recreatable | open post.

He has no excuse to stay knelt here, but he doesn't want to give up the touch until she retracts it herself. It's a bit of a blur how he got here, turned to putty in her hands by the most minute contact; he recalls that he was meant to be angry at her, but it's suddenly hard to conjure up the feeling. Briefly, he fantasizes about covering her hand with his and keeping it there, but he's certain he's not allowed to take that liberty.

"Me, too." Individual. Singular. Words he knew the meaning of academically, but couldn't have hoped to experience until recently. It's maybe not a fair comparison, given that he's just been permanently freed of his shackles whereas hers are very much still on. But it's not, as she'd surmised before, a competitive comment. It's an I see you, we're the same where it counts.

"Half of the things I told you—" He's abruptly resentful for their proximity as he feels an embarrassed heat crawl up his neck. Ducking his head and mumbling a little, he finishes, "I'd never even said them out loud."

And just like that, she feels the tug she's felt once before when he was braiding her hair — the sense of a needle buried somewhere beneath her ribs, a thread drawn tight between them. The slack disappears and she's reeled in. Me, too. It's the moment when the zoetrope aligns, when image and aperture briefly agree and offer a flicker of something clear. Although from any other angle it's nothing but a blank wall.

What embarrasses him sharpens her focus. Her gaze dips, tracking the places in his posture that want to retreat before she claims his attention again: a tilt of her head, a quiet insistence. Her hand stays on his shoulder, squeezes once and then her thumb worries the fabric of his sleeve as if it needs the reassurance as much as he does.

It's so very difficult to stay frustrated when she sees him stripped of his defensive performance. Honest and exposed. She catalogues it carefully and resolves to be a better steward of what he's offered her. Trust like this carries obligations. She gathers her fear and dread and irritation and sets them aside. She rises to this responsibility like all the others.

"How brave."

Jasnah would usually keep a verdict like this one to herself. Forgive her, then, if it sounds rough and rusted when spoken aloud. But it's genuine.

'Brave' is the last thing he is. 'Underhanded' would be more appropriate. 'Dishonest'. 'Cowardly'. But how can he possibly admit that? Oh, no, I'm actually really terrible when you get down to it. Appropriately, he's not brave enough to do it. He sort of tips his head to acknowledge that she's said something nice, nonverbal because he can't think of a single thing to say in return that isn't deflectively glib.

Eyes drifting downward again, as if pulled by some imaginary string: "I just mean— I know what it's like to feel like you're... living for this one purpose. That it's all you are."

And he knows what it's like to choose solitude because that feels like the morally correct action. Because you're afraid that attachments might cloud your mind and weaken your dedication to what has to be done.

He glances back up. "It'll burn you out eventually, if you never take anything for yourself." He speaks from experience. Do as I say, not as I do. "But you can be an individual with me."

He treads perilously close to the truth — close enough that it might as well be the truth. Jasnah has long since hollowed herself out to make room for something larger than her own comfort. Her temper, her enthusiasm, even her instinctive sense of obligation remain but everything else has been pared down, filed away. What remains clings to the inside of the mask she wears. All she is allowed to be.

But what about him? Storms, she wants to ask. Wants more data, more shading to fill in the blank spaces of the map she's been sketching of him. It's impossible not to think of the way he spoke of his former commander. Renoir. A conflict that left a scar he wouldn't heal. A conflict that mattered enough. Defining, she's certain, even if she hasn't learned the definition yet.

He looks away and she's lost his eye contact again. Jasnah's fingers tap—tap—tap against his shoulder, a small, insistent signal, then lift away. As the silence stretches, she very nearly reaches for him, imagines tucking a finger beneath his chin to guide his attention back where she wants it. She even telegraphs the move, leaning ever-so-slightly forward.

But then he looks up on his own and her hand settles back into her lap. Unnecessary.

"Thank you," she says. Practicing. "I'd — I'd like that."

It can't extend beyond this room. With him, alone, she can be an individual. She knows she ought to explain that distinction — carefully, clearly — but not now. Now would fracture the moment. Now would let the greater good, and her obligation to it, slip back across the threshold of a door he's offering to close for her.

With the warmth of her removed hand still lingering, he stands, leaning over to carefully line up her boots at the foot of the bed so that she'll be able to slip back into them with ease when she wakes. Afterward, he stretches out his neck again and shrugs his shoulders, like a dog shaking off after a particularly overwhelming experience. A physical reset after being particularly self-indulgent.

"If you lie down, I'll tell you more about the Continent."

Unrepentant, unabashed bribery.

She pauses (briefly) to consider the entirely obvious bribe. She's not even offended. Bargaining one thing for another is a tradition as old as community itself. Or so she assumes.

So Jasnah takes ownership of his bed. Her knees draw up; her safehand tucks under her cheek. The liberties she takes stop short of actually climbing under the covers, as though that might somehow be a step too far.

...One of her hair-pins makes the position uncomfortable, so she slides it free and sets it on the pillow beside her head.

"Go on, then."

Jasnah is complex and difficult to navigate, but at times, she's shockingly easy. Dangle one piece of as of yet unlearned information in front of her, and suddenly she's compliant.

For his part, Verso settles down in front of the foot of the bed, next to her shoes. He leans back against it not unlike the way he'd done against the divan, although now there's quite a bit more room for him. No need for her to curve her body to accommodate his presence.

Inexplicably, he finds himself thinking about the story Jasnah's old Wit had told him, and then beyond that. Parables. Allegories.

"I don't think I ever mentioned the Axons." He wouldn't have had much reason to. "They're these massive behemoths that live on the islands around the Monolith. Too strong for even me to take on, and as you know I'm rather durable."

And he's tried. A lot.

"There used to be four, but—I don't know what happened to the last." One for each member of Renoir's family. Aline, Verso, Clea, Alicia. It seems fitting that Clea's is the one who's gone. "There's, uh, Sirène—they call her She Who Plays With Wonder. Visages—He Who Guards Truth With Lies. And the Reacher—She Who Grasps the Sky."

He taps his fingers on his thigh. "Pretty interesting, when they aren't trying to kill you."

Edited 2026-02-02 17:39 (UTC)

It's not easy to get comfortable in someone else's bed. Jasnah fidgets, just a little, as she searches for the ideal tilt for her shoulders and the right shape for her spine. But oh, it helps to have something more interesting to listen to than the circular arguments echoing inside your own skull.

She hums a quiet uh-huh to confirm that whatever Axons might be, he's never mentioned them. They don't match anything in her carefully organized mental file on everything he's shared thus far. Which does indeed make them excellent bait by which to coax her into rest. The only real danger is how the topic might be so interesting she fails to fall asleep entirely.

How fasicinating that what he should call a massive behemoth — an axon — is the same word by which she knows the smallest division of matter. Is that something? Does she sort this information under proof that his world is indeed part of the Cosmere? No time to decide. He's already telling her more.

"Who calls them these things?" Who is the they in his explanation. "The citizens of Lumière? Do they know about the Axons? Or is it only the Expeditioners once they leave the city?"

So very nosy on its surface. In reality, she just wants to understand whose mythology these belong to. Whose folklore is this? The Axons exist, sure, but who gave them such striking names?

"Lumière doesn't know about them, no."

And thank goodness for that. The Expeditioners only know about them if Verso tells them, and he's long since stopped doing that. It's a death sentence. And, while the Expeditioners will all die sooner or later, he'd rather it wasn't through such violent means. At least being gommaged is painless.

"I guess... they were given those epithets by their creator."

He's careful not to lie. It wouldn't feel right, not after the conversation they just had. He doesn't, though, dissuade her of the reasonable conclusion that they were created by the only godlike being he's told her of.

His answer only raises more questions. Why does he know their epithets? Did the Axons introduce themselves before they (as he implied) tried to kill him? At least she does assume their creator to be the Paintress.

Such misdirection is helped by the fact that she's already drawing careful parallels in her mind. As the Paintress must have created these Axons, so too did Odium create his Unmade. Sja-anat, known as the Taker of Secrets. Re-Shephir, the Midnight Mother. Dai-Gonarthis, the Black Fisher. And all the rest, a pantheon of nine twisted spren.

Uncharitable, maybe. Sja-anat has at least proven herself no longer devoted to Odium. Is that an avenue she should take? Have Renarin ask his spren, one of Sja-anat's children, to make contact with the Unmade. Maybe then...

She's doing it again. Letting her thoughts give way to work. So, with a slowly exhaled sigh, she shepherds her attention back to Verso.

"Do they guard her?"

She doesn't name the Paintress. She assumes he catches the path of her inquiry. At least, it confirms for him that his misdirection-by-omission has worked.

It's not actually that far off, despite the fact that she's working with incomplete information. Honestly, her powers of deduction are impressive. Unfortunately, he can't compliment her on that given that it would out him as being not entirely truthful. It's just— it would be so complicated to explain the truth. She'd think he was insane, probably. Sometimes he still wonders if he actually is.

"Sort of. In a way. It's... complicated."

To say the fucking least. But he whittles it down to what she might actually want to know.

"The barrier around the Paintress's Monolith—the chroma there is dense, impenetrable. Even if you can make it through, you'll just get gommaged on the way."

His tone slips into something educational, like a tour guide explaining that if you look to your right you'll see... "But," he says, "theoretically, a powerful enough person"—he does not need to explain the Curator right now, or probably ever—"could forge a powerful enough weapon to pierce it, given enough pure chroma. Like the kind concentrated in an Axon's heart."

Bitch, how do you know all this??? Don't ask.

He deflates a little. "But they're too strong. It's a dead end."

He warns her that it's complicated and so she does a kind of internal gearing up to meet this complexity head-on. Only to find...well, the explanation is exactly what she might have guessed. Given the detail about the barrier and even the loose wink at power concentrated within these beasts' hearts.

Marvelous, the things you can do with an unreasonable amount of Investiture. And in her mind, that's exactly what this chroma he keeps describing must be. Gather enough of it in one person or one object, and it should overcome nearly anything.

Storms, she even knows exactly the weapon that she assumes could overcome both the Axons and the barrier. Nightblood, currently carried by the man who killed her father. It's okay, though, 'cause he's on their side now.

Her mouth opens. She almost explains exactly that. But then she considers the sorts of explanations of Realmatic Theory it would require. More than that, she'd need to explain Awakening. An Invested Art that isn't ordinarily found on Roshar.

"Have you attempted it? Crossing the barrier?"

Can he survive something as destructive as that?

"Sure," he says. "Lots of times."

Back when it was him and Renoir, they'd tried countless ways to get through the barrier. Mostly, they'd bounced right off of it. When they'd tried to ram their way through it, though—

"I just end up back where I was on the other side." Gommaged and un-gommaged in an instant.

Hmm. Hers is a soft, curious sound. His answer confirms a couple of other assumptions she's harboured. Or, at least, she assumes it confirms them. Is the purpose for which he's hollowed himself out — let it become all that he is — getting through that barrier and stopping the Paintress? Considering the difference of opinion to his commander.

She tosses onto her back in his bed. Hands, folded on her stomach. Eyes on the ceiling, chasing the striations in the tower's stone. What does she know? She knows this barrier must be heavily Invested. More so than he is. How Invested is he? Storms, she'd like to see him from the other side. It's not the first time she's thought this — wondering how he must appear from within Shadesmar.

"I wonder if the Axons pre-date the barrier."

What an expectant silence that follows.

"I don't know," he says honestly. He'd never been interested in this sort of thing before the Fracture. All he'd ever focused on was himself and his piano. That had seemed to be all that mattered.

"But I don't think so. The Monolith appeared after the Fracture, and so did the Nevrons—the monsters," he clarifies, since he's been trying not to use too much jargon that she won't understand. "It all sort of... happened at once."

It had felt cataclysmic at the time. Like the world was ending. He knows now that it was the result of Clea and Renoir's frantic attempts to pull Maman from the Canvas against her will.

"So, it stands to reason that the Axons were created then, too."

"Stands to reason," she echoes. There's an argument brewing behind her teeth but she avoids it at the last possible second. It would only have been (yet another) needling correction that such an assumption is built on faulty logic. And that went so well last time.

Hadn't she been tired? Yes. Bone-deep tired. But either she's passed that point where her body has given up on sleep. Or else Verso is being just a little too interesting. At the very least, she shuts her eyes.

But keeps talking.

"What do they look like? The Axons. Are the three that you've seen identical to one another?"

She was definitely meant to be asleep by now. He glances over his shoulder, but he can't tell what she's doing in the dark. He turns back around.

"Not at all," he answers, although he purposefully softens his tone a little, speaks a little slower. The cadence of a bedtime story instead of a daytime lecture. "Sirène is... beautiful, but dangerous. If you look at her too long—"

Mm. He has a sudden flash of seeing someone in Expedition uniform standing at the edge of a precipice, then watching them step off before he could reach out to stop them. It's not an appropriate thing to share at bedtime.

"It's just not good." To say the least.

"And Visages is this big, masked creature guarded by someone who calls himself the Mask Keeper." Kind of a dick move on Renoir's part to make the Axon that represents Verso a lying liar who lies, but whatever. "And the Reacher— she's smaller. Pale. One-eyed, at the top of a tall tower."

Hard not to feel a strange thrill — learning about things even the city-dwelling citizens of his home don't know exist. Like being let into a secret. So she tries to imagine what each one might actually look like behind her closed eyes.

"...Do they speak?"

"No," he says, shaking his head even though she can't see it in the dark. "Not that I know of. —Well, the Mask Keeper does, but he's..." A scoff. "You can't get anything useful out of him."

"No?"

Not quite a yawn. Not really a yawn at all. Just a softer note to the question. The sound trails off, never quite reaching its inflection point.

"Why is that?"

Maybe Verso doesn't ask the right questions, she thinks.

"You can't get a straight answer out of him. He just— talks around it." And the most annoying part is how congenial he is about it all. You could almost believe that he isn't about to lead you to your doom. "It can be... very irritating."

Verso is, in fact, the biggest hypocrite in the world.

You know what? She's not going to say anything about how familiar it sounds. Let it never be said that Jasnah Kholin can't (sometimes) toe a line. It's entirely possible that she will hop straight over that line at a different time in a different conversation. But for now, tonight, she holds her tongue.

Well. Other than to practice her novice-level active listening skills.

"That sounds...frustrating."

He's very biased, but Verso happens to find her novice-level active listening skills kind of cute.

"Yeah," he replies. "You can imagine why I gave up on the Axons." Can't defeat them, can't reason with them—actually, they make perfect sense as representations of the Dessendre family.

"—So," he follows up. "Is that enough to lull you to sleep?"

How does one even answer that question? She frowns into the darkness. If she isn't feeling particularly lulled, then she supposes he's to blame for being just a little too interesting tonight.

Still. It's not the information or the chatter or the learning opportunity that'll tip the scales. It's the knowledge that he's here. Invulnerable. A sort of guard in his own right. Even if the sense of security is all in her head.

"Yeah," she answers. Bewilderingly casual. She shifts once more, curling back onto her side and wrapping her arms around his pillow as though she prefers to bunch the material up under her chin. Like faking a firmer cushion than it really is.

"Good night," Jasnah finally says. Letting him gently off his hook.

"Bonne nuit," he replies, figuring she'll know what it means by context clues. Jasnah seems to enjoy the thrill of puzzling things out more than having it directly explained to her.

He doesn't sleep much, partially owing to the uncomfy sleeping arrangements—he's still propped up against the foot of the bed in lieu of having an actual pillow—and partially due to replaying the night's events in his head ad nauseam:

—She'd touched his shoulder. Because she wanted to. Not because she needed to lean on him, or because she was picking a piece of lint off his shirt, or any other practical, pragmatic reason. She'd touched him for the sake of touching him, and then she'd kept her hand there. If he focuses hard enough, he can still feel the way the fabric of his shirt bunched between her fingers.

Mostly, though, it's due to habitual insomnia. When he wakes, it's in the very early morning hours. He glances at Jasnah's sleeping form—somehow still a little bit tense, like a slight breeze could wake her—and doesn't have the guts to shake her awake. The semi-baring of his soul last night had felt surprisingly good, but that's the issue. Good things don't really happen to him. It's impossible not to feel a sort of dread at it being snatched away.

So, he lets her wake on her own time, busying himself instead with staring at himself in a hand mirror and unhappily trying to arrange his hair in a way that makes his apparent roots less obvious.

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