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."
"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.
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."
"—And I couldn't possibly understand, given my vast collection of friends."
He doesn't have friends, either. Didn't, even before tripping onto Roshar unaccompanied by anyone familiar. He's familiar with the concept of holding others at arm's length to protect yourself—he's been doing it longer than Jasnah has been alive. The only companion he's had in 67 years that wasn't brought into existence solely for his benefit, and it's her. He really knows how to pick 'em.
Another thing he's been doing longer than she's been alive: having circular arguments. After having so many of them with Renoir—the same argument over and over again, for decades on end—he can recognize a discussion that'll lead nowhere but will make him feel bad from a mile away.
"Forget it. I'm just tired." It isn't like he's been sleeping well the past week. Or the past century. "You can take the bed, if you like." Since that's why she came here, isn't it? "Think I might actually like the floor better, anyway."
It is not — storms alight — a competition over whose social circle is the most threadbare. The anger rises anyway, hot and reflexive, pressing at the back of her throat with accusations she does not voice. He was the one who suggested — mere moments ago — that she go elsewhere if she was frightened. Isn't there, you know, a friend? His words.
And there isn't. All she's done is answered the question and he's twisted it into a contest that doesn't exist.
Her jaw sets. She decides, with a clarity that feels almost punitive, that the entire attempt may have been a mistake. She is of the Ten Fools. For now, by his reaction, it would seem that seeking his company is just as offensive as declining it. So why play a hand she can't win?
Jasnah pushes back her chair and rises, one hand braced on the desk to steady herself. She casts a glance around the room, nodding once, as if confirming a conclusion already reached. Yes. It was her mistake to reach out tonight. Her greed, and its being repaid. Hers is a shaky exhale as she crosses the room — not toward the bed, but toward the door.
She will take her chances with the cremlings. Because for all they've frustrated each other and fought before now, this is the first moment since the attack where being near him does not feel unequivocally better.
"I'll send it back re-infused," she says, lifting the smokestone and giving it a brief, perfunctory wag — once, twice, thrice.
He feels guilty. Which is not an unfamiliar feeling, but is a strange one to have right now. Jasnah isn't the one who has the right to feel hurt here. She isn't the one who took a chance on someone only to find they didn't want to take a chance on her. All the same, there's the distinct feeling of having done something wrong. The sensations are identical, at least: a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, extra tension in his neck and shoulders.
"Don't be ridiculous," he scolds. "Take the bed."
If it had been irritating that she wanted to stay, it's even more bothersome that she wants to go. As much as it feels like he can't do anything right in her eyes, maybe he's put her in an inescapable trap, too. He's not in the headspace to examine that right now, so he packs that realization away.
"Just take the bed, Jasnah. You can be angry with me in the morning."
Her teeth grit. In the span of only a few minutes she has apparently managed to be baffling and ridiculous — by his accounting. And, fine. She leaves room for those possibilities. She is capable of self-critique. What needles is that every attempt to talk her way out of the whitespine den only seems to drive her deeper into it.
It's unfamiliar. Uncanny. Ordinarily, this is where she excels — parrying words with words, tightening logic until there is nowhere left to stand. No ardent has ever truly cornered her that way, though a few from the Devotary of Sincerity came uncomfortably close.
But this debate is not being fought on the terrain of logic. It is being fought on feeling, and she finds her footing far, far too slippery here.
She pauses at the door and turns back. Ah — another adjective, set neatly at her feet. Angry, now. To join baffling and ridiculous.
"I'm not angry," she says, her voice tight and certainly angry-adjacent. Storms, she can almost see the angerspren bubbling up like blood from the ground. Then, after the barest hesitation: "At least, not with you."
Clipped, sarcastic: "Right. Of course. You're downright chipper."
Hypocritical of him, considering he'd instantly denied being upset when she'd called him out. It somehow feels fine—morally just, even—to conceal his true feelings from her, but offensive and insulting to have hers hidden from him.
"At least be angry and well-rested." At least be angry in his room, instead of angry across the tower. There's already an emotional gulf between them; there doesn't need to be a physical one, too. "Think of how much more articulate you'll be when you yell at me."
Cogs turn. Pages flip. Something is happening behind her eyes — a quick accounting of what she needs versus what she wants versus what happens if she walks alone back to her quarters. It would be one thing if she thought she might get some work done, but in reality she knows she'll be tearing apart every drawer and fabrial (not unlike how she disassembled the clock) looking for additional evidence. Storms, one of those spies once tucked themselves tight into the mechanism of one of Hoid's pens. And in so doing, spilled all their secrets to the Ghostbloods.
He's right. At least be angry and well-rested. Her shoulders sink; she shuts her eyes, but briefly, and rubs the edge of a thumb against her temple. She's so very tired. How did she cope before she could burn stormlight?
Jasnah relents, walking back into the room and approaching the bed. Nevertheless, she still goes toe-to-toe with his sarcasm: "Because those are the only two options: chipper or angry. Nary an emotion in between."
Verso's eyebrow twitches. "You—" He visibly smothers down whatever it is that he'd been about to impulsively blurt out, but it's not too hard to figure out what it would have been. Something like you're impossible. Another descriptor to add to the list.
Instead of saying that, though, he takes a deep breath in through his nose as he watches her near his bed. Ridiculous, really, that he feels a sense of relief at the fact that she's chosen to stay here and make irritating little comments, but he's grown very used to the feeling of being unhappy with someone but still wanting them near.
"Please educate me then, professor, on what you're feeling." It's unreasonable to look down on a student for not knowing the curriculum when she's never taught it to him.
Oh. The unfinished sentence still nets him a sharp glance — a twitch of her own eyebrow like ornery little mirror. But it only lasts as long as it takes to sit (just at the foot of the bed, working in increments) and stabilize herself with both hands pressed against the mattress. The smokestone still pinched between her fingers.
But then he says please educate me and it doesn't matter how sarcastic he might still be, she feels herself slip easily into the opening. So — what is she feeling? There is no easy, instinctual answer. Jasnah rifles through her dread and her annoyance and the claustrophobic ways in which she feels caught between bad options. You can't think a feeling. You have to feel it.
Storms, she hates feeling.
"Fearful," she starts — picking an easy one because she's already confessed it. And because it's just as political as it is personal. "Every day we don't march to reclaim Alethkar, Odium's forces will get more and more entrenched in our cities. There will be lands we won't win back."
He's been in the meetings and the coalition conversations — albeit as 'background furniture,' as he'd put it. She expects him to have at least paid cursory attention to the trade-offs being made in those conversations.
"That, I already knew," he responds. "It may surprise you, but I have two working ears." He shoots a pointed look her way, eyes finally on her face for the first time in the past few minutes. "Some have even argued there's something between them, although I've yet to see any evidence to that effect."
He stares expectantly. Not saying it outright, but clear with his reaction all the same. Her response was unsatisfactory.
There he is. Regardless of how embroiled and embattled they are with one another, Jasnah finds satisfaction in how his gaze finally finally finally meets her own. She holds that eye contact, not shying away from it even as he peels back the first predictable layer of her answer. And her attention searches him. She has to stop herself from asking the questions she'd ask herself with her sights set on someone else: where to cut? Where to apply pressure? How much?
A brief shake of her head, directed more to herself than to him.
"Furious," she concedes her anger but by another word. "Furious with Dalinar for committing troops to help Herdaz when those numbers could have been sent to free our homeland."
He can't have known that much. Could he? She'd kept her reactions careful, measured, practical during the meetings themselves no matter how tempted she'd been to tear into her uncle for adhering to promises he never should have made. Ah, well. Perhaps he'd intuited it. He was better at catching her buried reactions, at times, than her own family. Likely because she'd already browbeaten her relatives into not scratching the surface.
Verso presses his mouth into a thin line. He knows what it feels like to have a lost home you can never return to, but admittedly, not what it feels like to have one that you could return to if only you had the manpower. He can imagine how it must feel, though. If he had the ability for things to be the way they were before, but was helpless to actually achieve it—
Yes, he'd probably be furious.
"Fearful," he repeats, "and furious." Not exactly the large spectrum she'd been trying to claim, but he doesn't say that now. He probably shouldn't comment at all until he's certain she's finished, even though he has the urge to. "Anything else?"
Anything else? For a moment it looks as though she might wind herself up to scold him for his prodding. But, hey, it's better this than spitting at each other from opposite sides of the room. Better the pressure than the silence. Jasnah rolls the gemstone between her fingers — a talisman or a toy — letting its smooth facets carry her from thought to thought.
What else does she feel?
Drained. With little sleep and no stormlight to compensate, even minor friction scrapes her raw. Ill-equipped. Childish. It's humiliating to recognize that some of the composure she's worn these past six years wasn't her at all. Just borrowed strength.
Overwhelmed. The dead cremling was likely only that: a cremling that crawled in behind a book while her study sat empty for three weeks. But paired with Hoid's warning, scaffolded by an attempt on her life? It felt like Yet Another Threat. Logical strategy would recommend setting Shallan loose to dig into the Ghostbloods. But that same logic also tells her the cost of that strategy might might be the safety of a young woman she's already failed once. Perhaps it's better to wait let that fight come to her.
She's quiet for a long while, picking through the debris of her heart, trying to guess which answer will satisfy him — and realizing, with a flare of irritation, that the only acceptable answer is to explain what drove her to seek him out tonight. Damnation.
"Lonely," she says at last. She leaves the smokestone on the covers and taps once, lightly, against her chest. "I missed talking about smaller stakes. I missed talking until falling asleep."
I missed you.
The thought lands, petty and sharp, given he's been there every day. Her shadow. Ha — background furniture. A hard swallow and she buries her embarrassment at her feet as she bends forward and works a boot free.
Ah. What must be torture for her makes something rise, buoyant, in his chest. It's exactly what he wanted to hear, of course. That she's felt lonesome since receiving the hard slap of reality, too. That she feels the absence of that closeness as keenly as he does. That even if his affections aren't returned in full, the whispered conversations and card games and shared silence while each occupying themselves had been in some way special to her, too.
"—Until you fell asleep, you mean," he corrects. "I never did." Not until he'd been able to hear the telltale slowed breathing that indicated she'd fallen asleep.
He leans forward on his knees, watching her as she readies herself for bed. She should have just asked to lie in bed while he played for her the first time around. It's— exasperating that she didn't. For as much as she derides prevarication, as much as she pretends to be straightforward and uncomplicated, she's only forthright when it suits her.
"I missed that, too," he admits, then glances down at his hands again. "But, Jasnah, you as good as spurned me."
A sharp burst of breath flared through her nose suggests exactly how overexaggerated she finds his claim to be. Spurned—? Please. She isn't quite so deflated, quite so sanded down, that she doesn't want to bite back and tell him that he's got no notion of what it means to be spurned by her in earnest. If she wanted to spurn him, she wouldn't have kept him close in any capacity.
It's just — thinking about saying so, about how she can't possibly have done what he's claiming considering she'd made a point to put him in her sightline every day — she can already hear how it sounds. Like he's less a person and more a rock she found on the shore, pocketed because she likes to have it around.
One boot off. It's one of those small, domestic tasks that's always a little bit longer to accomplish one-handed. But it gives her a wonderful excuse to keep her attention down at her feet.
Mouth dry, words stilted, she asks: "What would it have looked like to not have done so? In your mind."
A trap. We just don't know whether it's set for him or her.
He can practically see the trap now. Like a pressure plate he has to be careful not to step too heavily on. He worries his lip, eyes drifting up to watch her work on her second boot. An incredibly interesting task, apparently, considering that they're both transfixed on it.
"When one likes another person," he starts, "typically they might care to introduce them to others, rather than leave them standing on the periphery like an interloper."
That was strike one of many, obviously.
"They might not quickly dismiss the person they care for like a nuisance they've been waiting to get rid of." Strike two. "They might speak to the person instead of pretending they aren't there until their services are needed." Strikes three through, like, a thousand.
"Or so I've heard. I'm not an expert on these matters." It's annoying when someone responds to a question about themselves in abstract terms, isn't it???
— Actually, the abstract nature of his response is paradoxically comforting. It lands like one of those earnest self-help texts she'd skimmed in the months before ending things with Hoid, back when she was still searching for ways to mend something that hadn't been broken so much as...misaligned. Wrong. She'd read widely — pamphlets, essays, whole textbooks — and Verso's answer has that same shape to it. Vague, reflective, oddly grounded. With more bite, admittedly. And, of course, none of that research had been about friendships, exactly.
So Jasnah listens.
She sets aside how absurd it is for a monarch to broker introductions for anyone and instead attends to the two points that actually matter. The second two. About dismissing him and pretending he isn't there. Fine. Acknowledged.
"Verso." She straightens — one boot on, one still off — and waits until saying his name aloud draws his attention. His eye contact. When she gets it, her voice softens without losing its precision. "I don't think you're a nuisance. And I haven't wanted to be rid of you."
It's sincere. It's also a test, though not intended to be a cruel one. Not pass or fail so much as an observation: how does he receive something freely offered? Does he take it as the reassurance is sounds like he's requesting? Or does it become another loose thread he worries at until it tangles them both?
He visibly squirms. It isn't that he doesn't like to hear it. It's that he does like it, too much. He's not used to getting the things that he wants. When he does, it feels like it's only a matter of time before he loses them. Makes him antsy, anxious.
"I know," he says, sounding a little bit like the petulant child Clea has always accused him of being—although he doesn't know, really. Sometimes he does. Sometimes, like now, it feels like her light is shining directly on him, and it makes him feel warm and special. Other times it feels as if the light has gone dun, like that smokestone, and the contrast between the two makes it feel all the colder.
"Let me help you with your boot. You'll still be working on it when the sun rises at this rate."
His I know doesn't sound especially convincing. If Jasnah felt compelled to analogize — and in the maze-like corridors of her mind, she always does — he sounds like a first-year ward dodging correction by insisting she'd arrived at the answer already. It threatens to summon something sharp and instructional in her. Well. Sharper.
She swallows it.
Not because it wouldn't be earned, but because she finds herself uncharacteristically disinterested in the skirmish. Storms, she's tired. Tired enough to value a little quiet over being right.
And then his offer of help sidetracks the impulse entirely. Three weeks ago she would have refused on principle. Now it barely registers as a concession at all — just efficient delegation of a small task. Besides, despite how carefully she disguises it, bending at the waist still hurts.
So she says nothing. She simply cants her foot so only the heel touches the floor and tips it toward him, a silent invitation to make good on what he offered.
Verso kneels in front of her, just to the side of her outstretched leg, without any hesitancy. Playing the help in this way doesn't bother him at all. Makes him feel useful. Intimately so. It's the standing around being, yes, seen and not heard that bothers him. An uncharitable interpretation would be that he finds it less tolerable because he isn't the recipient of everyone's attention. He prefers to think it's because he feels like he could be replaced with a coat rack and there would be no difference.
With his full focus on the laces of her boots as he deftly undoes them, he says, "I know that it was just a stop-over for you." Everything they'd experienced. He's not stupid. He realizes now that things were never going to be the same way when they returned, and that he was incredibly shortsighted not to expect that.
"Felt real, though," he admits with a shrug, before carefully slipping her boot off her angled foot.
Jasnah has a harder time seeing the distinction. Storms, he's so dutiful in moments like this. Just like during that blip of time he's calling a stop-over, he notices where she feels friction and slots himself neatly into it. Eases it for her. How does he not understand that a predictable, trustworthy ally at her side — even three steps behind — meets the same desire? But even as the thought forms, guilt rises sharp and unpleasant at the back of her throat. It's difficult to admit that what she truly wants is someone who anticipates her needs so she never has to articulate them. Never has to claim the vulnerability out loud. That's not a kind way to consider another human being. She knows it.
"It was real," she counters, voice level — though she punctuates it by laying her hand on the slope of his shoulder. Not to brace; not to steady. Just to touch, although the pressure is feather-light. He's close, and storms, she'd grown used to that closeness; a week without the easy familiarity of friendly, platonic touch has left an absence that's louder than she expected. With him within reach now, she doesn't quite stop herself from taking some.
"But it was also," she pauses, searching, then settles on the truth, "unusual. For me. It's been quite a long time since I could feel so — individual."
Jasnah doesn't sound happy with the sentence. It's not that it's wrong, really. It just doesn't quite communicate what she's trying to say.
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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.
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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."
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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."
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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?"
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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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He doesn't have friends, either. Didn't, even before tripping onto Roshar unaccompanied by anyone familiar. He's familiar with the concept of holding others at arm's length to protect yourself—he's been doing it longer than Jasnah has been alive. The only companion he's had in 67 years that wasn't brought into existence solely for his benefit, and it's her. He really knows how to pick 'em.
Another thing he's been doing longer than she's been alive: having circular arguments. After having so many of them with Renoir—the same argument over and over again, for decades on end—he can recognize a discussion that'll lead nowhere but will make him feel bad from a mile away.
"Forget it. I'm just tired." It isn't like he's been sleeping well the past week. Or the past century. "You can take the bed, if you like." Since that's why she came here, isn't it? "Think I might actually like the floor better, anyway."
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And there isn't. All she's done is answered the question and he's twisted it into a contest that doesn't exist.
Her jaw sets. She decides, with a clarity that feels almost punitive, that the entire attempt may have been a mistake. She is of the Ten Fools. For now, by his reaction, it would seem that seeking his company is just as offensive as declining it. So why play a hand she can't win?
Jasnah pushes back her chair and rises, one hand braced on the desk to steady herself. She casts a glance around the room, nodding once, as if confirming a conclusion already reached. Yes. It was her mistake to reach out tonight. Her greed, and its being repaid. Hers is a shaky exhale as she crosses the room — not toward the bed, but toward the door.
She will take her chances with the cremlings. Because for all they've frustrated each other and fought before now, this is the first moment since the attack where being near him does not feel unequivocally better.
"I'll send it back re-infused," she says, lifting the smokestone and giving it a brief, perfunctory wag — once, twice, thrice.
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"Don't be ridiculous," he scolds. "Take the bed."
If it had been irritating that she wanted to stay, it's even more bothersome that she wants to go. As much as it feels like he can't do anything right in her eyes, maybe he's put her in an inescapable trap, too. He's not in the headspace to examine that right now, so he packs that realization away.
"Just take the bed, Jasnah. You can be angry with me in the morning."
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It's unfamiliar. Uncanny. Ordinarily, this is where she excels — parrying words with words, tightening logic until there is nowhere left to stand. No ardent has ever truly cornered her that way, though a few from the Devotary of Sincerity came uncomfortably close.
But this debate is not being fought on the terrain of logic. It is being fought on feeling, and she finds her footing far, far too slippery here.
She pauses at the door and turns back. Ah — another adjective, set neatly at her feet. Angry, now. To join baffling and ridiculous.
"I'm not angry," she says, her voice tight and certainly angry-adjacent. Storms, she can almost see the angerspren bubbling up like blood from the ground. Then, after the barest hesitation: "At least, not with you."
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Hypocritical of him, considering he'd instantly denied being upset when she'd called him out. It somehow feels fine—morally just, even—to conceal his true feelings from her, but offensive and insulting to have hers hidden from him.
"At least be angry and well-rested." At least be angry in his room, instead of angry across the tower. There's already an emotional gulf between them; there doesn't need to be a physical one, too. "Think of how much more articulate you'll be when you yell at me."
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He's right. At least be angry and well-rested. Her shoulders sink; she shuts her eyes, but briefly, and rubs the edge of a thumb against her temple. She's so very tired. How did she cope before she could burn stormlight?
Jasnah relents, walking back into the room and approaching the bed. Nevertheless, she still goes toe-to-toe with his sarcasm: "Because those are the only two options: chipper or angry. Nary an emotion in between."
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Instead of saying that, though, he takes a deep breath in through his nose as he watches her near his bed. Ridiculous, really, that he feels a sense of relief at the fact that she's chosen to stay here and make irritating little comments, but he's grown very used to the feeling of being unhappy with someone but still wanting them near.
"Please educate me then, professor, on what you're feeling." It's unreasonable to look down on a student for not knowing the curriculum when she's never taught it to him.
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But then he says please educate me and it doesn't matter how sarcastic he might still be, she feels herself slip easily into the opening. So — what is she feeling? There is no easy, instinctual answer. Jasnah rifles through her dread and her annoyance and the claustrophobic ways in which she feels caught between bad options. You can't think a feeling. You have to feel it.
Storms, she hates feeling.
"Fearful," she starts — picking an easy one because she's already confessed it. And because it's just as political as it is personal. "Every day we don't march to reclaim Alethkar, Odium's forces will get more and more entrenched in our cities. There will be lands we won't win back."
He's been in the meetings and the coalition conversations — albeit as 'background furniture,' as he'd put it. She expects him to have at least paid cursory attention to the trade-offs being made in those conversations.
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He stares expectantly. Not saying it outright, but clear with his reaction all the same. Her response was unsatisfactory.
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A brief shake of her head, directed more to herself than to him.
"Furious," she concedes her anger but by another word. "Furious with Dalinar for committing troops to help Herdaz when those numbers could have been sent to free our homeland."
He can't have known that much. Could he? She'd kept her reactions careful, measured, practical during the meetings themselves no matter how tempted she'd been to tear into her uncle for adhering to promises he never should have made. Ah, well. Perhaps he'd intuited it. He was better at catching her buried reactions, at times, than her own family. Likely because she'd already browbeaten her relatives into not scratching the surface.
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Yes, he'd probably be furious.
"Fearful," he repeats, "and furious." Not exactly the large spectrum she'd been trying to claim, but he doesn't say that now. He probably shouldn't comment at all until he's certain she's finished, even though he has the urge to. "Anything else?"
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What else does she feel?
Drained. With little sleep and no stormlight to compensate, even minor friction scrapes her raw. Ill-equipped. Childish. It's humiliating to recognize that some of the composure she's worn these past six years wasn't her at all. Just borrowed strength.
Overwhelmed. The dead cremling was likely only that: a cremling that crawled in behind a book while her study sat empty for three weeks. But paired with Hoid's warning, scaffolded by an attempt on her life? It felt like Yet Another Threat. Logical strategy would recommend setting Shallan loose to dig into the Ghostbloods. But that same logic also tells her the cost of that strategy might might be the safety of a young woman she's already failed once. Perhaps it's better to wait let that fight come to her.
She's quiet for a long while, picking through the debris of her heart, trying to guess which answer will satisfy him — and realizing, with a flare of irritation, that the only acceptable answer is to explain what drove her to seek him out tonight. Damnation.
"Lonely," she says at last. She leaves the smokestone on the covers and taps once, lightly, against her chest. "I missed talking about smaller stakes. I missed talking until falling asleep."
I missed you.
The thought lands, petty and sharp, given he's been there every day. Her shadow. Ha — background furniture. A hard swallow and she buries her embarrassment at her feet as she bends forward and works a boot free.
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"—Until you fell asleep, you mean," he corrects. "I never did." Not until he'd been able to hear the telltale slowed breathing that indicated she'd fallen asleep.
He leans forward on his knees, watching her as she readies herself for bed. She should have just asked to lie in bed while he played for her the first time around. It's— exasperating that she didn't. For as much as she derides prevarication, as much as she pretends to be straightforward and uncomplicated, she's only forthright when it suits her.
"I missed that, too," he admits, then glances down at his hands again. "But, Jasnah, you as good as spurned me."
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It's just — thinking about saying so, about how she can't possibly have done what he's claiming considering she'd made a point to put him in her sightline every day — she can already hear how it sounds. Like he's less a person and more a rock she found on the shore, pocketed because she likes to have it around.
One boot off. It's one of those small, domestic tasks that's always a little bit longer to accomplish one-handed. But it gives her a wonderful excuse to keep her attention down at her feet.
Mouth dry, words stilted, she asks: "What would it have looked like to not have done so? In your mind."
A trap. We just don't know whether it's set for him or her.
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"When one likes another person," he starts, "typically they might care to introduce them to others, rather than leave them standing on the periphery like an interloper."
That was strike one of many, obviously.
"They might not quickly dismiss the person they care for like a nuisance they've been waiting to get rid of." Strike two. "They might speak to the person instead of pretending they aren't there until their services are needed." Strikes three through, like, a thousand.
"Or so I've heard. I'm not an expert on these matters." It's annoying when someone responds to a question about themselves in abstract terms, isn't it???
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So Jasnah listens.
She sets aside how absurd it is for a monarch to broker introductions for anyone and instead attends to the two points that actually matter. The second two. About dismissing him and pretending he isn't there. Fine. Acknowledged.
"Verso." She straightens — one boot on, one still off — and waits until saying his name aloud draws his attention. His eye contact. When she gets it, her voice softens without losing its precision. "I don't think you're a nuisance. And I haven't wanted to be rid of you."
It's sincere. It's also a test, though not intended to be a cruel one. Not pass or fail so much as an observation: how does he receive something freely offered? Does he take it as the reassurance is sounds like he's requesting? Or does it become another loose thread he worries at until it tangles them both?
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"I know," he says, sounding a little bit like the petulant child Clea has always accused him of being—although he doesn't know, really. Sometimes he does. Sometimes, like now, it feels like her light is shining directly on him, and it makes him feel warm and special. Other times it feels as if the light has gone dun, like that smokestone, and the contrast between the two makes it feel all the colder.
"Let me help you with your boot. You'll still be working on it when the sun rises at this rate."
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She swallows it.
Not because it wouldn't be earned, but because she finds herself uncharacteristically disinterested in the skirmish. Storms, she's tired. Tired enough to value a little quiet over being right.
And then his offer of help sidetracks the impulse entirely. Three weeks ago she would have refused on principle. Now it barely registers as a concession at all — just efficient delegation of a small task. Besides, despite how carefully she disguises it, bending at the waist still hurts.
So she says nothing. She simply cants her foot so only the heel touches the floor and tips it toward him, a silent invitation to make good on what he offered.
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With his full focus on the laces of her boots as he deftly undoes them, he says, "I know that it was just a stop-over for you." Everything they'd experienced. He's not stupid. He realizes now that things were never going to be the same way when they returned, and that he was incredibly shortsighted not to expect that.
"Felt real, though," he admits with a shrug, before carefully slipping her boot off her angled foot.
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"It was real," she counters, voice level — though she punctuates it by laying her hand on the slope of his shoulder. Not to brace; not to steady. Just to touch, although the pressure is feather-light. He's close, and storms, she'd grown used to that closeness; a week without the easy familiarity of friendly, platonic touch has left an absence that's louder than she expected. With him within reach now, she doesn't quite stop herself from taking some.
"But it was also," she pauses, searching, then settles on the truth, "unusual. For me. It's been quite a long time since I could feel so — individual."
Jasnah doesn't sound happy with the sentence. It's not that it's wrong, really. It just doesn't quite communicate what she's trying to say.
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