream so high-pitched."

"Bewilderingly warm, actually."

— Because Jasnah is ignorant of that particular linguistic shift for cool. She taps the edge of her nail against a knuckle. And then gives the pinky a slow, experimental squeeze.

"Could you stay separated indefinitely?"

She wouldn't want him to. But the question steals across her all the same. Seemingly, he can stay separated long enough to play a prank without any concerns or considerations.

Girl, you are so weird. But then again, he's the one playing pranks with his disembodied fingers, so maybe they both have something to answer for. Regardless—

"Sure," he says with a shrug. "It's great for multitasking."

To her thin, thin credit — the shock has dissipated just enough that she doesn't even shiver grimly at the implication. And (perhaps a bit problematically) she finds herself looping back to the notion of spren. Sending a finger, a hand, an eyeball (?) off to snoop a room like she might occasionally send Ivory.

Having built up enough courage, she at long last and rather inevitably plucks the pinky off the counter and sets it in her gloved hand.

"You're fascinating," she mutters. At first blush it might feel forced after the day's earlier Lecture on compliments and praise, but the reality is that she's so distracted in her thoughts that it can't be anything but impulsive.

There's a little pang of melancholy in his chest, of wishing he could be fascinating for something that's his instead of every interesting thing about him being owned by someone else. There's no point, though, in dwelling on things that can't be—although he certainly loves to do it—so he pushes the thought out of his mind, smiling faintly and ruefully.

"Thanks." A cant of his head. "So are you."

...And she's too busy staring at the little finger — tilting her palm just barely — to notice the tension in his reaction. Jasnah turns to face away from the counter, setting her hip against it's edge. She isn't ordinarily a leaner; however, her injury and subsequent need for a little extra support has turned her into someone eager to take advantage of nearby stable surfaces.

"Not like this," she counters. Not quite thinking through her words. Just speaking, unfiltered, as she finally tears her attention back to him.

Well. The rest of him.

"What about now — right now. Does it still...hurt?"

Mm. Not like this. Verso takes that comment, files it away in his brain for later inspection and argument.

As for the pain— yeah, it does. It's not unbearable by any means, but there's still an unpleasant ache at his knuckle, where the finger should be attached. He doesn't want Jasnah to feel bad about having essentially asked him to do this, though, so he answers with a decisive, "Not at all. It barely hurt to begin with."

He mops up a streak of blood on the counter that he'd missed.

"Do you want to watch me reattach it?"

There's a sound in the back of her throat. She doesn't believe him. Or — well — she could have believed the first statement (that it doesn't hurt still) but he oversells it by suggesting it didn't hurt initially either. These are the little lies that add up to patterns. Tells, really. And although she doesn't consciously hitch on it just now, it sifts away to the growing sediment in her profile for him.

"Yes," she confirms, holding out her hand and offering his own finger back to Verso.

Verso reaches out, the fingers that are still attached grazing Jasnah's palm as he plucks his pinky from her grasp. The most unpleasant part is of course the actual injury, but reattaching is a close second; he can't help but make a trepidatious face as be lines the finger up with the hole at his knuckle. Gritting his teeth, he presses the finger back in place—

A litany of swears tumble out of his mouth, fuckshitputain and so on, as he feels the tissue of his hand reaching out for its relative, connections between muscles and nerve and bone reforming too quickly to be comfortable.

—and then it's over, and he lets out a sigh of relief.

"It's as easy as that," he says, wiggling his now-attached pinky finger.

"Easy," she echoes.

Her eyes had been fixed on the spot where his pinky met his hand. As if she could glean something from the moment — imagining, maybe, what's happening on the scale of axi and tissue. She can't help but note that of all the sharp, short words that have tumbled out of his mouth — most haven't been the ones he's taught her. Is he holding out on her? Maybe. Likely. At the very least he's absolutely dodging the truth about the pain he feels.

Hmm. She slides a half-foot closer and reaches for his hand. This time, she doesn't ask for permission before touching him — grip closing losely on his wrist, tugging his palm upwards so she can examine the finger returned to its rightful place. Just as before, she traces a line from fingertip to knuckle, like she's looking for a seam or scar.

"Why are you lying about how much it hurts?" She asks, gaze still buried in his hand.

It's even better being touched by her with his finger attached. Of course it is; he can feel the warmth of her fingers around his wrist, the brush of her fingertip down the length of his little finger. His heartbeat picks up tempo, and he turns his hand over as she inspects it, suddenly self-conscious of the piano calluses on his own fingertips.

The sensation of having someone's hand so close to his even for purely scientific reasons is so thrilling that he barely catches her callout. It takes a moment for his mind to catch up, but finally he says, "—I've had worse."

As truthful as he can get.

"Don't want to mar my tough reputation."

Jasnah doesn't release his hand. Not yet.

A long, slow exhale through her nose. Not quite laughter — the situation doesn't quite call for laughter — but it's softer than incredulity and harsher than a chuckle. What tough reputation? She's learned enough by now to realize he wouldn't like her suggesting that he hasn't got anything near such a reputation with her. But it's kind of his own fault, really, given how initially he'd convinced her he was some soft city-dwelling musician. Not that same creature turned survivalist.

Besides, she's the daughter of one warlord and the niece of another. Her scale for tough reputations is a bit hard to tilt.

"Tell me there isn't, say, dozens of little left-behind fingers rattling around the Continent."

Free-range. Perhaps abandoned in favour of regrowth.

The not-laugh should be offensive, but it isn't. He's spent a long time with a protective carapace around him, so long that it often felt impossible to chisel down to the soft flesh below. It's almost a relief that she doesn't see him that way. That she thinks of him how he should be, how he would've been. Maybe how he can be, now.

So, he doesn't meet it with a scoff or a frown but with a soft laugh of his own. "It's entirely possible they've started their own society by now."

—A pause, then, as his mind echoes back to what she'd said earlier. "Hey. What did you mean, 'not like this'?"

Oh. What a ludicrous, haunting thought. She'd also laugh, except she's caught ever-so-almost off-guard by his question.

Her first reaction feels a little...circuitous. What does he mean what did she mean? Jasnah had been so caught up in the spectacle (exactly as he'd intended for to be!) that for one rare jot she hadn't been running her usually strict and careful self-audit on every word and implication.

So, her pause is legible. She flexes her gloved fingers against his wrist — a little one, two, three rhythm not unlike when she taps her fingers on a book cover or a tabletop — and combs back through their exchange in an attempt to pinpoint exactly what he's asking after. Her search comes up dry.

Frowning, she confesses her confusion with a soft: "Hmm?" But doesn't look up from his hand.

She hadn't meant to say it, he suddenly realizes, and it begs the question of just how many things she's held back from saying because she wasn't distracted enough. It's hypocritical considering all the words he's let die in his throat before they ever made it out of his mouth, but he can't help feeling dismayed. Surely he's proven himself as someone she can talk to freely. Hell, he's told her things he's never told anyone else, things that felt like he might as well have been stripped down and standing naked in front of her for how exposing they were.

"I said that you were fascinating," he reminds her, "and you said 'not like this'."

If it were him being questioned right now, he knows how he'd respond: deflect, distance, redirect. He'd say something flippant and move on, and the conversational topic would die with him. Reluctant to allow her to do the same before he's gotten to say his piece, he doesn't wait for her to answer. He can take an educated guess at what she'd meant.

"You don't really believe that, do you?" He tilts his head, frowning. "You should know, Jasnah, that what you can do is the least interesting thing about you."

Power is an illusion of perception. And Jasnah believes she's adept at sculpting that perception. Oh, she's no Lightweaver. Her tools are so much more pedestrian than that — confidence, competence, and just enough conventionality to be taken seriously. She is a collection of books. She is a creature made up of philosophies and guiding principles. Remove one, and the rest come crashing down around her head.

What she does — what she can do — is all she is. And in this she is so much like her father, chasing legacy.

Her thumb (right, bare) settles in the crook of Verso's littlest finger. She can't figure out how his regeneration could possibly work. Stormlight, she understands. Jasnah could lay out a whole lecture on why a big breath of stormlight could stitch her wound right up. Good as new. However, she can't explain him. Maybe that's the point.

Something makes her smile, but wry and mirthless and a little bit sad. It always hurts to catch yourself falling prey to the same mistakes you accuse others of making.

"You're right. Defining someone simply by what they can do results in a — a reduction from the infinite variety that is personhood," she answers. Quoting something, clearly.

It's not a bad quote. All the same, he shakes his head. "You do this thing," he notes, softly, trying not to sound accusatory, "where you word things like—"

How does he describe it? She'd done it in the restaurant, too, when she'd discussed the difficulty returning from the Cognitive Realm. She'd phrased it as if... "Like it's an academic discussion." Like she has no personal stake in it, like she's simply an observer.

Very lightly, so gently that it could easily be mistaken for an accident or an involuntary physical reaction, he curls his little finger around her thumb. "I'm not talking about 'someone'. I'm talking about you."

Again: he's right. But the Philosophy of Aspiration is the bedrock of both her life and her work (is there any difference between the two?) and such an ideological mistress demanded that every action, every choice, should be in service of a greater ideal. The greater good, at any cost. The first and easiest cost will always be herself. Remove the heart from the equation at the jump. Approach every fork in the road with a scholar's duty to analyze what went wrong. What could go wrong. And make the best choice accordingly. For the Kholin family, for Alethkar, for Roshar, for the Cosmere.

He's right, but she won't look at that fact for too too long. It's not ready to be confronted. She doesn't want to confront it, anyway. She shies away.

"I'm an academic," she seethes a little in her response. Frustration sliding into place, covering the gaps that might otherwise be left vulnerable by his conclusion. "It's only fitting that I should discuss things like one."

But her hand reacts to his light, gentle movement. She's too smart to think it an accident but too comforted to spurn it. She does do him one better, though, by converting their loose grip on one another into something firmer — ostensibly because she wants help walking back to the divan. And just like she's been doing aloud, she hides her personal stake in something overtly practical.

Her reaction is less than ideal, and whatever confidence he'd had in saying what he did deflates like a sad balloon. Perhaps he'd thought they were closer than they were, and he's just being presumptuous. He helps her back to the divan, sitting her back down, and hesitates for a moment. It feels as if—despite all his best intentions—he can't help but do everything wrong with her. A tough pill to swallow for a perfectionist.

"Sorry," he says, although he's not sure what he's sorry for. "I didn't mean anything by it."

Then, as a quick excuse to abscond, he jerks his thumb over his shoulder. "I'm going to go soak that rag so Jochi doesn't think there's been a murder."

Her head and her heart are a snarl. A wicked dislocation — where he can do everything right, and that very rightness drives her further inward, away from the parts of herself that might, if indulged, want more. That's the true point of friction: every measure of care she invests in herself is care withheld from elsewhere. A calculated, cold altruism she has long mistaken for virtue. Unsustainable.

She bites back a retort. Why say something if you don't mean it? A rhetorical question, and one that neatly underlines how little she believes these milquetoast retractions of his

And yet — storm it — she still feels foul, watching that hunted, darting quality to his reactions. As though he is running a maze she laid out. Guilt pricks at her for hearing his apology. She doesn't know how to return it gently. Or whether she even should.

So she busies herself checking on Ivory instead. Something to occupy her hands now that they are no longer holding his.

"You apologize too much."

Says the woman who apologizes far too little.

Verso returns to the kitchenette, running the sink and watching dark red dilute into pink and swirl down the drain. He doesn't apologize enough. He's been guilty every moment of his life, and every reckless thing he's done has just been a vain attempt to distract himself from the crushing shame of existence. Every impossible reach for perfection an attempt to make up for the sin of being.

I have a lot to apologize for catches somewhere in his throat. It's a big thing to say, and although the past few weeks had slowly chiseled an opening for it to pass through, the embarrassment of—overstepping? Misreading the situation? Making a mistake, by any account—has sewn it back up.

"I think that's subjective," he says, thumb scraping over a stubborn bloodstain.

"...A fair point."

And the point she had been attempting to make — albeit poorly. That simply because he feels guilty about something does not mean the other party needs (or even wants) an apology. Yet, on reflection, she can quite neatly trace how archly informing him that he is doing too much of something fails to convey the reassurance he likely required in that moment.

...Absurdly — and wonderfully — Renarin leaps to the front of her thoughts.

"Would it help," she hedges, uncharacteristically hesitant as she eases into the suggestion, "if we agreed upon a signal? Some sign or indication when one of us — subjectively — expects an apology."

Storms. Such a thing would certainly help her.

She has stretched, turned, twisted on the divan to sit half-leaning against its backboard. Positioned just so she can watch the line of his shoulders as he works.

He wants to stew in his discontent. Wants to make this into some sort of miserable feedback loop where his dissatisfaction with things makes him feel even worse and worse. I think you enjoy moping, Clea had once accused. Then you never have to try.

But the suggestion of a secret signal, as if they're children, makes him laugh a little. Quiet and involuntary and wry—the cousin of a scoff—but a laugh all the same. He doesn't point out that their signal could just be asking for an apology. God knows neither of them would do that.

So: "Like what?"

"Like — like anything. We'd be its architects."

She folds an arm across the back of the divan. One recurring side effect of her injury as it heals is this constant need to support herself. Good posture and a straight spine aren't quite enough. So, uncharacteristically, she curls forward and learns her chin in the crook of her elbow.

But she understands that he'd asked for an example.

So: "My cousin doesn't like to be touched — at least, not without some warning — and there are always exceptions," says the other Kholin who doesn't like to be touched without some warning and also houses many exceptions. "He and I have a signal we share whenever one wants to give the other a hug. We've always done it. Since we were young."

Verso has rightly identified the childishness of the scheme. After all, a pair of very serious and rational and systems-thinking children developed it.

"That's nice," he says, because it is. Hard to imagine Jasnah ever asking for physical affection, but perhaps it's different with family. Or maybe it's different with everyone who isn't him.

"Me and my sister had a signal for when she wanted me to shut up. She'd pinch me."

Not exactly the same thing, though.

"What was your signal?"

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