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.
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."
A faint, affectionate smile lingers on her face. A little sad, maybe, but still brimming over with a quiet love. Never has she ever refused one of Renarin's signals — not even, not even when every fiber of academic instinct was telling her he'd be their downfall. That boy — like her — only asked for such comfort sparingly, and when every other comfort has failed.
"A pointed nod," she answers. The one word can't quite sum up how obvious it is between the two of them. So, hesitating a little, she clarifies: "A nod if you need one. A hand outstretched, palm up, if you think the other person needs one but they haven't figured it out just yet — and then you wait for their nod."
Verso feels a sharp pang of longing. The people—if you can call Esquie and Monoco 'people'—who would offer him that sort of comfort aren't around anymore. No wonder he's felt so ridiculously lonely. No wonder he latched on so hard to the only person to toss minuscule crumbs of interest his way. He'd give anything for an Esquie hug right about now.
"That's good," he says, trying not to sound like the mention of such closeness and affection has made him feel miserable, "that you had each other for that."
He sets the still slightly bloodstained rag aside. "You can scratch your nose if you want me to apologize." 'If you want me' is intentional—he'll never ask her to apologize. "Or tug on your earlobe. Or do a jaunty little jig, if you want."
There's a vague sense of offness — but there so often is. And in stark contrast to his position on such matters, she makes a point of waiting to be invited into someone else's troubled thoughts.
Instead, she tests each option in turn. A brief scratch on the side of her nose — but it feels at risk of being tripped unintentionally. A more well-received tug on first one earlobe and then the other. Hm. Could work.
Easy acceptance. No skin off his back, really. It'll be good to have confirmation when he's done something wrong, instead of just a creeping sense of dread.
Still, he feels a bit awkward. Uncertain how to segue back into normalcy. He clears his throat. "—And if you want me to shut up, you can feel free to pinch me." Just like Clea. "I have tough skin."
Does she not notice his sense of awkwardness? Or does she simply not consider it issue enough to alleviate? Hard to say. Impossible to know. Except for the part where she's still watching him from her chin-propped position against the back of the divan, attention never straying.
"I noticed," she skips right over the part about pinching him. But just because she skips it doesn't mean it hasn't been committed to memory. Just you wait. "The pads of your fingers. Is that — the piano? The guitar? Both?"
Oh. Odd conversational turn, but all right. He had thought she might notice—hence the self-consciousness—but he hadn't expected her to ask about them. He glances down at his hand for a split-second, then back up.
"Both, I guess," he says with a shrug. "Before you ask— I suppose I could heal them, but they'd just come back again."
She nods into the crook of her arm. Relieved, maybe? As though she was wondering first and foremost if it was hard living on the continent that had caused the callouses. Not that it would have been a knock against him if so — but she does believe they're more like badges of hard work and determination when earned through his playing. And although he's right, she absolutely would have asked, she thinks he's made the right decision in not healing them.
However. That leaves one very obvious and previously undiscussed topic.
Verso touches the tips of his fingers to the uneven skin of his scar. It's an understandable question; a marred face doesn't really fit the 'sensitive musician' aesthetic.
"I kept it as a— reminder, I guess. Of"—it's hard to explain without really telling her everything, so—"what I was fighting for, or... against." He drops his hand. "And it's a conversation piece."
How Romantic. Truly, in the big-R sense of the word. Or sentimental, maybe. She can't imagine requiring a physical reminder of her cause — it consumes her daily. Or...it used to. It's been so long since she's devoted any serious, deep-thinking time to the larger problems at hand.
She tears her eyes off Verso at last to take a sneaky, guilty peek at her satchel of maps. Then, smooth enough, she looks back at him.
"What happened?"
And so the conversation piece fulfills its purpose.
—All right. He probably should have expected that. Jasnah has a question about everything, after all.
Part of him wants to blurt everything out, every horrible, self-incriminating detail. It's been so long since he had someone he could really talk to. Open up to. It would feel awful, but it would be a relief, too, like working out a particularly painful knot in his shoulders.
But the rarity of companionship is exactly why he can't tell her everything—Jasnah is the only friend he has, and he regularly feels as if he's on thin ice without her knowing the ugly details of how he's spent the last 67 years. If she really knew him, she wouldn't like him anymore.
"The commander of my Expedition." True. He just fails to mention that he called said commander Papa. "We fought."
Jasnah gets this look in her eyes — a quiet glimmer of fascination. The sort she wears when she's found a piece of rhetoric dense enough to deserve rereading. When she already knows she'll winnow away at its sentences until the key lines are etched into her memory. She loves this. Exactly this: the careful assembly of another world's logic, another person's experience. A glimpse behind a foreign curtain.
A glimpse behind Verso's, too.
The new detail lands with a soft, startled click. Verso fought with a superior officer — or whatever an Expedition's commander could be considered — and now she must take that grain of information and test it against the half-sketched outline she carries of him. It doesn't slot neatly into place. For all their squabbling, she's never marked him as particularly rebellious or habitually insubordinate. If anything, she's noted how readily he yields when pressed, how quickly he backs down once she draws a line. Obedient, if cagey.
Hmm.
She makes a decision.
"Come sit down," she says, already shifting to sit properly on the divan. It's an order, delivered without heat, and is in itself a kind of test of her hypothesis. "I'm going to have more questions, and it's not comfortable to ask them like this."
Fielding questions about one of the worst moments of his life isn't his idea of a fun way to spend an afternoon, but Verso sits gingerly beside her on the divan regardless. Perhaps exemplifying obedient but cagey.
"Every Expedition has a commander." Admittedly, there hadn't been 'every Expedition' back then, just one. It hadn't even gotten its name—Expedition Zero—at that point. Just the Expedition. "Ours was a man named Renoir."
Jasnah would prefer not to make assumptions from the jump. Although she's comfortable with being incorrect, it always feels somehow deeply disrespectful to assert something about another person instead of simply asking.
But, as Verso settles next to her, she experiments a little with her approach.
"It must have been something severe," she picks her way carefully through the sentence — mirror a little how he's approached her stories in the past. A quality she's always observed, even if she's outwardly ignored. "For you to fight your commander."
Oh. Yes, that's a different approach than he expects; he'd already steeled himself for a semi-interrogation, a barrage of questions that would serve only to make him feel terrible. He blinks a few times, surprised that Jasnah has limited herself to simply making an observation.
"I told you, I think," he says, slowly, the gears in his mind turning as he tries to figure out how to express this without confession, "that most of my Expedition didn't make it."
'Didn't make it' makes it sound so vague. It's an inappropriate way to phrase what really happened: horrible violence, some of it at his own hands. That's not the story being told right now, though.
"Most, but not all. Renoir has the same... affliction as I do."
A curt, confirming nod. He did indeed tell her — in similarly vague terms — that he had survived the cohort. And despite her distaste for assumptions, she'd certainly already assumed it had been the monsters on the continent that had torn that Expedition apart. At any rate, Verso's storytelling had deftly (perhaps not even consciously) delivered her to that conclusion.
But this last bit is new. Freshly minted intel, to be carefully considered.
"So the two of you survived," she prompts — gut protesting against this practice, but so far he hasn't thrown some flippant shield up in her way. She'll continue her experiment. "When no one else did."
Wait! There's something else Verso always does at this junction of one of her stories — something she usually hates to hear, because it feels so much like an uncomfortable attempt for someone else to etch their guesses onto her heart. But she tries it now.
"It must have been — difficult. Surviving something like that together."
Her delivery is not smooth. But, storms, she's trying.
As much as Jasnah hates it, the softer approach works for him, visibly so—a slight lessening of the tension in his shoulders, eyes on hers instead of looking anywhere but her face. Not everyone prefers being asked endless questions. It's less pressure like this, when he can pick and choose how he wants to share and in what way.
"It wasn't— easy," he admits. It was fucking horrible, honestly; even all of these years later, he can still picture the slaughter, Clea's expression cold and indifferent through it all as if she were squashing a pesky bug instead of killing all of his friends. This still isn't about that, though.
"He thought that our immortality was a gift from the Paintress." Verso feels ashamed to think that he'd felt the same way once. He'd been so stupid. "We argued all the time."
He leaves the implication that they'd once been allied at that. No need to expound on what he did alongside Renoir.
"He would have done anything to stop the Expeditions from getting to her," he says, weight on the word anything. "I wanted to leave, and he—" Went on a tirade about how Verso was tearing the family apart. The first of many. "Let's just say he didn't want to accept my resignation."
Her throat feels tight in that strange anxious way — like the very scaffolding of her body has wrenched itself into a tense hold, worried she'll be caught with her hand in a drawer she really shouldn't be plundering. Even now, she can't understand why it's not preferable to field a question — to either agree to answer it or not. This way feels somehow sneaky.
Manipulative.
— But she doesn't mind the way he meets her eyes. Properly. It might be worth it for that alone.
"I remember, on the Shattered Plains. You mentioned not everyone thinks she needs to be stopped. Was that Renoir you were talking about?"
'So that we' what—?? Storms, he can probably see the question stuck in her craw. Floating behind her eyes. Tickling just under her lower lip, so much so that she bites down with her top teeth and must visibly restrain herself from chasing that dangling, unfinished mystery.
Jasnah crosses her arms over her chest — squeezing a little tightly, like the tension helps keep her instincts in check. Because now not only is she stuck wondering what he hasn't said, but she finds herself once again circling the nature of this Paintress like a carrion chicken. What are the confines that keep her from being free? Is it anything like the oaths that bind Odium to Roshar? And this Renoir wants to free her, whereas Verso — doesn't? Why? What purpose is served in keeping the Paintress confined?
(Why did Hoid insist they couldn't possibly let Odium renegotiate the terms of his captivity?)
After a silence that hangs just a little too long, she unwinds her arms enough to once again tap a finger against her cheekbone.
"He did that. To you."
Her tone is so carefully flattened. Not a single interrogative rise to be found.
"Yeah," he says after a long moment, eyes finally drifting off to stare at a point somewhere beyond her face, gone a little distant. "That was the first time he ever—"
Laid a hand on Verso. They'd never had the closeness Verso had with his mother—Renoir had preferred Alicia and Clea, and he'd known it—but it had never been hostile like that. He'd never been afraid of his own father before that day.
He shakes his head, eyes refocusing on her face again. "It's killing you not to ask questions, isn't it?"
Some blanks are easier to fill in. Jasnah nods into the gap between one sentence and the next, understanding somewhat implicitly what he isn't saying — although narrowed to the confines of a leader and their charges. Like a scholar betraying her ward. Without thinking, she eases an inch or two closer on the divan. And for what? Jasnah doesn't reach out, doesn't take his hand, doesn't do anything. Just...watches him, thinking a little too long and a little too hard about what it means to purposefully, intentionally keep a memento from a dynamic like that.
"Am I so transparent?" She asks, already knowing the answer. Jasnah loosens her shoulders and gives her neck a brief, easy side-to-side stretch. Trying to act like her whole body isn't an anxious spool of wire wound too tight with the effort and focus it takes to pay a different kind of attention.
Absolutely transparent. Nonetheless, it's sweet for her to have held back this long. Verso smiles wryly, reaching back to press his thumb against the juncture of his neck and shoulder. "If you press down here for long enough, it'll release some of that tension." He knows because he's also tense as fuck.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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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?"
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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.
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"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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"A pointed nod," she answers. The one word can't quite sum up how obvious it is between the two of them. So, hesitating a little, she clarifies: "A nod if you need one. A hand outstretched, palm up, if you think the other person needs one but they haven't figured it out just yet — and then you wait for their nod."
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"That's good," he says, trying not to sound like the mention of such closeness and affection has made him feel miserable, "that you had each other for that."
He sets the still slightly bloodstained rag aside. "You can scratch your nose if you want me to apologize." 'If you want me' is intentional—he'll never ask her to apologize. "Or tug on your earlobe. Or do a jaunty little jig, if you want."
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Instead, she tests each option in turn. A brief scratch on the side of her nose — but it feels at risk of being tripped unintentionally. A more well-received tug on first one earlobe and then the other. Hm. Could work.
She does not do a jaunty jig, sorry.
"Ear. Let's go with ear."
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Easy acceptance. No skin off his back, really. It'll be good to have confirmation when he's done something wrong, instead of just a creeping sense of dread.
Still, he feels a bit awkward. Uncertain how to segue back into normalcy. He clears his throat. "—And if you want me to shut up, you can feel free to pinch me." Just like Clea. "I have tough skin."
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"I noticed," she skips right over the part about pinching him. But just because she skips it doesn't mean it hasn't been committed to memory. Just you wait. "The pads of your fingers. Is that — the piano? The guitar? Both?"
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"Both, I guess," he says with a shrug. "Before you ask— I suppose I could heal them, but they'd just come back again."
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However. That leaves one very obvious and previously undiscussed topic.
"...And your scar?"
She taps one finger high on her own cheekbone.
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"I kept it as a— reminder, I guess. Of"—it's hard to explain without really telling her everything, so—"what I was fighting for, or... against." He drops his hand. "And it's a conversation piece."
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She tears her eyes off Verso at last to take a sneaky, guilty peek at her satchel of maps. Then, smooth enough, she looks back at him.
"What happened?"
And so the conversation piece fulfills its purpose.
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Part of him wants to blurt everything out, every horrible, self-incriminating detail. It's been so long since he had someone he could really talk to. Open up to. It would feel awful, but it would be a relief, too, like working out a particularly painful knot in his shoulders.
But the rarity of companionship is exactly why he can't tell her everything—Jasnah is the only friend he has, and he regularly feels as if he's on thin ice without her knowing the ugly details of how he's spent the last 67 years. If she really knew him, she wouldn't like him anymore.
"The commander of my Expedition." True. He just fails to mention that he called said commander Papa. "We fought."
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A glimpse behind Verso's, too.
The new detail lands with a soft, startled click. Verso fought with a superior officer — or whatever an Expedition's commander could be considered — and now she must take that grain of information and test it against the half-sketched outline she carries of him. It doesn't slot neatly into place. For all their squabbling, she's never marked him as particularly rebellious or habitually insubordinate. If anything, she's noted how readily he yields when pressed, how quickly he backs down once she draws a line. Obedient, if cagey.
Hmm.
She makes a decision.
"Come sit down," she says, already shifting to sit properly on the divan. It's an order, delivered without heat, and is in itself a kind of test of her hypothesis. "I'm going to have more questions, and it's not comfortable to ask them like this."
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"Every Expedition has a commander." Admittedly, there hadn't been 'every Expedition' back then, just one. It hadn't even gotten its name—Expedition Zero—at that point. Just the Expedition. "Ours was a man named Renoir."
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But, as Verso settles next to her, she experiments a little with her approach.
"It must have been something severe," she picks her way carefully through the sentence — mirror a little how he's approached her stories in the past. A quality she's always observed, even if she's outwardly ignored. "For you to fight your commander."
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"I told you, I think," he says, slowly, the gears in his mind turning as he tries to figure out how to express this without confession, "that most of my Expedition didn't make it."
'Didn't make it' makes it sound so vague. It's an inappropriate way to phrase what really happened: horrible violence, some of it at his own hands. That's not the story being told right now, though.
"Most, but not all. Renoir has the same... affliction as I do."
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But this last bit is new. Freshly minted intel, to be carefully considered.
"So the two of you survived," she prompts — gut protesting against this practice, but so far he hasn't thrown some flippant shield up in her way. She'll continue her experiment. "When no one else did."
Wait! There's something else Verso always does at this junction of one of her stories — something she usually hates to hear, because it feels so much like an uncomfortable attempt for someone else to etch their guesses onto her heart. But she tries it now.
"It must have been — difficult. Surviving something like that together."
Her delivery is not smooth. But, storms, she's trying.
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"It wasn't— easy," he admits. It was fucking horrible, honestly; even all of these years later, he can still picture the slaughter, Clea's expression cold and indifferent through it all as if she were squashing a pesky bug instead of killing all of his friends. This still isn't about that, though.
"He thought that our immortality was a gift from the Paintress." Verso feels ashamed to think that he'd felt the same way once. He'd been so stupid. "We argued all the time."
He leaves the implication that they'd once been allied at that. No need to expound on what he did alongside Renoir.
"He would have done anything to stop the Expeditions from getting to her," he says, weight on the word anything. "I wanted to leave, and he—" Went on a tirade about how Verso was tearing the family apart. The first of many. "Let's just say he didn't want to accept my resignation."
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Manipulative.
— But she doesn't mind the way he meets her eyes. Properly. It might be worth it for that alone.
"I remember, on the Shattered Plains. You mentioned not everyone thinks she needs to be stopped. Was that Renoir you were talking about?"
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Verso stops himself. He's getting carried away. Sharing too much.
"We've been at cross purposes for decades."
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Jasnah crosses her arms over her chest — squeezing a little tightly, like the tension helps keep her instincts in check. Because now not only is she stuck wondering what he hasn't said, but she finds herself once again circling the nature of this Paintress like a carrion chicken. What are the confines that keep her from being free? Is it anything like the oaths that bind Odium to Roshar? And this Renoir wants to free her, whereas Verso — doesn't? Why? What purpose is served in keeping the Paintress confined?
(Why did Hoid insist they couldn't possibly let Odium renegotiate the terms of his captivity?)
After a silence that hangs just a little too long, she unwinds her arms enough to once again tap a finger against her cheekbone.
"He did that. To you."
Her tone is so carefully flattened. Not a single interrogative rise to be found.
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Laid a hand on Verso. They'd never had the closeness Verso had with his mother—Renoir had preferred Alicia and Clea, and he'd known it—but it had never been hostile like that. He'd never been afraid of his own father before that day.
He shakes his head, eyes refocusing on her face again. "It's killing you not to ask questions, isn't it?"
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"Am I so transparent?" She asks, already knowing the answer. Jasnah loosens her shoulders and gives her neck a brief, easy side-to-side stretch. Trying to act like her whole body isn't an anxious spool of wire wound too tight with the effort and focus it takes to pay a different kind of attention.
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