It's STEAM now, Verso. Not just STEM! They opened the doors to creative and design thinking when they added the A-for-Arts. Perfect for logical humanities nerds like this gal.
And because he's offering up this speck of intel on his own, she's going to glide in with the obvious and inevitable question: "Is it also powered by chroma? Like the barrier around the Monolith?"
Well. Obvious and inevitable to her. Mention a shield, and she's going to imagine that it's somehow powered.
In the meantime, she at long last sets the pot of dye aside. But she's not done with him yet; Jasnah gives his hair a good, vigorous comb-through with her gloved fingers. Despite the — intimacy — of the action, it's oddly nice to put her left hand to use. When she'd said she used to love mechanical puzzles, she'd truly meant it in the past tense. The puzzles got harder to do after she started covering her hand at twelve.
Mmm. Don't enjoy this too much, he scolds himself, but he leans marginally into her touch regardless. Just a little. Just enough that he has plausible deniability if pressed.
"No. We can manipulate chroma to an extent, yes, but—not like that. You'd have to be as powerful as the Paintress to do that." Which he certainly is not. For whatever reason, Maman didn't see fit to give him any of her Painting abilities—any of the Painting abilities the real Verso possessed. "It's just a transparent dome around Lumière that keeps the Nevrons out but allows sunlight in."
That's about the extent of his knowledge about it: how it actually works. If she wanted a theoretical explanation, she should have had Gustave isekai into her world instead!
"It just, ah... we felt like we needed to help, after everything that happened at the Monolith."
Urithiru is a marvel of engineering — even if they don't know whose engineering was so marvelous. The strange dug-out space under Kharbranth for its library? Also a marvel, also unexplained. But none of it quite can compare to the idea of a transparent dome. Transparent? Is it glass? Wouldn't that cook its inhabitants?
Jasnah finger-combs the hair back from his temple — organizing it all in one tidy direction. Then, once that's accomplished, she steps aside. She holds her safehand away from her body, hesitant to put it near anything it might smudge.
The deed is done — at least for now. The colour, she assumes, has to set before it can be washed out. But she tries to sneak one last question in before the spell possibly breaks.
"—We?"
She thinks she knows the answer. She wants him to say it, though.
She withdraws her hand, and Verso straightens up. Almost imperceptibly, but not quite. Another case of plausible deniability.
"—Renoir and I," he says without a smidge of emotion. Reciting facts. "He was different then." A moment. "Or at least I thought he was."
As suspected, though, the spell is broken. He stands, placing a hand on the back of the chair and swiveling it around so that Jasnah can sit in it instead if she prefers.
"If I answer any more questions, I'll lose all mystery, and then I'll have to develop an appeal beyond 'dark and enigmatic'." His tone is humorous, purposefully shallow. "Besides, it's only fair that you answer a few. How was your day?"
And while Jasnah does catch how his spine straightens — she's more entangled in the minor revelation that she'd guessed correctly. Renoir and Verso. She nods, brief, like maybe she'd just felt out one of those incremental steps in one of her mechanical puzzles. It satisfies her for the time being.
Instead of taking the now-vacant chair, she busies herself with wiping what dye she can off her safehand glove. The leather is going to stain — but she at least wants the excess removed.
She snorts a laugh at only fair that you answer a few and pauses, thoughtful, as she tries to discern what is or isn't worth sharing about her day.
"I expect we're only days away from abolishing slavery. On paper." She sounds uncommonly hopeful as she says it, but is quick to add — "Getting the words down and signed is the easiest part of what's going to be an uphill cultural battle."
Despite Jasnah staying unseated, he leaves the chair for her in case she changes her mind. There's not a lot of options for seating here, and he figures she won't want the piano or the bed, even if she did sleep on it last night. Weirdly, and without the covers on.
"That's great," he says, because it definitely sounds good, at least. "I... don't think I knew that there was slavery in Roshar." Yikes! Lumière would never. They just do child labor instead.
"Why were you speaking about Alethi marriage laws?" he asks, perching on the edge of his mattress. "Planning on taking up an offer?"
"Alethkar has been an unfortunate outlier," she interjects on the topic of slavery. "And there are lessons to be learned from how the transition was handled in places like Azir..."
She trails off. There's a lot of academic discourse to be had on the subject. Jasnah has spent a great deal of time studying other examples across Roshar that might inform how Alethkar might successfully make this pivot without falling into the traps and pitfalls common to such sweeping, sudden change.
But he leap-hops to a different question and (with an internal release of tension) she switches smoothly to answering it instead of revealing just how much of a policy wonk she actually is.
"Hm? Oh." A raise of her brows, a firm shake of her head. "No. Storms, no. He wasn't inquiring for my sake."
Jasnah continues scrubbing at her glove. The way it buffs the dye into the leather makes her think she should just follow-up in the next few days by dying it outright.
"If I had to guess, he's considering his own betrothal."
Verso feels incredibly silly for being relieved at that reply. It's not like he's a romantic option in her eyes, but the idea of Jasnah getting engaged to some nobleman—who probably can't even read and doesn't even play a single instrument!—still rankles. He has the feeling that she'd be insulted at the suggestion that he has her enough to share her in the first place, but... he's not good at sharing.
"That's nice for him," Verso says. "Is your marriage law really so complex?"
Since, you know, a betrothal seems pretty straightforward??
A marriage (even a political one) is absolutely the very last thing Jasnah cares to think about just now. In fact, she doesn't even let the prospect sink into her thoughts as she glides easily through this topic. (Although she would agree with Verso that settling for someone who won't read would simply never be an option. At the very least, any prospective match would need to be open to learning.)
She relents and drops into an easy seat on the desk chair.
"Complex? Not especially, no. It follows the usual Vorin precepts: upholding oaths. But there are a handful of obscure points of political tension surrounding his would-be betrothed should he want to take that step."
Having continues to work the question in the background of her thoughts ever since Renarin stopped her in the hall, she concludes: "I suspect he asked because he was worried I wouldn't give my blessing."
Oh. Huh. It takes a moment to turn that over in his head. Is it a requirement, he wonders, for the queen to bless a union? In Lumière, it had been simple. You might have asked for the parents' blessing, back in the day; now, he imagines, there are no parents left alive to ask. 'Until death do us part' doesn't go so far anymore.
He tilts his head. "Why wouldn't you give your blessing?"
Unfortunately, he's not learned enough in political matters to really understand why a match would be found unsuitable. Back when he'd had a future, he'd always understood there to some amount of pressure to carry on the Dessendre family legacy in a way that was respectable, but he could never imagine being denied something—or someone—he truly wanted. Besides, he's the second child. Clea was always the one with the real responsibility not to tarnish their name, but she'd scared off nearly every man who looked her way until Simon.
"You don't like her?" His assumed heteronormative betrothed.
Her cheeks puff with a sigh. There's a lot of meat on these particular bones. Some of which has long since turned rotten. It's tricky to explain why she might disapprove of Rlain without also recounting the six years of war with Rlain's people. Without explaining why the Listeners had her father killed. Without explaining how the Listeners are, in fact, different to the Singers. And how it used to be horrifically common for any average Rosharan household to keep Singers with he spiritual equivalent of a lobotomy as slaves. Which, sure enough, loops right back around to the legal reforms she's been so eager to enact.
Luckily (?!) Jasnah doesn't disapprove of Rlain, so she tries to elide over the gnarliest of the details with a very simple:
"He," she corrects the pronoun, "used to be a spy. Planted in our warcamps by the enemy. Renarin rightly wondered whether or not there's some archaic law around whether someone who is ostensibly a member of our royal family could engage in any kind of legal union with an enemy ex-operative. It's good that he approached me with the question."
She can only help untangle the problems she knows about.
"A member of the royal family, fraternizing with the enemy?" He means the sexy kind of fraternizing. Canting his head: "That's rather torrid."
Kind of hot, tbh, but somehow he feels that Jasnah won't appreciate enemies-to-lovers in the same way. In his defense, he did kill his ex-girlfriend in a weirdly intimate way, so that probably gave him some psychological complex he's not willing to analyze at the moment.
She does wrinkle her nose at his word choice. Torrid. Hard to say whether she disagrees or whether she'd rather not imagine her baby cousin being torrid about anything.
"I told him I'd look into it. And that if there are any legal impediments, we'd remove them."
Jasnah finally seems satisfied with the state of her glove. It's still tacky to the dye, however, so she sits with her arm slung over the back of the chair. Mostly so she can keep the stained glove quarantined from touching anything else that might suffer a stain.
"I would see him happy. And, besides, he's not so directly in the line of succession that an heir will be required of him."
And if there is, there's always legal recourse. Like how Dalinar adopted Kaladin into his line of succession. Not to mention other plans concerning monarchies and highprincedoms. No, legally it ought to be clean and tidy. Politically, however?
"The highprinces won't like it. But that'll be my battle to fight. Not his."
She protests. Sitting up a little straighter. Rolling her eyes at the idea. However, it's hard to outright deny the soft spot she carried for Renarin in particular. Like her, he'd always had a challenging time fitting in with broader Alethi society. He was never going to be an exemplary soldier like his older brother. And how that little boy had cried on her shoulder with shuddering sobs asking why his father didn't love him as much as he loved Adolin. And how (she knows) he would always be the first to break and give Dalinar a bottle of something when the rest of the family were staunchly attempting to dry the miserable drunk out.
Renarin, looking up at Jasnah and her sword, prepared to accept a fate his odd powers had insisted to him was immutable. Storms, she's grateful she went against her logic on that particular night.
Verso smiles, endeared. How could he not be? There's nothing in this world he has a softer spot for than family.
"It's all right," he says with a scrunch of his nose. "I've got a favorite, too."
Everyone in the Dessendre family seems to. Hard to imagine not having one. They all love each other, yes, but— there are clear alliances, he thinks. Maman and he were always close. Renoir preferred Alicia and Clea. Alicia is a papa's girl. And Clea— best not to think too much about Clea when he has company.
"It's nice. That he has you there to look out for him." Protection, in his eyes, is the purest form of love.
Oh — she nearly tells him. Nearly spills it all like dye over her safehand glove. She hadn't always looked out for him. Not like she wants to now. Not like she used to when they were children. Nearly spills how sometimes the greater good demands sacrifices of even your favourites.
Except she hadn't done it. And to this day, Jasnah isn't entirely certain whether it was the right choice. She just knows she's grateful to have made it. And, subsequently, every slip of eye contact between her and her cousin feels a little weightier.
She appears conflicted for a moment longer. Two heartbeats. Three. Something spooks her away from the truth.
"—Did the merchant say how long you ought to leave it?"
Something goes unsaid in those moments before she speaks, but no matter how much he searches her face, Verso can't figure out what. He'd only meant to compliment her for looking out for her family, but— perhaps there's something there he doesn't understand. Something she doesn't intend to share, it seems. Family is certainly complicated.
Verso picks up the mirror and inspects his roots. "—It's probably been long enough," he says, shrugging.
Even wet and freshly rinsed, he can tell that he missed a few spots. Ah, well. He's never been a detail person. Maman favored picture-perfect recreations for her art, but he'd always been more focused on capturing essence.
To avoid getting hair all over his sheets, he sits down in his desk chair again, plucking up the little pair of scissors he'd used to trim his beard. "If there's any other flattery you've been withholding about my hair, now would be the time."
While he's rinsing out his dye, Jasnah takes the brief opportunity when she's not being perceived to peel off the dye-stained glove. Balling it up inside out, she secrets it into her safehand pouch before buttoning the sleeve itself back over her hand. And when he returns to claim his desk chair, she migrates to the piano bench — sitting perched on the edge, turned in his direction.
He lobs the conversational ball none-too-gently into her custody. Any other flattery? Storms, she didn't think calling the white sections of his hair striking was flattery so much as it was truth. An observation.
Instead of paying him any direct compliments, she simply asks: "Are you simply trimming away the last few weeks' growth?"
Or is he making a more significant change? Admittedly, she doesn't know whether he arrived with his platonic ideal of a haircut or not.
The flattery. But damn, she could at least acknowledge that he said something, even if there's no compliments forthcoming! He sort of half-laughs, half-scoffs under his breath, then takes another look at his hair in the mirror. It's still damp and lacking the texture it has when dry, but he can tell it's longer than it should be. Longer than he normally keeps it, anyway. Although hair would hardly be a priority for most out on the Continent, he's kept it dutifully trimmed in that sort of shaggy way that looks like he doesn't care when he really does. An 'I just rolled out of bed' cut that takes fifteen minutes to style every morning.
Thoughtful: "I'm not sure. I've worn it like this for seventy years." But, like, if it looks bad... "What do you think?"
Jasnah doesn't answer immediately. She watches the way he studies his reflection instead. She's learning to recognize his habit of habit of disguising care under his indifference. But it's a strangely intimate thing to be asked about. Stranger still to realize how little practice she has at answering.
Mostly, she hadn't expected to have an opinion. On anyone's hair, really. Beyond her own. Storms — this isn't a category she's ever meaningfully engaged with, except to note whether someone was clean, presentable, appropriate for court. Yet here she is.
"I wouldn't advise changing it too much," she says at last. "Tidy the length. But don't lose too much of it." She pauses, considering whether her opinion deserves additional context. And if she gives it, it's again only because he asked. What do you think?
"It's longer than the local custom," she admits. Alethi men's styles favour discipline. Cropped and short and controlled. His is none of those things. "That's — that's not a criticism. It's novel. It looks as though you've lived in it. But certainly it could do with a trim."
A faint, almost wry tilt of her head. Just enough to fall into his eyes; just short enough that she imagines it never quite does what he tells it to. Her gaze lingers a moment longer than necessary, as if quietly filing away this version of him in case it too changes more than anticipated.
Then (because she refuses to trap him with her preferences) she adds: "If you want it shorter — do that. It's your head."
"Yet you're the one who'll have to look at it," Verso points out. There's a conceding tilt of his head as he adds, "Among others." He cares somewhat less about what 'others' think or feel while looking at his hair, though. Don't get him wrong—he still cares, but. Decidedly less.
"Besides," he says, taking a strand of newly black fringe between his fingers and snipping off the very end. "I'd be a fool not to take the queen's word under advisement, even if she is hesitant to make it a royal decree."
He takes care of the majority of the front, just as he'd done with the dye. It feels overly self-indulgent to make her do more than she absolutely has to, even if she did come here tonight for that express purpose. Once the easy part is done, though, he does shoot a look over his shoulder at her. "You want to do the back, or shall I take my chances with going in blind?"
Is she — is she supposed to care more about how his hair does or doesn't look? The thought startles her, and then irritates her. She finds herself questioning her own neutrality on the subject which feels frankly absurd. Since when is she expected to have opinions on this? Since when has anyone asked?
She's still circling that question while he snip-snip-snips at the front of his hair, permutations blooming and collapsing in her mind. Everything from the starkly literal — no person, not even a queen, should have this much say in another person's appearance — to the bafflingly tender — what do I say when he's done? What counts as the right sort of compliment?
And then he asks her — kinda — to finish the back.
Jasnah freezes. Not least because there's no doing it one-handed, and her safehand is very much bare beneath its sleeve. But after a beat, she rises from the piano bench and steps behind his chair anyway.
She stops there, close enough now to feel the heat of him. The faint clean scent of soap and a punchier undernote of stubborn dye.
"Are you certain?" She asks.
Because storms help her, she doesn't to be responsible for his bad-haircut villain origin story.
"Why not?" he says with a shrug. For the record, he'll be devastated if she fucks his hair up, but it isn't like he'll be angry. He's fairly confident she'll do her best; Jasnah wouldn't mess this up just to screw with him, primarily because he can't imagine Jasnah willingly messing anything up, ever.
"It's a winning scenario both ways. Either I get a good haircut"—the preferable option—"or I finally learn the one thing that you aren't skilled at."
Yeah, he's sort of sucking up. But she seemed like maybe she needed a pep talk.
Still— "It's all right if you don't want to do it." Say the word, and he'll go hacking at the back of his head on his own.
— Storms, but she will always rise to a challenge. And perhaps also to the chance to repay a fraction of the care he showed her in Thaylen City.
Jasnah braces her still-sleeved hand on the back of his chair and leans over his shoulder just enough to take the scissors from him, careful not to crowd nor to hesitate.
"There are many things at which I am not skilled in the least," she half-warns as she claims the scissors and straightens again. She tucks one handle briefly between her teeth and unbuttons her sleeve again — rolling the fabric up to her elbow again, fastening it out of the way again. When she takes the scissors back into her hand, it's her right, despite the tug of instinct insisting otherwise.
"Drawing. Sword-fighting. Sewing. Whittling. Gardening," she lists. Dry as a ledger.
Then she steps closer. Her palm settles at the back of his head. Fingers sliding into his hair, lifting and sifting to judge the length, the fall, the way it naturally wants to behave. A small, thoughtful pause.
"...Hair," she decides in a quieter voice, "remains to be seen."
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And because he's offering up this speck of intel on his own, she's going to glide in with the obvious and inevitable question: "Is it also powered by chroma? Like the barrier around the Monolith?"
Well. Obvious and inevitable to her. Mention a shield, and she's going to imagine that it's somehow powered.
In the meantime, she at long last sets the pot of dye aside. But she's not done with him yet; Jasnah gives his hair a good, vigorous comb-through with her gloved fingers. Despite the — intimacy — of the action, it's oddly nice to put her left hand to use. When she'd said she used to love mechanical puzzles, she'd truly meant it in the past tense. The puzzles got harder to do after she started covering her hand at twelve.
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"No. We can manipulate chroma to an extent, yes, but—not like that. You'd have to be as powerful as the Paintress to do that." Which he certainly is not. For whatever reason, Maman didn't see fit to give him any of her Painting abilities—any of the Painting abilities the real Verso possessed. "It's just a transparent dome around Lumière that keeps the Nevrons out but allows sunlight in."
That's about the extent of his knowledge about it: how it actually works. If she wanted a theoretical explanation, she should have had Gustave isekai into her world instead!
"It just, ah... we felt like we needed to help, after everything that happened at the Monolith."
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Jasnah finger-combs the hair back from his temple — organizing it all in one tidy direction. Then, once that's accomplished, she steps aside. She holds her safehand away from her body, hesitant to put it near anything it might smudge.
The deed is done — at least for now. The colour, she assumes, has to set before it can be washed out. But she tries to sneak one last question in before the spell possibly breaks.
"—We?"
She thinks she knows the answer. She wants him to say it, though.
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"—Renoir and I," he says without a smidge of emotion. Reciting facts. "He was different then." A moment. "Or at least I thought he was."
As suspected, though, the spell is broken. He stands, placing a hand on the back of the chair and swiveling it around so that Jasnah can sit in it instead if she prefers.
"If I answer any more questions, I'll lose all mystery, and then I'll have to develop an appeal beyond 'dark and enigmatic'." His tone is humorous, purposefully shallow. "Besides, it's only fair that you answer a few. How was your day?"
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Instead of taking the now-vacant chair, she busies herself with wiping what dye she can off her safehand glove. The leather is going to stain — but she at least wants the excess removed.
She snorts a laugh at only fair that you answer a few and pauses, thoughtful, as she tries to discern what is or isn't worth sharing about her day.
"I expect we're only days away from abolishing slavery. On paper." She sounds uncommonly hopeful as she says it, but is quick to add — "Getting the words down and signed is the easiest part of what's going to be an uphill cultural battle."
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"That's great," he says, because it definitely sounds good, at least. "I... don't think I knew that there was slavery in Roshar." Yikes! Lumière would never. They just do child labor instead.
"Why were you speaking about Alethi marriage laws?" he asks, perching on the edge of his mattress. "Planning on taking up an offer?"
He's joking. Obviously. Hopefully.
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She trails off. There's a lot of academic discourse to be had on the subject. Jasnah has spent a great deal of time studying other examples across Roshar that might inform how Alethkar might successfully make this pivot without falling into the traps and pitfalls common to such sweeping, sudden change.
But he leap-hops to a different question and (with an internal release of tension) she switches smoothly to answering it instead of revealing just how much of a policy wonk she actually is.
"Hm? Oh." A raise of her brows, a firm shake of her head. "No. Storms, no. He wasn't inquiring for my sake."
Jasnah continues scrubbing at her glove. The way it buffs the dye into the leather makes her think she should just follow-up in the next few days by dying it outright.
"If I had to guess, he's considering his own betrothal."
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"That's nice for him," Verso says. "Is your marriage law really so complex?"
Since, you know, a betrothal seems pretty straightforward??
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She relents and drops into an easy seat on the desk chair.
"Complex? Not especially, no. It follows the usual Vorin precepts: upholding oaths. But there are a handful of obscure points of political tension surrounding his would-be betrothed should he want to take that step."
Having continues to work the question in the background of her thoughts ever since Renarin stopped her in the hall, she concludes: "I suspect he asked because he was worried I wouldn't give my blessing."
She is (awkwardly) his Queen too. After all.
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He tilts his head. "Why wouldn't you give your blessing?"
Unfortunately, he's not learned enough in political matters to really understand why a match would be found unsuitable. Back when he'd had a future, he'd always understood there to some amount of pressure to carry on the Dessendre family legacy in a way that was respectable, but he could never imagine being denied something—or someone—he truly wanted. Besides, he's the second child. Clea was always the one with the real responsibility not to tarnish their name, but she'd scared off nearly every man who looked her way until Simon.
"You don't like her?" His assumed heteronormative betrothed.
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Luckily (?!) Jasnah doesn't disapprove of Rlain, so she tries to elide over the gnarliest of the details with a very simple:
"He," she corrects the pronoun, "used to be a spy. Planted in our warcamps by the enemy. Renarin rightly wondered whether or not there's some archaic law around whether someone who is ostensibly a member of our royal family could engage in any kind of legal union with an enemy ex-operative. It's good that he approached me with the question."
She can only help untangle the problems she knows about.
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Kind of hot, tbh, but somehow he feels that Jasnah won't appreciate enemies-to-lovers in the same way. In his defense, he did kill his ex-girlfriend in a weirdly intimate way, so that probably gave him some psychological complex he's not willing to analyze at the moment.
"What did you say?"
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"I told him I'd look into it. And that if there are any legal impediments, we'd remove them."
Jasnah finally seems satisfied with the state of her glove. It's still tacky to the dye, however, so she sits with her arm slung over the back of the chair. Mostly so she can keep the stained glove quarantined from touching anything else that might suffer a stain.
"I would see him happy. And, besides, he's not so directly in the line of succession that an heir will be required of him."
And if there is, there's always legal recourse. Like how Dalinar adopted Kaladin into his line of succession. Not to mention other plans concerning monarchies and highprincedoms. No, legally it ought to be clean and tidy. Politically, however?
"The highprinces won't like it. But that'll be my battle to fight. Not his."
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Just making those assumptions he's so fond of.
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She protests. Sitting up a little straighter. Rolling her eyes at the idea. However, it's hard to outright deny the soft spot she carried for Renarin in particular. Like her, he'd always had a challenging time fitting in with broader Alethi society. He was never going to be an exemplary soldier like his older brother. And how that little boy had cried on her shoulder with shuddering sobs asking why his father didn't love him as much as he loved Adolin. And how (she knows) he would always be the first to break and give Dalinar a bottle of something when the rest of the family were staunchly attempting to dry the miserable drunk out.
Renarin, looking up at Jasnah and her sword, prepared to accept a fate his odd powers had insisted to him was immutable. Storms, she's grateful she went against her logic on that particular night.
"But. Yes." She admits. "He is."
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"It's all right," he says with a scrunch of his nose. "I've got a favorite, too."
Everyone in the Dessendre family seems to. Hard to imagine not having one. They all love each other, yes, but— there are clear alliances, he thinks. Maman and he were always close. Renoir preferred Alicia and Clea. Alicia is a papa's girl. And Clea— best not to think too much about Clea when he has company.
"It's nice. That he has you there to look out for him." Protection, in his eyes, is the purest form of love.
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Except she hadn't done it. And to this day, Jasnah isn't entirely certain whether it was the right choice. She just knows she's grateful to have made it. And, subsequently, every slip of eye contact between her and her cousin feels a little weightier.
She appears conflicted for a moment longer. Two heartbeats. Three. Something spooks her away from the truth.
"—Did the merchant say how long you ought to leave it?"
The dye. She gestures to his hair.
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Verso picks up the mirror and inspects his roots. "—It's probably been long enough," he says, shrugging.
Even wet and freshly rinsed, he can tell that he missed a few spots. Ah, well. He's never been a detail person. Maman favored picture-perfect recreations for her art, but he'd always been more focused on capturing essence.
To avoid getting hair all over his sheets, he sits down in his desk chair again, plucking up the little pair of scissors he'd used to trim his beard. "If there's any other flattery you've been withholding about my hair, now would be the time."
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He lobs the conversational ball none-too-gently into her custody. Any other flattery? Storms, she didn't think calling the white sections of his hair striking was flattery so much as it was truth. An observation.
Instead of paying him any direct compliments, she simply asks: "Are you simply trimming away the last few weeks' growth?"
Or is he making a more significant change? Admittedly, she doesn't know whether he arrived with his platonic ideal of a haircut or not.
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The flattery. But damn, she could at least acknowledge that he said something, even if there's no compliments forthcoming! He sort of half-laughs, half-scoffs under his breath, then takes another look at his hair in the mirror. It's still damp and lacking the texture it has when dry, but he can tell it's longer than it should be. Longer than he normally keeps it, anyway. Although hair would hardly be a priority for most out on the Continent, he's kept it dutifully trimmed in that sort of shaggy way that looks like he doesn't care when he really does. An 'I just rolled out of bed' cut that takes fifteen minutes to style every morning.
Thoughtful: "I'm not sure. I've worn it like this for seventy years." But, like, if it looks bad... "What do you think?"
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Mostly, she hadn't expected to have an opinion. On anyone's hair, really. Beyond her own. Storms — this isn't a category she's ever meaningfully engaged with, except to note whether someone was clean, presentable, appropriate for court. Yet here she is.
"I wouldn't advise changing it too much," she says at last. "Tidy the length. But don't lose too much of it." She pauses, considering whether her opinion deserves additional context. And if she gives it, it's again only because he asked. What do you think?
"It's longer than the local custom," she admits. Alethi men's styles favour discipline. Cropped and short and controlled. His is none of those things. "That's — that's not a criticism. It's novel. It looks as though you've lived in it. But certainly it could do with a trim."
A faint, almost wry tilt of her head. Just enough to fall into his eyes; just short enough that she imagines it never quite does what he tells it to. Her gaze lingers a moment longer than necessary, as if quietly filing away this version of him in case it too changes more than anticipated.
Then (because she refuses to trap him with her preferences) she adds: "If you want it shorter — do that. It's your head."
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"Besides," he says, taking a strand of newly black fringe between his fingers and snipping off the very end. "I'd be a fool not to take the queen's word under advisement, even if she is hesitant to make it a royal decree."
He takes care of the majority of the front, just as he'd done with the dye. It feels overly self-indulgent to make her do more than she absolutely has to, even if she did come here tonight for that express purpose. Once the easy part is done, though, he does shoot a look over his shoulder at her. "You want to do the back, or shall I take my chances with going in blind?"
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She's still circling that question while he snip-snip-snips at the front of his hair, permutations blooming and collapsing in her mind. Everything from the starkly literal — no person, not even a queen, should have this much say in another person's appearance — to the bafflingly tender — what do I say when he's done? What counts as the right sort of compliment?
And then he asks her — kinda — to finish the back.
Jasnah freezes. Not least because there's no doing it one-handed, and her safehand is very much bare beneath its sleeve. But after a beat, she rises from the piano bench and steps behind his chair anyway.
She stops there, close enough now to feel the heat of him. The faint clean scent of soap and a punchier undernote of stubborn dye.
"Are you certain?" She asks.
Because storms help her, she doesn't to be responsible for his bad-haircut villain origin story.
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"It's a winning scenario both ways. Either I get a good haircut"—the preferable option—"or I finally learn the one thing that you aren't skilled at."
Yeah, he's sort of sucking up. But she seemed like maybe she needed a pep talk.
Still— "It's all right if you don't want to do it." Say the word, and he'll go hacking at the back of his head on his own.
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Jasnah braces her still-sleeved hand on the back of his chair and leans over his shoulder just enough to take the scissors from him, careful not to crowd nor to hesitate.
"There are many things at which I am not skilled in the least," she half-warns as she claims the scissors and straightens again. She tucks one handle briefly between her teeth and unbuttons her sleeve again — rolling the fabric up to her elbow again, fastening it out of the way again. When she takes the scissors back into her hand, it's her right, despite the tug of instinct insisting otherwise.
"Drawing. Sword-fighting. Sewing. Whittling. Gardening," she lists. Dry as a ledger.
Then she steps closer. Her palm settles at the back of his head. Fingers sliding into his hair, lifting and sifting to judge the length, the fall, the way it naturally wants to behave. A small, thoughtful pause.
"...Hair," she decides in a quieter voice, "remains to be seen."
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