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.
While Jasnah doesn't sleep for long — or even all that well — it's still better than sleeping alone in a space she doesn't trust. And in contrast to the nights that preceded it, her fitful sleep is downright refreshing. She wakes shortly after he does but stays still. Eyes closed. Willing herself to drift away just once more, like she'd done a handful of times through the night. When that fails, she thinks through her agenda for the day and how she's supposed to both be the Queen of Alethkar and Friend of Verso simultaneously. Impossible.
Her fist tightens around the smokestone. She'd held it all night. And feeling it now, a source of resistance as she closes her hand, she realizes there's no time fabrial to read. No way of knowing what the hour is. And it's that cold shock to her nervous system that has her eyes fluttering open, spine lengthening in a mink-like stretch. She pushes up on one hand, blinking blearily and——
Jasnah watches him sit with the mirror. It's not hard to guess what he's examining — and when she realizes it, remembering a conversation shared back on Jochi's divan — she suppresses a smile. A problem and a solution fall into place, one beside the other.
"If you go and find dye in the Breakaway today," she pockets the smokestone and swings her legs over the edge of his bed, "I'll help you with it tonight."
Her turn to offer an unrepentant, unabashed bribe. Let me be Queen today and I'll return as Just Jasnah tonight.
He'd been half-afraid that she'd react the same way she had when they'd first returned to Urithiru. That she'd wake and flip a switch, and the Jasnah he's fond of—the one who calls him Verso, who takes card games very seriously, who can sit and talk with him for ages without growing bored of the conversation—would be replaced with Queen Jasnah, who has no time for him until she's fearful and furious and needs a distraction.
For the moment, at least, she's the same person she fell asleep as, and he's relieved that's the case.
He doesn't turn to face her, but he does look at her through the reflection in the mirror as he picks at a particularly egregious strand. "—How much experience do you have dyeing hair?"
Gauging by the glow of a soon-to-be-sunrise outside the window, she think she doesn't quite need to flee back to her own quarters just yet. Ordinarily — if she wasn't slowly and methodically healing a gut wound — the predawn hour would be spent in training, learning bit by little bit how to better wield her shardblade. It gives a bit of breathing room to her schedule.
Otherwise, she'd already be gone. Switch, flipped.
"None," she confesses.
No experience whatsoever. But — it can't be that hard, can it? Oh well. Her feelings won't be hurt if he refuses her help and goes looking elsewhere for someone who likely could do a better job. Mostly, she wanted to signal that she'd be back. And that signal is more important than whether or not she actually does the thing.
A thoughtful pause, before Verso sets the mirror down. His hair looks pretty much exactly the same, although he'd balk if anyone pointed that out. It's obviously completely different!!
"I guess it can't be any worse than the gestral apprentice who was doing it," he says as he swivels in his chair to look at her. This, if nothing else, is proof of how much he likes her: he's willing to let her at his hair with nothing but a bottle of dye and a dream.
Y'know, someone might be offended to hear that their sincere offer of support and service is met with I guess it can't be any worse than (insert other option.) But luckily for Verso, Jasnah is nothing like him in this regard. Her ego is steel-clad in this regard — it's got so much less hanging in the balance than the dozens of other problems she's got to solve in a day. It might be refreshing to fail at something with considerably lower stakes — apologies to Verso's hair for calling it low stakes.
"And I'm assuming purple was not the intended outcome," she muses, having an easier time putting her boots on than she did taking them off.
"No," Verso says flatly. Be more engrossed in his hair stories!
"But all right, I'll go and see if I can track down some supplies." Which means he'll probably be walking around aimlessly until he finds someone kind enough to point him in the right direction. Just as he'd started learning where everything was here, he'd been whisked away. "Your room, or—?" She probably won't want to make a mess in her room. "My room, I suppose."
Sending him on a mission to walk around aimlessly is — sadly — rather the point of this side quest. It buys her another day to decide what to do with a man who refuses to be background furniture, when realistically what she needs from him is background furniture. Unhelpfully, the last Wit hadn't been particularly skilled at fading into the background either — but that was because, instead of sulking, he simply installed himself in the foreground and dared the Kholins to object.
She reaches for the hairpin she'd removed and left lying out the night before. The twisting motion draws a faint frown, but she manages it with only a small hitch — proof, she supposes, that healing is progressing. With practiced ease, she slots the pin back among the others and gives her head a brief shake. Braids secure. Still, she'll likely need to stop by her quarters before any official business. Ugh. She isn't entirely comfortable there yet.
Which makes the answer easier. "Your room," she confirms.
She gives his room a careful once-over in the thin, breaking light. Would it be strange to ask him to keep an eye out for odd cremlings? Storms — would he even know what constituted as odd in a cremling?
Jasnah pushes herself to her feet. She should say something. The silence stretches just long enough to be noticeable. She worries the corner of her lip, then settles something pared-down but honest.
"Thank you," she says, a little stiff, a little sincere. "For letting me stay."
Oh. "Well," he says, unsure what to say, "if I recall, it was more demanding that you stay." While she had one foot out the door, although he doesn't bring that up. It's silly, but it feels like bringing up the earlier part of the evening would sour what became of it. "But I'll gladly take your more gallant interpretation."
He turns back around to look self-consciously at his hair in the mirror again, silently giving her permission to take her leave.
—But he does add one more thing. "It's okay if you can't make it." Better to preemptively assume disappointment than get his hopes up and spend the evening feeling stood up like he had their first night back. "Just let me know so I don't have to organize a search party."
She doesn't feel more gallant for it, not when the entire maneuver had been about tucking herself into his space long enough to steal a quiet beat of peace. Perhaps it became less of a scheme if he'd already recognized her motive. In any case, correcting him would only reopen old seams and invite fresh accusations, so she contents herself with a nod. Yes — true enough — he had in fact demanded she stay.
She pauses at the threshold when he adds his one final caveat. Perfectly reasonable on its face. And yet it needles her, just slightly. Jasnah has never been in the habit of accounting for her movements to anyone. The expectation chafes; the recoil is instinctive. Still, she nods again. "Understood."
For a fleeting moment she considers checking the corridor — measuring who might see her leaving his rooms in the early morning. But the echo of last night's question (what, do I embarrass you?) causes that impulse to stutter and stop. Instead, she squares her shoulders and walks out into the belly of the tower with unhurried confidence, letting the moment pass unqualified.
———
Later — whether he is present when it arrives or discovers it later, a runner in Kholin blue eventually leaves a small, neatly wrapped parcel outside Verso's door.
Inside: a spanreed, accompanied by a concise note in Jasnah's hand explaining that she has its paired pen; a modest pouch of spheres; and a thin, tile-like chit. The note directs him — precisely, without flourish — to present the chit to the Kholin quartermaster from now on, where it will serve as authorization to collect his wages.
Everything accounted for. Everything said without saying more than necessary. Except...except what looks to be an afterthought, scribbled under a signature of just her first initial. It reads: I expect to be free by the Hateful Hour.
Does he know that the Hateful Hour is that one hour between when one moon (Salas) sets and the next moon (Nomon) hasn't yet risen? The darkest hour of the night. Oh well. Something else to do rather than standing around feeling like a coatrack.
It's not until a while after the parcel is delivered that Verso actually returns. The wild goose chase Jasnah had intended to send him on was a long one; he'd tried finding the right merchant himself—for longer than he's willing to admit—before he finally gave up and asked for help. From there, he'd had to choose just the right dye, just the right supplies. His hair is important! It's, like, 60% of his personality, at least.
But when he does finally return back to his lodgings, he's surprised to see anything from her at all. He sets up the spanreed and sends a simple OK, thanks, uncertain if she'll even have time to look at his message. Uncertain if she'll even care for a response at all. Ah, well. Better safe than sorry.
Then, of course, he has to go on another wild goose chase to figure out what a Hateful Hour is. It's at least getting him more social interaction, even if he looks like a complete fool during it.
Once he knows, he wonders if he's meant to fetch her at that time or if she simply means for him to wait. Hm. He contemplates the options for a long moment before deciding that Jasnah is much like a cat; she prefers to approach rather than be approached. So, he stays put right where he is, dutifully trimming his beard with a pair of small scissors he'd purchased.
Jasnah makes an effort to be punctual. Truly, she does. Salas starts to sink and, setting her pen down, the Queen attempts to remove her crown. Y'know. Figuratively. She's not actually wearing the crown. But with a shuffle of paper and a glance at her waiting spanreeds, she puts her desk to bed.
It's just that when she steps outside of her study she finds Renarin pacing the hallway.
"Cousin," she greets him. Apprehensive, if only because of how loudly she reads the agitation in his demeanour. And that's how the next forty-five minutes of the Hateful Hour gets eaten up by an impromptu audience with the youngest of her cousins.
Her mind is still pivoting around Renarin's questions when she finally, finally, finally makes it to Verso's door. And because she's a stickler for presentation, she takes a moment to straighten the skirts on a garnet-coloured havah piped with gold frogging up to its high collar.
...And she'll withhold any apology until she gets a better sense of his mood.
—Verso's mood isn't particularly sour, but having grown impatient, he's apparently in the middle of doing it his damn self. There's black paste all up in his hair (and a little bit on his face, because he's not good at this). All over the white parts, unfortunately! He's not skilled enough to leave them out, nor does he have a real attachment to them.
"Oh. I didn't think you were coming," he says by way of greeting.
She takes in the image of him mid-dye-job. Door ajar, its edge still caught by the tips of her fingers. A series of complicated (and not so complicated) expressions flicker across her face. Fascination; disbelief; reproach; amusement; settling into a mild exasperation.
"I was on my way here when my cousin caught me in the halls to ask some interesting questions about Alethi marriage law. I..."
She trails off. Sounds like that's as close to an I'm sorry as he's likely to get. Maybe if he'd looked a little sadder.
"Could you really not wait an hour?"
Gentle, with a soft thud, the door shuts behind her. Jasnah stalks the perimeter of his personal space, examining his work thus far from every angle. And by the time the tracks to his far side — and notices how the dye itself is covering those stripes of white of which she's actually quite fond.
He doesn't know how to explain that he'd already set himself up to expect the worst to shield against disappointment, so he doesn't. "Sitting there with nothing to do but look in the mirror made me realize the circumstances were more dire than previously thought."
He did wait the majority of the hour, at least. The dye is still wet, little bits somehow smeared onto his neck and chin. It's been a process trying to do this himself.
Taking the 'oh' as disappointment that he didn't wait for her, he says, "Don't worry. There's still ample area in the back that I've missed, I'm sure."
Just for a beat. Long enough for the disappointment to finish blooming and be packed neatly away where it won't show on her face. Still, she can't quite stop inspecting the way the dye has wicked into places she hadn't expected to miss.
Instead, she lifts a hand and — without touching him — gestures vaguely toward the front of his head.
"...I was under the impression," she says, carefully even, "that this was a corrective measure. Roots only."
"—You mean the stripes?" he asks, finally catching on. "It may surprise you, but I wasn't born with them."
This is the way he's meant to look, is what he means. The way he did look for a long time. It certainly wasn't his choice to sport white hair; in Lumière, even a few greys are a rare occurrence now. More than that is an anomaly. It made him stand out, but not necessarily in a good way. Things are different here, admittedly, but it had never occurred to him until— well, right this second that he would ever do his hair any other way.
"Didn't I tell you? The apprentice who used to dye my hair would always muck it up." Said with no small amount of annoyance. Obviously, this has been a pain point. "I kept it rather than risk him turning it green on a revision."
It does surprise her. It wouldn't be so strange to see someone with two such markedly different tones in their hair. Not only could it be parentage (like with her cousins) but it's not that far off from the way Thaylens tend to have white eyebrows no matter what the other hair on their head.
She likely shouldn't say anything. It's a bit cruel, isn't it? To say something complimentary about a thing that's no longer accurate. But he did as good as ask for flattery — that one time, walking to the restaurant. So maybe she should say something and get it over with and...
"I found them quite striking."
The words fall fast from her mouth as she — stares, stock-still, not possessing near enough self-consciousness to so much as fidget under the awkward silence that follows.
It's clear by his expression that, despite the fact that he wants flattery from her, he's not quite sure what to do with it now that he has it. He'd assumed she didn't have a single opinion on his physical appearance, save for maybe 'I'm sure it works for other people'. As long as he looks put together enough to not reflect poorly on her, he'd figured he could shave himself bald from head to toe and it wouldn't even register as noteworthy on her radar.
"Well, that might have been helpful to know beforehand." Why didn't she say anything before he lost the singular physical attribute of his that she's ever complimented??? "I thought maybe it made me look like an old man."
See? It's not just women he thinks need to look young!
Jasnah reaches for the dye pot — gingerly lifting it out of his possession and...and does nothing with it, as this suddenly and unexpectedly starts to look like a two-handed job. All she wanted to accomplish just now was to wipe down the jar with a cloth — supposing the one within reach was acquired for exactly this purpose — but she doesn't want to hold either the pot or the rag with her safehand sleeve.
So, with a decisive hum, she drops the little pot onto the cloth for a second and unbuttons her sleeve up to the elbow. Her hand is (of course) gloved. With that little bit extra mobility, she picks up the pot again and begins to scrub away some smudges. A little tidying before dying the back half of his hair, you see.
"But you never looked like one." Her attention is buried on this small, compulsive little task as she talks. "I'd always assumed you couldn't be any older than me, at any rate."
But he's obviously pleased by the comment, even though of course it makes sense that he wouldn't really look old. At least, not as old as he really is. He's not so sure how he feels about the proof of his real age peeking through in his hair, but it's too late; if he rinses the dye off now, partway through, it'll just look grey.
Since she seems to be determined to finish the job, he settles down in his desk chair, turned away from her so that she can easily see what she's working with. As he does, he says, "I was... thirty-three, I think. When the Fracture happened." Older than he ever should have been by seven years.
She gets to work. Having secured the rolled-up sleeve with a button, Jasnah opts to tackle this task explicitly with her safehand — mostly because it's already got a glove, and she'd prefer not to have dye staining her skin. Awkward, maybe, but she's trying not to think too long or too hard about that particular note of cognitive dissonance.
Fingers tented firmly against the back of his skull, she tilts his head forward. Then, glancing over the supplies, she grabs a small stubby brush that looks as though he may have already used it to glob some of the colour into place. Standing just behind him, she pauses to test the viscosity of the dye. Small, curious steps — she isn't rushing.
She does the math he doesn't say aloud — after all, she remembers how he told her that thirty-three was the most recent gommage before he'd landed here.
But oh, storms, she can't help herself: "Were you not — cursed yet?"
She always uses his word for it. Always, always, always.
Verso keeps his head angled how she tilts it, an obedient customer in Jasnah's first-time-ever salon. He wishes he hadn't preemptively begun to dye his hair for a different reason now; if he hadn't already done it, she would have started at the front, facing him. She might have touched his face.
But he did already do it and she isn't touching his face, so he keeps his head still.
"I'm not sure," he says, and this is one case where he really isn't. He'd felt like he was aging, but would he really know? Verso had been twenty-six. That's not so different from thirty-three. Maybe he's been a fly in amber since his first breath. "I wasn't exactly going around dying in my younger years. The Fracture was the first time I noticed it."
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"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?"
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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.
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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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Her fist tightens around the smokestone. She'd held it all night. And feeling it now, a source of resistance as she closes her hand, she realizes there's no time fabrial to read. No way of knowing what the hour is. And it's that cold shock to her nervous system that has her eyes fluttering open, spine lengthening in a mink-like stretch. She pushes up on one hand, blinking blearily and——
Jasnah watches him sit with the mirror. It's not hard to guess what he's examining — and when she realizes it, remembering a conversation shared back on Jochi's divan — she suppresses a smile. A problem and a solution fall into place, one beside the other.
"If you go and find dye in the Breakaway today," she pockets the smokestone and swings her legs over the edge of his bed, "I'll help you with it tonight."
Her turn to offer an unrepentant, unabashed bribe. Let me be Queen today and I'll return as Just Jasnah tonight.
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For the moment, at least, she's the same person she fell asleep as, and he's relieved that's the case.
He doesn't turn to face her, but he does look at her through the reflection in the mirror as he picks at a particularly egregious strand. "—How much experience do you have dyeing hair?"
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Otherwise, she'd already be gone. Switch, flipped.
"None," she confesses.
No experience whatsoever. But — it can't be that hard, can it? Oh well. Her feelings won't be hurt if he refuses her help and goes looking elsewhere for someone who likely could do a better job. Mostly, she wanted to signal that she'd be back. And that signal is more important than whether or not she actually does the thing.
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"I guess it can't be any worse than the gestral apprentice who was doing it," he says as he swivels in his chair to look at her. This, if nothing else, is proof of how much he likes her: he's willing to let her at his hair with nothing but a bottle of dye and a dream.
"Did I ever tell you he once turned it purple?"
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"And I'm assuming purple was not the intended outcome," she muses, having an easier time putting her boots on than she did taking them off.
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"But all right, I'll go and see if I can track down some supplies." Which means he'll probably be walking around aimlessly until he finds someone kind enough to point him in the right direction. Just as he'd started learning where everything was here, he'd been whisked away. "Your room, or—?" She probably won't want to make a mess in her room. "My room, I suppose."
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She reaches for the hairpin she'd removed and left lying out the night before. The twisting motion draws a faint frown, but she manages it with only a small hitch — proof, she supposes, that healing is progressing. With practiced ease, she slots the pin back among the others and gives her head a brief shake. Braids secure. Still, she'll likely need to stop by her quarters before any official business. Ugh. She isn't entirely comfortable there yet.
Which makes the answer easier. "Your room," she confirms.
She gives his room a careful once-over in the thin, breaking light. Would it be strange to ask him to keep an eye out for odd cremlings? Storms — would he even know what constituted as odd in a cremling?
Jasnah pushes herself to her feet. She should say something. The silence stretches just long enough to be noticeable. She worries the corner of her lip, then settles something pared-down but honest.
"Thank you," she says, a little stiff, a little sincere. "For letting me stay."
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He turns back around to look self-consciously at his hair in the mirror again, silently giving her permission to take her leave.
—But he does add one more thing. "It's okay if you can't make it." Better to preemptively assume disappointment than get his hopes up and spend the evening feeling stood up like he had their first night back. "Just let me know so I don't have to organize a search party."
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She pauses at the threshold when he adds his one final caveat. Perfectly reasonable on its face. And yet it needles her, just slightly. Jasnah has never been in the habit of accounting for her movements to anyone. The expectation chafes; the recoil is instinctive. Still, she nods again. "Understood."
For a fleeting moment she considers checking the corridor — measuring who might see her leaving his rooms in the early morning. But the echo of last night's question (what, do I embarrass you?) causes that impulse to stutter and stop. Instead, she squares her shoulders and walks out into the belly of the tower with unhurried confidence, letting the moment pass unqualified.
———
Later — whether he is present when it arrives or discovers it later, a runner in Kholin blue eventually leaves a small, neatly wrapped parcel outside Verso's door.
Inside: a spanreed, accompanied by a concise note in Jasnah's hand explaining that she has its paired pen; a modest pouch of spheres; and a thin, tile-like chit. The note directs him — precisely, without flourish — to present the chit to the Kholin quartermaster from now on, where it will serve as authorization to collect his wages.
Everything accounted for. Everything said without saying more than necessary. Except...except what looks to be an afterthought, scribbled under a signature of just her first initial. It reads: I expect to be free by the Hateful Hour.
Does he know that the Hateful Hour is that one hour between when one moon (Salas) sets and the next moon (Nomon) hasn't yet risen? The darkest hour of the night. Oh well. Something else to do rather than standing around feeling like a coatrack.
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But when he does finally return back to his lodgings, he's surprised to see anything from her at all. He sets up the spanreed and sends a simple OK, thanks, uncertain if she'll even have time to look at his message. Uncertain if she'll even care for a response at all. Ah, well. Better safe than sorry.
Then, of course, he has to go on another wild goose chase to figure out what a Hateful Hour is. It's at least getting him more social interaction, even if he looks like a complete fool during it.
Once he knows, he wonders if he's meant to fetch her at that time or if she simply means for him to wait. Hm. He contemplates the options for a long moment before deciding that Jasnah is much like a cat; she prefers to approach rather than be approached. So, he stays put right where he is, dutifully trimming his beard with a pair of small scissors he'd purchased.
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It's just that when she steps outside of her study she finds Renarin pacing the hallway.
"Cousin," she greets him. Apprehensive, if only because of how loudly she reads the agitation in his demeanour. And that's how the next forty-five minutes of the Hateful Hour gets eaten up by an impromptu audience with the youngest of her cousins.
Her mind is still pivoting around Renarin's questions when she finally, finally, finally makes it to Verso's door. And because she's a stickler for presentation, she takes a moment to straighten the skirts on a garnet-coloured havah piped with gold frogging up to its high collar.
...And she'll withhold any apology until she gets a better sense of his mood.
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"Oh. I didn't think you were coming," he says by way of greeting.
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She takes in the image of him mid-dye-job. Door ajar, its edge still caught by the tips of her fingers. A series of complicated (and not so complicated) expressions flicker across her face. Fascination; disbelief; reproach; amusement; settling into a mild exasperation.
"I was on my way here when my cousin caught me in the halls to ask some interesting questions about Alethi marriage law. I..."
She trails off. Sounds like that's as close to an I'm sorry as he's likely to get. Maybe if he'd looked a little sadder.
"Could you really not wait an hour?"
Gentle, with a soft thud, the door shuts behind her. Jasnah stalks the perimeter of his personal space, examining his work thus far from every angle. And by the time the tracks to his far side — and notices how the dye itself is covering those stripes of white of which she's actually quite fond.
Her reaction is a soft, deflated oh.
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He did wait the majority of the hour, at least. The dye is still wet, little bits somehow smeared onto his neck and chin. It's been a process trying to do this himself.
Taking the 'oh' as disappointment that he didn't wait for her, he says, "Don't worry. There's still ample area in the back that I've missed, I'm sure."
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Just for a beat. Long enough for the disappointment to finish blooming and be packed neatly away where it won't show on her face. Still, she can't quite stop inspecting the way the dye has wicked into places she hadn't expected to miss.
Instead, she lifts a hand and — without touching him — gestures vaguely toward the front of his head.
"...I was under the impression," she says, carefully even, "that this was a corrective measure. Roots only."
A pause. Her head tilts.
"Not a full revision."
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This is the way he's meant to look, is what he means. The way he did look for a long time. It certainly wasn't his choice to sport white hair; in Lumière, even a few greys are a rare occurrence now. More than that is an anomaly. It made him stand out, but not necessarily in a good way. Things are different here, admittedly, but it had never occurred to him until— well, right this second that he would ever do his hair any other way.
"Didn't I tell you? The apprentice who used to dye my hair would always muck it up." Said with no small amount of annoyance. Obviously, this has been a pain point. "I kept it rather than risk him turning it green on a revision."
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She likely shouldn't say anything. It's a bit cruel, isn't it? To say something complimentary about a thing that's no longer accurate. But he did as good as ask for flattery — that one time, walking to the restaurant. So maybe she should say something and get it over with and...
"I found them quite striking."
The words fall fast from her mouth as she — stares, stock-still, not possessing near enough self-consciousness to so much as fidget under the awkward silence that follows.
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It's clear by his expression that, despite the fact that he wants flattery from her, he's not quite sure what to do with it now that he has it. He'd assumed she didn't have a single opinion on his physical appearance, save for maybe 'I'm sure it works for other people'. As long as he looks put together enough to not reflect poorly on her, he'd figured he could shave himself bald from head to toe and it wouldn't even register as noteworthy on her radar.
"Well, that might have been helpful to know beforehand." Why didn't she say anything before he lost the singular physical attribute of his that she's ever complimented??? "I thought maybe it made me look like an old man."
See? It's not just women he thinks need to look young!
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Jasnah reaches for the dye pot — gingerly lifting it out of his possession and...and does nothing with it, as this suddenly and unexpectedly starts to look like a two-handed job. All she wanted to accomplish just now was to wipe down the jar with a cloth — supposing the one within reach was acquired for exactly this purpose — but she doesn't want to hold either the pot or the rag with her safehand sleeve.
So, with a decisive hum, she drops the little pot onto the cloth for a second and unbuttons her sleeve up to the elbow. Her hand is (of course) gloved. With that little bit extra mobility, she picks up the pot again and begins to scrub away some smudges. A little tidying before dying the back half of his hair, you see.
"But you never looked like one." Her attention is buried on this small, compulsive little task as she talks. "I'd always assumed you couldn't be any older than me, at any rate."
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But he's obviously pleased by the comment, even though of course it makes sense that he wouldn't really look old. At least, not as old as he really is. He's not so sure how he feels about the proof of his real age peeking through in his hair, but it's too late; if he rinses the dye off now, partway through, it'll just look grey.
Since she seems to be determined to finish the job, he settles down in his desk chair, turned away from her so that she can easily see what she's working with. As he does, he says, "I was... thirty-three, I think. When the Fracture happened." Older than he ever should have been by seven years.
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Fingers tented firmly against the back of his skull, she tilts his head forward. Then, glancing over the supplies, she grabs a small stubby brush that looks as though he may have already used it to glob some of the colour into place. Standing just behind him, she pauses to test the viscosity of the dye. Small, curious steps — she isn't rushing.
She does the math he doesn't say aloud — after all, she remembers how he told her that thirty-three was the most recent gommage before he'd landed here.
But oh, storms, she can't help herself: "Were you not — cursed yet?"
She always uses his word for it. Always, always, always.
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But he did already do it and she isn't touching his face, so he keeps his head still.
"I'm not sure," he says, and this is one case where he really isn't. He'd felt like he was aging, but would he really know? Verso had been twenty-six. That's not so different from thirty-three. Maybe he's been a fly in amber since his first breath. "I wasn't exactly going around dying in my younger years. The Fracture was the first time I noticed it."
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