recreatable | open post.

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."

Unlike her mother, Jasnah doesn't carry a travel-sized set of delicate fabrial tools ideal for tinkering with small latches and catches and cages. But with a bit of jockeying, she tugs the mechanism open. Her gaze falls on the smokestone within — another passable excuse, this time to avoid looking at him.

Something twists in her stomach. For someone who considers it a cardinal virtue not to lie to herself, this feels awfully close to self-deception. She rattles the smokestone in situ.

"I'd prefer to stay."

He sits back down on the bench, warring with himself. It's an objectively stupid thing to do to hover in this friend-adjacent space when she's made it clear that the feeling isn't returned, but— Verso has done a lot of objectively stupid things. The time he'd dived off of the Stone Wave Cliffs and cracked his head open on a rock on the way down; the numerous times he couldn't identify if a mushroom was poison and ate it anyway; the time he'd volunteered for gestral beach volleyball to impress Julie and ended up getting hit in the face.

Adding another stupid action to the list, he asks, softly and a bit hesitantly, "Is something wrong?"

Smokestone, she thinks — recites, really — into the ringing quiet of her own head. Sleep still clings stubbornly to the edges of her thoughts, a gauze she needs to cut through before she can proceed. So: smokestone. Used in conventional Soulcasting to produce smoke, fog, gas. Its body focus is exhalation.

So she exhales. The breath steadies her, and with it comes a brief, unexpected flicker of gratitude that Ivory agreed to remain behind, ostensibly to watch for strange cremlings. His presence here would have doubled the humiliation. Or worse — he would have murmured your fear is in that infuriatingly patient way of his and pressed her to name it aloud.

Ah. There! She works the smokestone free and rolls it between finger and thumb, the familiar weight anchoring her in the present.

"My paranoia has gotten the better of me, tonight," she says at last, lightly. Boldly owning her fatal trait out loud.

Edited 2026-02-01 03:48 (UTC)

"You're worried," he says in lieu of saying you're scared. Of course she is. She's only barely recovered from the assassination attempt, and it must have been a traumatic experience. He'd be scared, too, if he were in her shoes (and capable of dying in the first place).

The fear, he understands. The fact that it's made her choose to be here, with him, of all places and all people—that, he doesn't. Verso frowns faintly. She treats him like a close comfort one moment and someone who needs to stay two steps behind her the next.

"Isn't there—" Somebody else you'd rather be with right now? embarrasses him before he's even said it. He talks around it. "You know. A friend?" The thing she's been quite emphatic that he is not.

Edited 2026-02-01 03:54 (UTC)

Jasnah doesn't bristle at the word worried. She accepts it with a small, inward recalibration. Better than paranoid, at any rate. Her fingers curl around the smokestone, thumb tracing its surface, grounding herself in something cool and known.

"I don't need a friend," she says, quietly and more practical than defensive. "I need to feel safe."

It sounds, on reflection, like something a very very very friendless person might say. Someone who doesn't quite understand how those two things can be one in the same. Or perhaps like someone whose only real friend is also the axis around which her powers (and therefore her sense of nigh-invulnerability usually turns — but Ivory doesn't know any lullabies.

She exhales through her nose and glances, almost despite herself, toward the piano.

"And I thought," she adds, after a moment, "that those afternoons and nights on the divan were the safest-feeling sleep I've had in years."

Not saccharine. Just an observation, offered with the faintest edge of self-reproach — as though she's mildly irritated with herself for discovering it only now.

Verso laughs. Not humorously, mind you—it's dry, mirthless. "You— baffle me."

Not the response she might have expected, maybe. At any other time, he would have been thrilled to hear this. All he's ever wanted is to be that for somebody he cares about; someone who can provide protection, safety, instead of just hurting them with his corrosive touch. To hear it from Jasnah should feel good—and it does, but that's the problem. He's being jerked around, he realizes, at Jasnah's will.

"I might as well be the background furniture for you all week," he says, "and then you decide to come here when you're too scared to sleep."

Jasnah stills.

She balances the smokestone on the desk — by its point — and holds it there with the barest pressure of a fingertip. She despises this sensation: the recognition of a misstep made not for the first time but along a well-worn fault line. Storms. It has been some time since she last thought of Tyvneri and Lorieta, and yet the feeling is the same. Chagrin, sharp and unwelcome. A clean incision beneath her ribs, well above the site of her actual wound. She notes it. Files it away. She doesn't indulge it.

Outwardly, her posture firms.

"You're upset," she says. Evenly. Not apologetic.

The smokestone balances on its own for a breath before her fingers close around it again. She considers telling him he's wrong — telling him that restraint is not the same thing as disregard — but the protest feels too loud, too defensive. And Jasnah has never believed that volume improves an argument.

Jasnah has just pointed out the obvious, but perhaps it was necessary, because he blurts out an immediate, defensive, "I'm not upset." Like he's been accused of a shameful crime. All the same, his face reddens a little in the dim light, either from the upset he's been accused of or the flustering that the accusation caused (or both).

Hands interlocked in his lap, he fidgets with his fingers, running a thumb up and down the blade of his hand. While she looks at the smokestone, he looks down at his hands. He wishes this conversation was happening between them while he was lying on the floor in front of the divan; it felt less nauseating to bare his real thoughts and feelings then.

"I just don't understand." His lip curls as he feels a vague sense of mortification. "If you really don't care for me as a friend, then at least cut me loose."

Hadn't she already told him? She's not good at this part — making friends, keeping them. Only now does it fully register that naming her weakness doesn't absolve her of the obligation to work around it. Or — no — that realization had arrived days ago. She simply refused to meet it head-on. Too busy, as ever, setting herself aside in service of Alethkar.

Only it seems that in setting herself aside, she set him aside too. She hadn't anticipated how much that might matter to him. Background furniture, he'd said.

Be kinder, Hoid's maddening addendum had urged. And now she has to wonder whether his counsel came from detached observation or his own uncomfortable experience. Except, no, he would never—

Stop it, Jasnah.

Instead of circling defensively, she does what she does best: identifies a faulty assumption. In this case, the faulty assumption is that the hours spent shoulder-to-shoulder in Thaylen City were incidental. That they meant less to him than they did to her. She replaces the original conclusion with a cleaner hypothesis and lets the data realign around it. All of this occurs while she ignores the smokestone entirely and simply looks at him.

She realizes all at once that the choice isn't complicated. It's merely inconvenient. Personally inconvenient.

"I'd rather have you as a friend than a Wit," she says, evenly. "If I have to choose."

Edited 2026-02-01 12:22 (UTC)

"But you don't want me to be both," he points out, although it sounds more like an accusation than he intends. Still, there's no point taking it back when it's true. Or, more accurately, she doesn't seem to want him to be both at the same time. He can be one or the other when it suits her most, but never both.

If she's looking at him, he can't tell. He hasn't looked up from his hands this entire time. Like maybe if he looks at them hard enough the humiliation will cause him to burst into flame and finally be unmade.

"What, do I embarrass you?"

Jasnah doesn't flinch at his accusation. Mostly because she finds it absurd, knowing how intently does indeed want him to be both. Some version of both. How in public she wants a Wit who is precise and disciplined and loyal to the role; how in private she wants someone — yes, perhaps a friend — who challenges her and argues and refuses to be ornamental. To her, these aren't contradictory. To her, it's simply situational. But she's a creature who already carves off and quarantines parts of herself with ease.

Smokestone, she thinks, is also associated with confidence. And justice. Two things she tries to enshrine, but which currently feel like they're slipping through her fingers.

"I am not embarrassed."

Although she hesitates. Realistically she is embarrassed — but by herself more than him. By the notion that she might need more than what she has when there's so much still to accomplish.

"But I am wary of those who would use you against me if I allow the line to blur so carelessly. Verso — I don't have friends. Not the way you mean it. There wasn't anywhere else I could go, tonight."

It's him. Only him.

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