recreatable | open post.

Verso raises both of his eyebrows. "Rather a wasted wager, I think." Not that he's complaining; he really loses nothing here. That's why it's such a strange wager to make, though—

"I was under the impression entertaining you was part of the job description." She didn't need to wager for it, is his point. She would be well within her rights just to tell him to do it. "Although admittedly you haven't yet provided one for me to read."

Would probably be helpful.

If only there was a job description. Maybe all of this would be easier. Regardless, she chafes under the (logical, correct, accurate) criticism of how she used her wager. But how can she explain that what she's asking for is extracurricular? How can she explain that she's shied back from taking what's rightfully hers to take because of the too-exact way he's executed on it thus far?

What are the words she needs to use to ask-order-command to feel safe again like she did when she knew he was sitting shoulders against the edge of the divan? Right there.

It would have felt better had she won it. Earned it. But now it feels all hollow again.

"I'll draw one up and have it delivered before the end of the day — tomorrow."

Verso gets the sense, somehow, that he's said the wrong thing. Maybe he did. Maybe it's offensive to suggest, however obliquely, that he's unhappy with this arrangement—despite the fact that he is. He shakes his head, trying to recover from the blunder.

"Just a joke," he says, light. "Don't worry about it."

Really. Don't. The only thing that could make him feel more like the help would be reading over a contract.

"Sure, I'll play. When?"

Jasnah pushes her chair back from the little table. Even now, there's a stiffness in how she rises to her feet. Nothing so notable that she'd need help — and maybe someone who didn't know about her injury wouldn't clock it — but she takes observable time and care in how she stands.

After a beat of silence that drags on a little too long, she ends up ignoring his question altogether in favour of one of her own.

"Was it really?" She chews her bottom lip. "Just a joke?"

She knows jokes; she's not a humourless idiot. She'd like to think she isn't, at any rate. But the things he explains away as jokes...! They don't feel all that funny to her. And it can't simply be a conflict of culture.

Verso hasn't been helping her move for over a week now, but he still shifts in his chair a little bit when she rises, like he has to suppress the urge to reach out and assist her. Despite all the careful untangling and stowing away he's done of his emotions this week, he still cares about her. Of course he does; he'd held pressure on her wound as she gushed blood over his palm, his fingers. It's not so easy to completely sever that string tying him to her.

He doesn't actually get up, though. She's been on her own for a while now, and helping her stand certainly isn't in his job description.

Speaking of— she shoots that question his way, and he visibly waffles, searching for the right answer. Sometimes, talking to Jasnah feels like traversing a minefield. He always seems to say the wrong thing somehow, even though he tries so hard to say what she'll want to hear.

"I'm not sure what you want me to say here," he finally admits.

They've been here before. Circling this line in the sand — the one that she keeps coming back to, again and again, in her head. The line that is (perhaps) never quite fair to draw. The truth, Verso. Always the truth.

Or, if not the truth, then at least some answer that doesn't feel like it was soulcast especially for her. Purpose-built. Bespoke.

"I'm trying to determine what was supposed to be so humorous about it — even allowing for if it had simply been a very bad joke." She shrugs. "So I wondered whether it was less joke and more deflection. Which brings me to the present question: was it really a joke?"

Sometimes, she wants to grab him and shake him and hiss — explicitly — that countless others don't get the privilege of such detailed, careful explanations. Not from her.

"And what I want you to say," she lands on giving specific and actionable feedback, "is whatever helps me understand whether I should be putting something in writing or not."

A series of possible responses emerge in his mind—

An earnest no, I don't want you to draft up a contract and make this feel even more clinical than it already is. Or maybe a passive-aggressive I think you can do whatever you want. After all, you are the boss. Or even you seemed much more fond of my humor before we came back here.

"Not every joke can be a winner," he says with a shrug.

"No," she says. "I suppose not."

Hers is a thoughtful disappointment. He indicates that he'd like some direction. She gave him that direction — so specific and so actionable — and he ultimately meets her with yet another deflection. Is there anyone, anywhere, who could actively listen their way out of these traps?

"I meant tonight. Now, in fact."

Looping none-too-gently back around to the fact that he'd asked when.

"Oh."

A sudden panic runs through him as he thinks of what his room looks like right now. Bed unmade—it's never been made, in the past week—and curtains drawn for maximum brooding, pillow on the floor where he left it because he hasn't yet managed to get reaccustomed to the mattress enough to sleep on it after the weeks curled up beside the divan like a dog.

"Do you want me to conjure the piano in your room?"

"No."

Quick. Decisive. It doesn't even occur to her he might not want her to visit his room.

"I assumed you'd prefer not to move it. Even," a sweep of her hand, "magically."

"—Okay," he says, gritting his teeth. "My room, then."

It's funny. A week ago, he would have been over the moon at the idea of Jasnah visiting his room—so late in the night, nonetheless. Now, he's just worried that she's going to look at it and see it for what it is: pathetic.

Upon entering his room, he's quick to say, "Just, uh, let me tidy up a little." Making a beeline for his desk, he slams his poetry journal shut with such force that it makes a snapping sound, shoving it away in a drawer. He picks up the embarrassing floor pillow and tosses it back on the bed, too, pulling the covers up to at least make it look semi-presentable in here.

"Fais comme chez toi," he says afterward, gesturing.

Politely, she waits at his door. It's a thin politeness — spackled over her curiosity about how much tidying constitutes a little when he slips in before her. Left alone for a moment, she contemplates her plan. It's going okay. Not great; not terrible. Surely more face has been saved than if she'd outright told him what she'd wanted to start with. Despite that wrinkle where he told her yet again that her wager was a wasted one.

When he does gesture her inside — the wait was short enough — she steps in and does that strained, awkward thing that anyone does when invited into a space they were just old had to be tidied up: she pretends like she's not stealing furtive glances, wondering about what the mess had been and how he'd addressed it.

"Fay comm shay twa?" She repeats back to him, voice lilting into a question.

"Huh?" he asks, just distracted enough to be uncertain what she's saying before realization kicks in. "—Oh. Make yourself at home."

Verso perches on the piano bench, stretching his neck from side to side and loosening up his shoulders in preparation. As he'd told her back at Jochi's, he's perpetually tense, and that's not ideal for piano-playing. He works his fingers out after, a methodical and systematic series of stretches he's gone through about a million times.

"Sit wherever you like." There's not a lot of options—on the foot of his bed, in the chair by his desk, on the piano bench beside him—but it'll have to do, since she'd wanted to come to his room. "Any requests?"

She stands in the middle of the room — watching his back, finding it impossible not to remember their conversation about stiff, sore muscles. Him describing sleeping on the ground while the tightest knots in her shoulders eased under his hands. Thoughtful, her index finger taps against her thigh.

As tempting as she is to perch on the foot of his bed, especially given her ultimate goal for the night, Jasnah takes an easy seat at his desk — scraping the chair back lightly and angling it so that she leans an elbow on the desk, but still has a fine vantage on him and his playing.

"Do you remember the piece you first played for me?"

"You remember that?" he asks, a little surprised that it didn't blend together with all the other memories for her. She's a busy person. She has a lot to think about. "I guess it's hard to forget your first time hearing a piano."

Part of him wishes he could experience that, too. He'd heard the tinkling of the keys since before he could even form memory. Or— someone else had, and he'd had those memories forcibly stuffed inside him like chicken feathers into a pillow. Either way, there's never been a moment of his life that he didn't know what a piano sounded like, how it worked. There must be something really wonderful about getting to hear the most beautiful sound in the world for the very first time.

"I remember," he says after a moment, fingers pressing down softly on the keys to begin the song.

How romantic and fairy-tale of him. Typifying the first time hearing a piano like some dividing line — like a person might change from one minute to the next, having heard the keys and chords. Then again, she's the one admitting to how it had left an impression. So maybe he's right.

Jasnah doesn't want to talk over his just-for-her performance, so she answers with a simple, "I do," before tucking her chin in a palm and giving the proverbial floor over to him.

— Is it odd that she missed this? By this point, she's heard him plucking at guitar strings or humming far, far more often than she's heard him at the piano. But there's truth in fairy-tales and romances for a reason, so maybe it has indeed left some indelible mark. She watches his shoulders while he plays, attention tilted. Pinned.

Playing piano may be Verso's only healthy coping mechanism. He's always enjoyed the feeling, and he enjoys it in this moment, too. When he plays, he can be someone—or something—else; he's no longer someone who makes everything worse just by existing, or someone who's done terrible things he can't take back. He's not even someone who humiliatingly misjudged his relationship with a queen and had to be chided back into line. He's just a conduit for the music, and that can never be bad.

When he finishes, he doesn't look back or ask if she'd like another, instead segueing smoothly into another song.

There is a strange and brilliant magic to it. As much as she can understand — objectively — the math that underpins the music, there's something about it (Verso's playing; his approach to the rhythms; the foreign keys and cadences) that just-so-slightly defies expectation in the strictest definition of the word. Like, some slice of animal brain can just about predict want comes next but barely seconds before it happens and without any academic understanding of how and why. All she knows is that when a phrase resolves, she can breathe a little easier. And when the melody takes an unpredictable twist, it anchors her attention.

Jasnah has all manner of systems she falls back upon to clear her mind. Shelving books; editing old drafts; amateurish sword lessons just to get her thoughts out of her brain and into her muscles. None of it functions quite like this.

So she doesn't stop him when he segues into a second song. Or a third. Or a fourth. All that changes is how near her head is to the expanse of his desk, as bars go by and she slowly sinks her shoulders down until she's hunched forward. Cheek on the inside of her bicep; safehand in its sleeve, dangling off the desk's edge. At some point, once the notes have successfully crowded out every last lingering regret over what it means to delay retaking Alethkar, she drifts into a light doze.

And although he may be unlikely to see it this way, it's one of the highest compliments she could possibly pay him tonight.

When he finally looks back and sees her asleep, he has no idea how long she's been like that. One song? Two? More? There's a slight tinge of embarrassment working its way through him, semi-horror at realizing he'd been playing this entire time while there's been no one to even hear it. If a Verso plays piano and there's no one to hear him, does he even make a sound?

He stops his playing, turning around on the piano bench to look at her for an ill-advised moment—

She looks very human. Unguarded, all of the sharp lines and tight expressions that keep everyone at a distance softened and smoothed out. He wishes she was like this all the time.

Then he realizes it's pretty creepy to sit there and watch her sleep, so he carefully closes the piano lid and retrieves his poetry journal from its drawer. He can't sleep while she's here, and he can't wake her, so instead he busies himself with sitting back on the bench and making incredibly critical—if the near-violent way he erases and crosses words out is any indication—edits to his poems until she wakes.

It's not the first time she's drifted off at a desk. Before becoming Radiant — during the long years spent proving her mettle as a scholar — she'd often fall asleep with books splayed around her. She'd often wake up with ink on her chin. In some ways, sleeping at a desk feels more natural than sleeping on a bed. And she dozes long enough to dream.

Her dreams are nothing special. Hazy, thinly lit landscapes with obsidian for ground and a sea of beads. Shadesmar. And she's being chased, but instead of angerspren this time it's fearspren. Large eels with ridges on their back. Their stumpy legs end in claws that rend the glass-like ground when they scrabble after her — like metal on stone or something rending, ripping, ruining...

With a huff of breath, she wakes without even opening her eyes. In that liminal space, head still in her arms, she murmurs: "I can hear your pen tearing the paper from here."

Verso doesn't turn around just yet, but like a child being caught doing something he isn't supposed to—hand in the cookie jar—the sound of scratching stops at the sound of her voice. He hadn't realized just how vigorous his revisions were until she'd pointed it out; it's somewhat mortifying to be perceived in the middle of his creative process. Sincere words spilled out onto the pages, then scrubbed and scoured until they're something palatable but unrecognizable. Even in his own private, cathartic writing, he's erected a wall between reader and writer.

Son, you'll never be a true artist—

"I was just keeping tally marks of how many times you snored."

Regardless of whether she's raised her head, there's a telltale rustle when his journal closes, a thump-tap as he sets it and the pencil down on top of the piano. Carefully, he swings his legs around to the other side of the bench so that he's facing her once more.

"Sorry. Should've woken you up." She must have been exhausted to fall asleep listening to him play like that, though—he just couldn't. "Your neck's going to kill you after this."

Without lifting her chin, Jasnah rubs at the corner of an eye. Burying a yawn in her folded arm. He's right; she can already feel the protest along the very spear of her spine as she rolls her head left-to-right. A slight crackle she feels more than hears.

"No," she refuses his apology, "I'm grateful you didn't."

It can't have been — what, an hour and a half? But it feels long enough. Tenting her fingers on his desk, she rises to sit once more. Suppressing a stretch. Eying the journal, she wonders what he'd really been doing. Whatever it was, it had sounded fierce. Energetic.

"I hope you didn't stop on my account."

Playing. He'd looked so focused while he'd been playing.

"I started on your account, remember?" he asks, not unkind but still pointing out the fact that he was playing for her. Since she'd fallen asleep, there had been no real reason to continue. Besides, it's probably quite rude of him to be playing piano in the night like this. Someone's going to make a complaint if he does it again.

He stands, dusting his hands off—

"It's dark. I'll walk you back."

She ought to agree. She ought to stand, too. At the very least, she ought to scoff and tell him she knows her own way back through the tower — thank you kindly — and leave him behind. It would be nearer to every other move she's made this past week, letting the shutters tighten between them.

But going back means clock-watching and wondering whether every flickering shadow is a hoardling spy and checking all the spines of her books and caps of her inkwells for cremlings.

So Jasnah hesitates. And, casting a glance around the room, she looks for an excuse. Her eyes fall on the thick tome that kicked so much off — the history text she'd initially lent to him. No, that's no use. Would hate to bore him with another dry academic discussion.

Instead — she picks up the fabrial clock from the desk and, flipping it onto its front and toying with the gemstone cage, she claims: "It looks like the gemstone inside has gone dun."

Going back to sleep in her own bed rather than on a strange man's desk is the reasonable thing to do here, and he'd expected her to agree; the hard part, he'd thought, would be convincing her to allow him to accompany her back. He's already ready to leave when she turns over the clock, and in return, he raises a brow.

"Oh," he says, not really sure what else to say to that strange conversational turn. "All right. I guess I'll need to replace it, then."

There's a second's pause. A little awkward. "Not sure if I'd classify that as urgent, though."

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