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."
Drawing, sword-fighting, sewing, whittling, gardening—he's good at... three of those. Maybe passable at sewing. Not so great at gardening, unfortunately, so hopefully they're never in a situation which needs a green thumb.
Verso notes the unbuttoning of her sleeve and the newly bare hand with a sort of distant curiosity. Seeing her bare left hand doesn't excite him any more than seeing her right—which is to say it does excite him a little, since he's of the opinion that she has very nice hands, but the leftness of it all is really quite unimportant. He knows the same can't be said for her, though. Even though she'd made a point of telling him how unimportant it was to cover her hand, there's been very few times in which she's actually bared it. The times that she has, it's always seemed as if she was made uncomfortable by it; old habits die hard, he supposes.
He doesn't mention it, doesn't even let his eyes linger on it. He just turns around so that she can inspect his hair. It's only slightly damp now, natural texture—somewhat unruly and disheveled waves—coming back in. Probably not the best hair for a first-time hairdresser to work with, but needs must.
"Cooking," he says, seemingly apropos of nothing. Trying his best not to react too strongly to the feeling of her fingers in his hair again, this time without the glove between them. "Volleyball. Carpentry. Sailing, apparently."
A pause. "Those are mine." The things he's not good at.
Her laugh is brief and small and dry when he mentions sailing, apparently — but she does laugh. Reminiscing, maybe, about that week at sea and how the claustrophobia of their cabin had twisted into something pleasant and safe.
She pulls a piece of hair taut between her fingers and snips away the dead, split, uneven ends. One decisive cut. If she's going to do this work, then she's not going to be cowardly about it. And with that vague process decided upon, she continues — making an effort to maintain length (like she'd suggested!) but to give the cut a clean, tidy finish.
"What's volleyball?" Because of course she was going to interrogate the thing she doesn't understand.
Another snip. A ruffle of her fingers into the roots of his hair, searching out another piece to straighten and examine and cut.
Verso really does his best not to move this time, no matter how pleasant the feeling of her hands against his scalp is. If he moves unexpectedly, she might snip off a little too much, and then he'll have a giant bald spot in the back of his head. So, he's very still—at least the top part of him. Since he can't move his head, he taps his feet restlessly against the floorboards instead.
"You don't have volleyball on Roshar?" A laugh. "Count yourself lucky."
Admittedly, his only experience is with gestral beach volleyball, which is... special.
"It's a sport that involves..." Well, this is a little on the nose, but: "Volleying a ball back and forth over a net." Which sounds easy enough, but he's been hit in the face enough times to know that isn't the case. "The gestrals enjoy playing it—aggressively."
— Doesn't especially sound like something a whole planet should feel lucky not to have. She's not about to say it aloud but it kinda sounds boring. Chucking a ball back and forth? Over a net? Is that truly worth a whole sport?
A judgemental sniff.
"Sounds as though you're not missing out on much for it landing on your — list."
List of things he's bad at. A list she's quietly pleased to have been told, incidentally. She likes it more than the boasting.
Jasnah continues cutting, but only in small curated snips. Realistically, she's likely going to leave the back of his hair a little longer than the rest — risking a mullet-like style. Not that she knows what a mullet it, of course. But that is the direction this is kinda taking.
Unaware of the mullet she's about to give him: "I guess that depends what sort of duels we're talking about." To the death, or...? It happens to be a Dessendre family pastime to hit each other with weapons for fun, so. Or it used to be, before it became a pastime to hit each other with weapons for serious reasons. "You do run the risk of injury when you play volleyball with the gestrals. But you run that risk whenever you do anything with a gestral."
"In arenas. With judges and rules. Anything more — honour duels or trials by combat — were outlawed last year."
By her, notably. But she's not here to gild her own reputation. He'll either guess it was one of her initiatives or he won't; neither version matters more than the fact that the archaic custom was put to rest.
"The tower doesn't have the same spectator stands that the arena back in the Shattered Plains does — but bouts between accomplished duelists would draw considerable crowds."
Hm. She catches the scissor handles between her teeth again and uses both hands to give the back of his hair a small, experimental toss. Is it even? She squints — wishing, maybe, for slightly better light. And deep in the minor details of his haircut, she doesn't even realize how efficiently she's banished the day's larger questions to the recesses of her mind.
Dueling in arenas, that is. They have their own tournaments set up and everything. It was Verso's doing, he imagines—after all, he's the one who made the gestrals the way that they are. They must have been very entertaining companions for a little boy.
"Actually," he says, pushing his shoulders back a little (while still staying as still as he can manage), "you're looking at the Gestral Arena champion 67 years running."
Jasnah makes no effort to conceal her surprise. Although the one word does come out a bit marbled, given the scissors dangling from her mouth. She's still got her hands tangled in his hair. Gently (and then more vigorously) tousling the strands as though a bit of energetic movement might dry them that little bit more to better judge her effort by.
"—I'm not sure I like your tone, young lady," he says, although it's teasing and playful. Hard to be too upset when he can feel her bare fingers tousling his hair like that. Turned away from her, the corner of his mouth quirks up.
"Yes, me." Who else?? "What, you don't believe that I could beat Matthieu the Colossus?"
She restrains herself from pointing out the obvious: what does she know of Matthieu the Colossus? What does she know of gestral fighting prowess? What (really) does she know of his talents beyond the ones that have been demonstrated to her already?
Jasnah — seemingly pleased with the results thus far — drops the scissors onto the desk, trading them for a tight-woven towel she uses to better, more thoroughly squeeze any excess water from his hair. This little sequence of work (dying, cutting, drying) has become quite meditative in its own right. She likes things that keep her hands busy.
"I suppose," she warms up to the idea, "you've had ample time to train."
And just like that, she boots a faulty premise out of her thoughts and installs something revised. It remains lightly shaded in, like a hypothesis, since she hasn't really got any evidence to back it up besides his word.
"And spending seven decades on a continent awash with monsters is an excellent way to do so."
What did she think, that he spent all of his time getting killed and reviving again? ...That has happened more times than he'd like to admit, but he's more skilled at combat than most Expeditioners by a large margin. After a while, it becomes rote, just like everything else.
"Plus, a rousing duel is the only way to calm Monoco down when he's worked up."
Was, technically, but he's not willing to think about the past tense of Monoco's life at the moment.
— In her defense, he does talk up how often he's getting chomped in half or something equally gruesome. Not once has he described dying in a fit of tense, dramatic combat. You can't blame a gal for assuming otherwise.
Sure, he'd shown her a blade. But that didn't mean he was any good with it. Storms, Jasnah can (could) summon ivory as practically any weapon she could conceive of, but that doesn't translate into being a dueling champion. Unlike, apparently, him.
Jasnah continues, quiet and thoughtful, until she senses his hair is just dry enough. Tossing aside the towel, she hooks the heel of her boot on the leg of his chair and hauls it a few inches out from the desk.
"I stand corrected." She shifts to stand more beside than behind him. "I'll try not to doubt your martial abilities in future."
All in all, it's an advantage. Another reason to feel that little bit more safe here.
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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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Verso notes the unbuttoning of her sleeve and the newly bare hand with a sort of distant curiosity. Seeing her bare left hand doesn't excite him any more than seeing her right—which is to say it does excite him a little, since he's of the opinion that she has very nice hands, but the leftness of it all is really quite unimportant. He knows the same can't be said for her, though. Even though she'd made a point of telling him how unimportant it was to cover her hand, there's been very few times in which she's actually bared it. The times that she has, it's always seemed as if she was made uncomfortable by it; old habits die hard, he supposes.
He doesn't mention it, doesn't even let his eyes linger on it. He just turns around so that she can inspect his hair. It's only slightly damp now, natural texture—somewhat unruly and disheveled waves—coming back in. Probably not the best hair for a first-time hairdresser to work with, but needs must.
"Cooking," he says, seemingly apropos of nothing. Trying his best not to react too strongly to the feeling of her fingers in his hair again, this time without the glove between them. "Volleyball. Carpentry. Sailing, apparently."
A pause. "Those are mine." The things he's not good at.
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She pulls a piece of hair taut between her fingers and snips away the dead, split, uneven ends. One decisive cut. If she's going to do this work, then she's not going to be cowardly about it. And with that vague process decided upon, she continues — making an effort to maintain length (like she'd suggested!) but to give the cut a clean, tidy finish.
"What's volleyball?" Because of course she was going to interrogate the thing she doesn't understand.
Another snip. A ruffle of her fingers into the roots of his hair, searching out another piece to straighten and examine and cut.
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"You don't have volleyball on Roshar?" A laugh. "Count yourself lucky."
Admittedly, his only experience is with gestral beach volleyball, which is... special.
"It's a sport that involves..." Well, this is a little on the nose, but: "Volleying a ball back and forth over a net." Which sounds easy enough, but he's been hit in the face enough times to know that isn't the case. "The gestrals enjoy playing it—aggressively."
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A judgemental sniff.
"Sounds as though you're not missing out on much for it landing on your — list."
List of things he's bad at. A list she's quietly pleased to have been told, incidentally. She likes it more than the boasting.
Jasnah continues cutting, but only in small curated snips. Realistically, she's likely going to leave the back of his hair a little longer than the rest — risking a mullet-like style. Not that she knows what a mullet it, of course. But that is the direction this is kinda taking.
"More or less aggressive than dueling?"
Because that's the big Alethi sport.
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Snip, snip, snip.
"In arenas. With judges and rules. Anything more — honour duels or trials by combat — were outlawed last year."
By her, notably. But she's not here to gild her own reputation. He'll either guess it was one of her initiatives or he won't; neither version matters more than the fact that the archaic custom was put to rest.
"The tower doesn't have the same spectator stands that the arena back in the Shattered Plains does — but bouts between accomplished duelists would draw considerable crowds."
Hm. She catches the scissor handles between her teeth again and uses both hands to give the back of his hair a small, experimental toss. Is it even? She squints — wishing, maybe, for slightly better light. And deep in the minor details of his haircut, she doesn't even realize how efficiently she's banished the day's larger questions to the recesses of her mind.
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Dueling in arenas, that is. They have their own tournaments set up and everything. It was Verso's doing, he imagines—after all, he's the one who made the gestrals the way that they are. They must have been very entertaining companions for a little boy.
"Actually," he says, pushing his shoulders back a little (while still staying as still as he can manage), "you're looking at the Gestral Arena champion 67 years running."
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Jasnah makes no effort to conceal her surprise. Although the one word does come out a bit marbled, given the scissors dangling from her mouth. She's still got her hands tangled in his hair. Gently (and then more vigorously) tousling the strands as though a bit of energetic movement might dry them that little bit more to better judge her effort by.
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"Yes, me." Who else?? "What, you don't believe that I could beat Matthieu the Colossus?"
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Jasnah — seemingly pleased with the results thus far — drops the scissors onto the desk, trading them for a tight-woven towel she uses to better, more thoroughly squeeze any excess water from his hair. This little sequence of work (dying, cutting, drying) has become quite meditative in its own right. She likes things that keep her hands busy.
"I suppose," she warms up to the idea, "you've had ample time to train."
And just like that, she boots a faulty premise out of her thoughts and installs something revised. It remains lightly shaded in, like a hypothesis, since she hasn't really got any evidence to back it up besides his word.
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What did she think, that he spent all of his time getting killed and reviving again? ...That has happened more times than he'd like to admit, but he's more skilled at combat than most Expeditioners by a large margin. After a while, it becomes rote, just like everything else.
"Plus, a rousing duel is the only way to calm Monoco down when he's worked up."
Was, technically, but he's not willing to think about the past tense of Monoco's life at the moment.
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Sure, he'd shown her a blade. But that didn't mean he was any good with it. Storms, Jasnah can (could) summon ivory as practically any weapon she could conceive of, but that doesn't translate into being a dueling champion. Unlike, apparently, him.
Jasnah continues, quiet and thoughtful, until she senses his hair is just dry enough. Tossing aside the towel, she hooks the heel of her boot on the leg of his chair and hauls it a few inches out from the desk.
"I stand corrected." She shifts to stand more beside than behind him. "I'll try not to doubt your martial abilities in future."
All in all, it's an advantage. Another reason to feel that little bit more safe here.
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