"If you like," is easily given. After all, he'd done a great deal of reading aloud to her while she'd been laid up and so low in the Gallows infirmary. It's only fair to accord him the same consideration. That, and she likes the idea all on its own. Maybe she will find some way of getting a laugh out of him then, painstaking sincerity or no.
"Though you must be warned that I'm a very poor reader when it comes to verses. One of my governesses tried very hard to break me of the habit of pausing at the end of every line or reading more or less only for the rhymes, and now it's all I think about and I find it doesn't do much to improve the sound of anything. But of course, Mister Ellis. I shall be most happy to have my revenge in person."
She can't touch his wrist in return, so instead Wysteria sets her cheek briefly to his shoulder and cinches the link of their arms momentarily tighter, and is pleased by the resolute shape of the whole thing. To that end, she keeps her arm tight in his even after she's otherwise straightened and as they reach the stairs, though it makes traversing the latter with their differences in height somewhat hilarious.
"Oh, but that reminds me. I have a project that I could use your help with. Not this moment. I won't keep you from your bed. But should you find yourself with a free hour or two later today—"
His thumb runs briefly along the bend of her wrist, the base of her thumb, in a silent expression of gratitude. Ellis does not make any move to separate, even as they clear the bottom step.
They can return to their usual habit. (If anything that came out of illness and pain can be called a habit.) But Ellis already knows he'll be fond of her reading, just as he tends to be fond of Wysteria's approach to most activities. Even if this particular exercise turns into Wysteria's opinions on whatever verse she chooses, it would still be pleasant to spend time listening to her.
But he is spared trying to pare this sentiment down by the tacit request she follows her agreement with.
"I'll have the time to spare. What are you thinking of?"
The gun, perhaps. He's already promised himself to it, and it would be easy enough to give her whatever assistance she needs in the midst of whatever other duties have been assigned to him.
Let no one say she isn't merciful—or that she is so fully ignorant to his distemper that she doesn't recognize the responsibility to keep the conversation dashing along at a clip lest he otherwise be permitted to think too hard on any particular point.
"I need a spare set of hands. To, ah,"—she waggles her fingers at the end of the arm to which he's been so firmly linked, tendons flexing under his fingertips. "Make a spare hand, I suppose. I've ambitions for some adjustments in my future which first require the making of a cast. It will be very rough draft, of course. Eventually I'll have to find someone whose left hand I like enough to take for myself—oh how macabre that sounds—but for the time being, two right ones will do while I sort out exactly what I wish to do with it. And it will take some time for the cast to set, and I think I will be bored without company."
Having reached across to set his fingers at her wrist, Ellis' thumb presses lightly at the edge of her hand once more. Thinking on what's been taken from her, and what she might fashion for herself.
"You have mine."
Hands. Company. Surely she already knew, whatever she would ask of him is most always easily given.
"I'll be awake again by the afternoon. Will that suit you?"
"This afternoon should suit perfectly well, Mister Ellis. I have some work to see to on behalf of the Division first, and then some papers to file in the Felandaris office—I do wish someone would come along to lead the project. The office is becoming rapidly unmanageable without anyone being there full time. I have been thinking of suggesting it to Mister Dickerson, you know. He clearly has a passion for the thoery, and is no stranger to the task of keeping up paperwork and seeing that a place be arranged in a certain kind of order. Mister Stark doesn't care for him very much of course, but I suspect it to be a matter of the two being somewhat unfamiliar with another and so easily remedied."
Wysteria turns her hand, knuckles bumping him in her eagerness to swat away this dovetail in the conversation while she sucks in a breath and girds herself to continue chattering along.
"Yes, the afternoon. I'll see that I've all the materials necessary, so come by the work rooms whenever it is you've returned to the land of the living. Please and thank you."
Being so accustomed to the flow of conversation, Ellis is aware of the pointed nature of this recitation. The nudge of her knuckles prompts a shift of his hand where he's settled it, thumb running along the seam of her sleeve as he considers Wysteria's patter.
"Would you like me to bring something to read?" he questions, in the wake of paper and the idea of Silas ascending to project lead.
A stopgap measure, while Ellis considers the bigger picture, how he might approach it.
These are very important points she's making, thank you. Even so, she allows herself to be swayed from them readily enough. His question is a simple one, after all.
"I suppose. If you like. I imagine that I'll have my hand in a plaster for at least an hour, and surely only have half that worth of conversation. That is to say, that's all I can be trusted to provide. I suppose if there were a particular topic or happening which you would like to discuss, then we might arrange to fill the rest of the time that way. But some a bit of reading serves just as well."
A twitch of humor at that. Only half an hours worth of conversation. Ellis is certain Wysteria might manage the full hour and then some, if past experience is any indicator.
As to what he might like to discuss—
Would it not be unfair, discussing what's at the forefront of his mind while she had a hand in plaster? (And for all the other reasons. Ellis has them listed, knows them well.)
"I'll think on it," is what he settles on. "We get on well enough, book or no."
Even under these circumstances. Ellis imagines it weighs on her more than she's showing, the matter of the arm.
"Oh, hardly any of that is really worth talking over. Truly most of that was writing just to write—to feel as if I were doing something, you know. The illusion of productivity, or what have you."
This is said with said casual candidness that it must be true, and also must be something she has made purposefully remote either by time or his return or some other factor so that if it ever held a sharp edge (maybe it had) that it's now been blunted.
"Oh, but that does remind me. I told you I was going to tell you everything I found out about dreaming and the Gates. But that too should make for a very short conversation, so I'm tempted to retain it until this afternoon in case we need to fill, oh, forty seconds or so."
His fingers flex over her elbow. Yes, Ellis understands. He hadn't been able to write, but he'd thought often of what he might put to paper if the option had been open to him.
But it had been hard enough to conceal the crystal. Taking the book was out of the question.
Wysteria would scoff to hear that all her writing had been kept. Ellis senses this, and so opts to direct his attention more fully to the latter statement.
"Save it," Ellis decides for her. "I assume it's not something to be heard by anyone else seated by us on the ferry."
This early, it's surely those afflicted with hangovers or the irritability that comes with rising at such an hour, both of which might do better if spared scientific theory.
"You might tell me of the celebrations I missed, while I was away."
At this suggestion, her reaction is instant and extreme—a twisting of the features so severe it's if he's shown her something rotten or suggested she put her hand into a bag full of live snakes. Her "Ugh!" is, in a word, emphatic.
"You mean the celebrations you didn't miss. It has been a thoroughly miserable year of parties of all kind, Mister Ellis. First I was abed for the Duke's grandson's birthday. Miss Ellie told me as many of the details as she could remember, but it isn't the same as being there in person and I have been longing, no dying, to observe the interior of that house. And I'm quite certain that all the music and dancing was lovely, and I've heard the Duke keeps a fine library. Do you know, de Foncé and Madame Baudin are some sort of cousins and yet they dislike each other so much that there hasn't even been any invitation to for tea or to anything like it which might ordinarily— Not that I have any great fondness for Madame Baudin, of course. Which I say so freely because she would point it out herself, I'm quite sure. But it's the principle of the thing."
Which as everyone knows, Wysteria takes highly seriously (for as long as the principle is convenient to her, anyway).
"And then there were all the undead for Satinalia proper, though I'd hardly prepared a good costume and now make for a dreadful dancing partner. And then Brother Gideon blew up the make up party to follow, and there has been nothing since. I think everyone is convinced that Riftwatch parties are cursed affairs, and at this rate we'll never have another one again. And now we'll spend Summersday getting nearly assassinated in Antiva! It's all highly unjust!"
This unspooling of misery carries them down another flight of stairs, along a narrow side-street. Shutters are opening above them. The sound of seagulls and the lapping of the tide beckon them forward. Wysteria's hand is warm, the link of her arm anchors him here, and Ellis is very aware of them both.
"I should apologize," he says, once he has is certain the flow of her answer has reached a natural conclusion. "I am glad that I didn't miss our dance."
Something easier to say now that he's returned. It would have been to difficult to admit from his perch on the very heights of Weisshaupt towers.
"Oh." Her scoff is mild rather than that sharp insistent thing Wysteria ordinarily deploys, as breezy as the breath of harbor wind which plucks at her hair from beneath her felt cap and divides it into wild filament strands about her ears and face.
"I'm afraid those days are well behind us, Mister Ellis. But truly—I'm pleased to hear you so passionate on the subject. When next we're at some function where the subject must naturally arise, I will do everything in my power to secure you an appropriate alternate. I would hate it, truly hate it, if my own inconvenience were to signal the end of your dancing career. You're far too fine a partner to deprive the floor of."
Her response is unexpected, and it carries a whip-crack sting with it as the words lands.
It is not so far removed from the minor fracturing of a bone. A small injury, relatively speaking. Something he'll carry along with him, as he moves forward. Something that might pain him, if he sets his weight wrong.
But there is nothing from him for a few moments. His fingers move over the seam in her sleeve. The quiet stretches as he orders his thoughts, waiting for the initial flinch away from this thing to pass.
"You're exaggerating my ability," is mild too. Not the point Ellis finds important, but isn't capable of simply letting it pass on his way to the more relevant response: "But you won't have to trouble yourself with that, with finding an alternate. I'll manage."
No hesitation over it: Ellis doesn't want an alternate.
"'I'll manage,'" she parrots back, the pitch and cant of her voice in (poor) imitation of his. "A likely story. That sounds to me as if you meant to loiter on the sidelines if you bother to show up at all, sir. I have put far too much effort into the improvement of your footwork to let it go to waste, Mister Ellis! 'Exaggerating my ability'—how dare you disparage my efforts in such a fashion!"
It's a joke. All of it is. It's just a silly little nonsense conversation. An absurd little thing exchange designed to fill the time that it takes them to trot down to catch the ferry and make their way across to the fortress island. Later—at the next party they have cause to attend, maybe—she will make some reference to it and hope that he laughs. That's all that it is, and so there is no reason at all to feel even a little insulted or annoyed by his being contrary. That would be absurd. Of course that's how he must be. It's the part she had already mentally cast him in. The joke wouldn't stand up at all if he were to go along with it.
Traipsing down the stairs arm and arm, Wysteria bullheadedly charges through that little inexplicable twinge in her chest.
"And if that isn't what you mean—if you really will be responsible for finding yourself a new dancing partner—, then you must at least promise to pretend to entertain my suggestions. I couldn't bear it if your new choice were someone I disapproved of."
The look he gives her is so very measuring. Assessing, as he observes her profile, marks the wisps of loose hair playing about her face, the brightness of her expression. All that he feels for her, Ellis can feel how it stretches in all directions, how impossible it is to get his hands around the edges of it.
And Wysteria, who can be so sharp, will perhaps never look directly at him and see this truth. Ellis could let her carry them along, momentum drawing them past every moment where he might make himself very clear to her.
Though Ellis has never dug his heels in, asked for her attention. It feels like an unkindness, a selfish act. Ellis balks every time, but this—
"There won't be a new choice, Wysteria."
Gentle over the words. I'll manage means something other than finding someone new to dance with.
Her chattering along at a clip has more or less dictated the pace of their going, their footfalls a steady pulse under the swift staccato of her recitation, and his reply, and whatever subsequent monologue she followed after with. She ought to simply maintain that patter. She has practice trampling over what Mister Ellis considers stubbornness, and they are almost to the ferry slip besides. Why, she can see the boat there in the distance lingering at the end of the quay. If they carry along at this clip they're all be guaranteed to find their seats before the ferryman starts grousing about slipping the cable.
But that morning she had spent a good deal of time fussing with the clasp on the chain of that pretty little necklace, trying at first to contrive to open it between her first three fingers and then to unlatch it with the help of a fork's tine, and then despairing when the length of the chain was too short to simply fit the damned thing on over her head. She had not cried. That would have been stupid. Instead she had thrown her little hand mirror and blamed its shattering on the spirit, and had furiously arranged all her tools on her work table to decide which were to be added to the chatelaine. And once all that had been done, Wysteria had decided once more to not feel at all sorry for herself, and that was that.
(Tak, tak, tak go the heels of her field boots along the stairs very like the click, click, click of a clasp which could be either opened or manipulated in relation to its mate but not both at once.)
She stops abruptly halfway down this last flight of stairs much to the consternation of some light foot traffic behind them which is forced to zag abruptly in either direction to pass. She is still smiling when she looks at Ellis, but some of the good humor has gone out from the expression, and the effect is quite stern in the way laughing women women can sometimes accomplish when they're making light of something they find very serious indeed.
"Really, Mister Ellis! You must continue dancing, or every time I see you not doing so I will only think of why you aren't. And I refuse to be at all self pitying, you see. I find it a very aggravating state for anyone to be in, much less myself. For there is no company quite so miserable as a person who feels their circumstances are so dire that they can't be improved. So I'm sorry, but I'm afraid you must help me for otherwise I may become intractably gloomy."
So clever, Wysteria is. When has Ellis ever been able to decline in the face of these specific things? A request for help, the sincere profession of dismay and gloom, Ellis has acquiesced in the face of them since they very beginning of their acquaintance.
But he finds himself wedged into an impossible position in this moment. There is no clarity in how he might answer her. He has been so wrong-footed by this, the idea that even this small tradition is closed to him, that he lapses into silence.
There is something fleetingly pained in his expression. Despite everything, he has the impulse to ask Don't you know? It goes. Ellis' gaze drops, follows the shift of his hand from their linked arms to the brief lacing of their fingers as Ellis draws her those last few steps down and aside to remove any impediment they pose to Kirkwall's pedestrian traffic. The low carved wall is at Wysteria's back. Ellis' thumb draws along her knuckles.
"You don't need to think of it," he promises at last, though he cannot say he expects that to bring her the relief she is seeking. "The circumstances of it are mine to manage now."
As suspected, this oath does very little to relieve that sort of strange mock-good humor Wysteria has adopted in place of frowning. Indeed for a moment it seems almost as if she might well and truly actually scowl at him while they stand there at the edge of the Kirkwall docks, the sunlight all pale and the morning's clamor of tradesman and fishermen and merchant sailors and what have you already wound to their full volume.
But that flicker of distemper is there and gone again as quickly as it had first manifested. She widens her smile by a half degree to compensate for the failure.
"Which is a fine theory, but I think you and I both know that I'm far too invested in the subject to turn a blind eye to it. I swear to tou that I will endeavor to do my very best to ignore your presence at the margins of dances entirely, Mister Ellis, but surely you mustn't think me invincible as all that. And when I inevitably notice, because you are my friend and I care for you, what would you rather have of me? I will either be miserable that I can't be a good partner to you in my current state, or furiously jealous at whoever gets to take my place after all this effort I've put into bringing you up! At least if we were to make a sort of game of it, then it might still be something we—"
No, that's too tender a bruise on her pride to push on. Wysteria veers away from it.
"If you really truly don't enjoy the dancing, then I won't insist you do it. But I will be very guilty if mine quitting means you do too."
By now, having known him this long, Wysteria must be familiar enough to recognize Ellis struggling over his words. He finds himself at a loss. It is difficult, feeling one sentiment come so immediately to hand, and having to sift and sort until he can find a way past it.
He looks away from her face. He takes her hand in his own, thumb running back and forth over the back of her palm. It's a loose hold, easily disengaged when she has had her fill of it.
What would he have of her? This is not a question he knows how to answer. Or rather, it is not a question he knows how to answer truthfully. Not while still being fair to her. Not in such a way that would not become a burden to her.
"I enjoy dancing with you," Ellis says quietly, brow knit into furrows. Watching their hands, and not the too-bright smile on her face that Ellis knows to be as much a function of her unhappiness as it is a mask. The second half of this answer explains itself: this is the thing that matters. Her. The moments in time where he might permit himself to consider the possibility that—
The thought is fractured before it can continue on. Ellis draws in a breath. Recognizes that he has not offered her sufficient response, though he doesn't see what else can be said, he adds, "But I don't want you to be unhappy. Not over this."
In which this holds place for a great many things, all of which Ellis keeps tucked neatly away.
Yes, she can tell when he isn't saying something. It's just like knowing that picking and prying and levering at the shell which covers is unlikely to do her much good—it will simply have to be enough to know that both things exist and that the thing Ellis says isn't necessarily the full shape of what he means. She isn't a blood mage. She can't very well compel him to it.
(Which is obviously a horrible thing to even think, unserious though it may be.)
Her study however remains far more relentless; Ellis watches their hands and Wysteria watches his face with a sharply analytical eye designed for the examination of schematics. He's going to make those wrinkles on his brow deeper frowning like that, she makes herself think. Otherwise the direction her thoughts wander in is far more morose than the day calls for.
"Do Wardens ever have parties and dancing, or is the seriousness when you're together too much for it? This is a real question and not an attempt to make fun of you or anyone else. I really do wish to know."
Once said, Ellis can never reclaim the words. He knows this.
But there is an inevitability to it all the same. Someday, he will say this thing aloud. He has divulged the thing in so many other ways. His own body betrays him in this. Perhaps she already knows the shape of it, has put name to it and is kindly allowing him the space to pretend he hasn't been rendered so transparent.
Ellis hopes otherwise, but it is impossible to know.
"There are Wardens who dance," he answers. "I imagine there are parties, where they'd do so. I was never one for them."
Then he came to Kirkwall, where enough shifted to make that statement not quite true anymore.
And times have changed among the Wardens regardless. If there was ever dancing in Weisshaupt Fortress, they're well past it.
By the end of the day, there will be some ink spattered here, he knows. His thumb moves along the edge of her knuckles, where a quill may rest at some point. It is still early, though Kirkwall stirs further to full consciousness with every passing moment.
She could draw her hand free from him at any point. Instead, he is welcome to it—the scuff of his calloused thumb drawing its outlines over her knuckles and the hardly noticeable small circular burn scars between her thumb and forefinger, palm and fingers pliable.
It strikes her that he is nervous, or frightened, or maybe both, or maybe just something adjacent to them which she would have difficulty recognizing. Maybe it's something he found at Weisshaupt which he now refuses to speak on. Or maybe it's the reason he went to begin with.
"Will you tell me why you weren't?" isn't the following question she had originally planned—Has their ever been a Lady Warden with some dreadful injury, and did she dance, and was it strange to see or did everyone simply forget and see only her and not her pinned sleeve—but it seems the more important one.
"Is it because of—That young lady you knew. Or was there some other reason?"
But the question draws his gaze up to her face anyway. It does not still the sweep of his thumb. It does not shift his expression, change where it has cracked open in the course of their discussion. The quiet unspools between them, punctuated by the thunk and crack of storefronts opening, shutters being pushed outwards high above them, the cawing of gulls in the harbor.
"Aye, that was part of it," Ellis ventures, frown deepening as he feels his way through to this answer. Abbreviated because the day is very new; it is too early to invite this part of his history onto the street alongside them.
Yes, part of it was that Shanae was gone. But so was everyone else, even the person he was then, who danced with anyone who reached for him.
"But we should speak on something else now."
There is no obligation for Wysteria to tread along this conversational topic with him.
Her hand turns gently, thumb and forefinger setting at either side of his wrist. But she hasn't looked away from his face before this moment and so there's little reason to do so now just because he is looking back at her and the street is peeling itself out of its bedclothes.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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"Though you must be warned that I'm a very poor reader when it comes to verses. One of my governesses tried very hard to break me of the habit of pausing at the end of every line or reading more or less only for the rhymes, and now it's all I think about and I find it doesn't do much to improve the sound of anything. But of course, Mister Ellis. I shall be most happy to have my revenge in person."
She can't touch his wrist in return, so instead Wysteria sets her cheek briefly to his shoulder and cinches the link of their arms momentarily tighter, and is pleased by the resolute shape of the whole thing. To that end, she keeps her arm tight in his even after she's otherwise straightened and as they reach the stairs, though it makes traversing the latter with their differences in height somewhat hilarious.
"Oh, but that reminds me. I have a project that I could use your help with. Not this moment. I won't keep you from your bed. But should you find yourself with a free hour or two later today—"
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They can return to their usual habit. (If anything that came out of illness and pain can be called a habit.) But Ellis already knows he'll be fond of her reading, just as he tends to be fond of Wysteria's approach to most activities. Even if this particular exercise turns into Wysteria's opinions on whatever verse she chooses, it would still be pleasant to spend time listening to her.
But he is spared trying to pare this sentiment down by the tacit request she follows her agreement with.
"I'll have the time to spare. What are you thinking of?"
The gun, perhaps. He's already promised himself to it, and it would be easy enough to give her whatever assistance she needs in the midst of whatever other duties have been assigned to him.
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"I need a spare set of hands. To, ah,"—she waggles her fingers at the end of the arm to which he's been so firmly linked, tendons flexing under his fingertips. "Make a spare hand, I suppose. I've ambitions for some adjustments in my future which first require the making of a cast. It will be very rough draft, of course. Eventually I'll have to find someone whose left hand I like enough to take for myself—oh how macabre that sounds—but for the time being, two right ones will do while I sort out exactly what I wish to do with it. And it will take some time for the cast to set, and I think I will be bored without company."
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Having reached across to set his fingers at her wrist, Ellis' thumb presses lightly at the edge of her hand once more. Thinking on what's been taken from her, and what she might fashion for herself.
"You have mine."
Hands. Company. Surely she already knew, whatever she would ask of him is most always easily given.
"I'll be awake again by the afternoon. Will that suit you?"
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Wysteria turns her hand, knuckles bumping him in her eagerness to swat away this dovetail in the conversation while she sucks in a breath and girds herself to continue chattering along.
"Yes, the afternoon. I'll see that I've all the materials necessary, so come by the work rooms whenever it is you've returned to the land of the living. Please and thank you."
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Determined.
Being so accustomed to the flow of conversation, Ellis is aware of the pointed nature of this recitation. The nudge of her knuckles prompts a shift of his hand where he's settled it, thumb running along the seam of her sleeve as he considers Wysteria's patter.
"Would you like me to bring something to read?" he questions, in the wake of paper and the idea of Silas ascending to project lead.
A stopgap measure, while Ellis considers the bigger picture, how he might approach it.
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"I suppose. If you like. I imagine that I'll have my hand in a plaster for at least an hour, and surely only have half that worth of conversation. That is to say, that's all I can be trusted to provide. I suppose if there were a particular topic or happening which you would like to discuss, then we might arrange to fill the rest of the time that way. But some a bit of reading serves just as well."
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As to what he might like to discuss—
Would it not be unfair, discussing what's at the forefront of his mind while she had a hand in plaster? (And for all the other reasons. Ellis has them listed, knows them well.)
"I'll think on it," is what he settles on. "We get on well enough, book or no."
Even under these circumstances. Ellis imagines it weighs on her more than she's showing, the matter of the arm.
"You left much for us to discuss."
His poor mail cubby.
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This is said with said casual candidness that it must be true, and also must be something she has made purposefully remote either by time or his return or some other factor so that if it ever held a sharp edge (maybe it had) that it's now been blunted.
"Oh, but that does remind me. I told you I was going to tell you everything I found out about dreaming and the Gates. But that too should make for a very short conversation, so I'm tempted to retain it until this afternoon in case we need to fill, oh, forty seconds or so."
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But it had been hard enough to conceal the crystal. Taking the book was out of the question.
Wysteria would scoff to hear that all her writing had been kept. Ellis senses this, and so opts to direct his attention more fully to the latter statement.
"Save it," Ellis decides for her. "I assume it's not something to be heard by anyone else seated by us on the ferry."
This early, it's surely those afflicted with hangovers or the irritability that comes with rising at such an hour, both of which might do better if spared scientific theory.
"You might tell me of the celebrations I missed, while I was away."
Because that's Ellis, so concerned with parties.
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"You mean the celebrations you didn't miss. It has been a thoroughly miserable year of parties of all kind, Mister Ellis. First I was abed for the Duke's grandson's birthday. Miss Ellie told me as many of the details as she could remember, but it isn't the same as being there in person and I have been longing, no dying, to observe the interior of that house. And I'm quite certain that all the music and dancing was lovely, and I've heard the Duke keeps a fine library. Do you know, de Foncé and Madame Baudin are some sort of cousins and yet they dislike each other so much that there hasn't even been any invitation to for tea or to anything like it which might ordinarily— Not that I have any great fondness for Madame Baudin, of course. Which I say so freely because she would point it out herself, I'm quite sure. But it's the principle of the thing."
Which as everyone knows, Wysteria takes highly seriously (for as long as the principle is convenient to her, anyway).
"And then there were all the undead for Satinalia proper, though I'd hardly prepared a good costume and now make for a dreadful dancing partner. And then Brother Gideon blew up the make up party to follow, and there has been nothing since. I think everyone is convinced that Riftwatch parties are cursed affairs, and at this rate we'll never have another one again. And now we'll spend Summersday getting nearly assassinated in Antiva! It's all highly unjust!"
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"I should apologize," he says, once he has is certain the flow of her answer has reached a natural conclusion. "I am glad that I didn't miss our dance."
Something easier to say now that he's returned. It would have been to difficult to admit from his perch on the very heights of Weisshaupt towers.
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"I'm afraid those days are well behind us, Mister Ellis. But truly—I'm pleased to hear you so passionate on the subject. When next we're at some function where the subject must naturally arise, I will do everything in my power to secure you an appropriate alternate. I would hate it, truly hate it, if my own inconvenience were to signal the end of your dancing career. You're far too fine a partner to deprive the floor of."
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It is not so far removed from the minor fracturing of a bone. A small injury, relatively speaking. Something he'll carry along with him, as he moves forward. Something that might pain him, if he sets his weight wrong.
But there is nothing from him for a few moments. His fingers move over the seam in her sleeve. The quiet stretches as he orders his thoughts, waiting for the initial flinch away from this thing to pass.
"You're exaggerating my ability," is mild too. Not the point Ellis finds important, but isn't capable of simply letting it pass on his way to the more relevant response: "But you won't have to trouble yourself with that, with finding an alternate. I'll manage."
No hesitation over it: Ellis doesn't want an alternate.
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It's a joke. All of it is. It's just a silly little nonsense conversation. An absurd little thing exchange designed to fill the time that it takes them to trot down to catch the ferry and make their way across to the fortress island. Later—at the next party they have cause to attend, maybe—she will make some reference to it and hope that he laughs. That's all that it is, and so there is no reason at all to feel even a little insulted or annoyed by his being contrary. That would be absurd. Of course that's how he must be. It's the part she had already mentally cast him in. The joke wouldn't stand up at all if he were to go along with it.
Traipsing down the stairs arm and arm, Wysteria bullheadedly charges through that little inexplicable twinge in her chest.
"And if that isn't what you mean—if you really will be responsible for finding yourself a new dancing partner—, then you must at least promise to pretend to entertain my suggestions. I couldn't bear it if your new choice were someone I disapproved of."
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And Wysteria, who can be so sharp, will perhaps never look directly at him and see this truth. Ellis could let her carry them along, momentum drawing them past every moment where he might make himself very clear to her.
Though Ellis has never dug his heels in, asked for her attention. It feels like an unkindness, a selfish act. Ellis balks every time, but this—
"There won't be a new choice, Wysteria."
Gentle over the words. I'll manage means something other than finding someone new to dance with.
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But that morning she had spent a good deal of time fussing with the clasp on the chain of that pretty little necklace, trying at first to contrive to open it between her first three fingers and then to unlatch it with the help of a fork's tine, and then despairing when the length of the chain was too short to simply fit the damned thing on over her head. She had not cried. That would have been stupid. Instead she had thrown her little hand mirror and blamed its shattering on the spirit, and had furiously arranged all her tools on her work table to decide which were to be added to the chatelaine. And once all that had been done, Wysteria had decided once more to not feel at all sorry for herself, and that was that.
(Tak, tak, tak go the heels of her field boots along the stairs very like the click, click, click of a clasp which could be either opened or manipulated in relation to its mate but not both at once.)
She stops abruptly halfway down this last flight of stairs much to the consternation of some light foot traffic behind them which is forced to zag abruptly in either direction to pass. She is still smiling when she looks at Ellis, but some of the good humor has gone out from the expression, and the effect is quite stern in the way laughing women women can sometimes accomplish when they're making light of something they find very serious indeed.
"Really, Mister Ellis! You must continue dancing, or every time I see you not doing so I will only think of why you aren't. And I refuse to be at all self pitying, you see. I find it a very aggravating state for anyone to be in, much less myself. For there is no company quite so miserable as a person who feels their circumstances are so dire that they can't be improved. So I'm sorry, but I'm afraid you must help me for otherwise I may become intractably gloomy."
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But he finds himself wedged into an impossible position in this moment. There is no clarity in how he might answer her. He has been so wrong-footed by this, the idea that even this small tradition is closed to him, that he lapses into silence.
There is something fleetingly pained in his expression. Despite everything, he has the impulse to ask Don't you know? It goes. Ellis' gaze drops, follows the shift of his hand from their linked arms to the brief lacing of their fingers as Ellis draws her those last few steps down and aside to remove any impediment they pose to Kirkwall's pedestrian traffic. The low carved wall is at Wysteria's back. Ellis' thumb draws along her knuckles.
"You don't need to think of it," he promises at last, though he cannot say he expects that to bring her the relief she is seeking. "The circumstances of it are mine to manage now."
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But that flicker of distemper is there and gone again as quickly as it had first manifested. She widens her smile by a half degree to compensate for the failure.
"Which is a fine theory, but I think you and I both know that I'm far too invested in the subject to turn a blind eye to it. I swear to tou that I will endeavor to do my very best to ignore your presence at the margins of dances entirely, Mister Ellis, but surely you mustn't think me invincible as all that. And when I inevitably notice, because you are my friend and I care for you, what would you rather have of me? I will either be miserable that I can't be a good partner to you in my current state, or furiously jealous at whoever gets to take my place after all this effort I've put into bringing you up! At least if we were to make a sort of game of it, then it might still be something we—"
No, that's too tender a bruise on her pride to push on. Wysteria veers away from it.
"If you really truly don't enjoy the dancing, then I won't insist you do it. But I will be very guilty if mine quitting means you do too."
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He looks away from her face. He takes her hand in his own, thumb running back and forth over the back of her palm. It's a loose hold, easily disengaged when she has had her fill of it.
What would he have of her? This is not a question he knows how to answer. Or rather, it is not a question he knows how to answer truthfully. Not while still being fair to her. Not in such a way that would not become a burden to her.
"I enjoy dancing with you," Ellis says quietly, brow knit into furrows. Watching their hands, and not the too-bright smile on her face that Ellis knows to be as much a function of her unhappiness as it is a mask. The second half of this answer explains itself: this is the thing that matters. Her. The moments in time where he might permit himself to consider the possibility that—
The thought is fractured before it can continue on. Ellis draws in a breath. Recognizes that he has not offered her sufficient response, though he doesn't see what else can be said, he adds, "But I don't want you to be unhappy. Not over this."
In which this holds place for a great many things, all of which Ellis keeps tucked neatly away.
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(Which is obviously a horrible thing to even think, unserious though it may be.)
Her study however remains far more relentless; Ellis watches their hands and Wysteria watches his face with a sharply analytical eye designed for the examination of schematics. He's going to make those wrinkles on his brow deeper frowning like that, she makes herself think. Otherwise the direction her thoughts wander in is far more morose than the day calls for.
"Do Wardens ever have parties and dancing, or is the seriousness when you're together too much for it? This is a real question and not an attempt to make fun of you or anyone else. I really do wish to know."
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But there is an inevitability to it all the same. Someday, he will say this thing aloud. He has divulged the thing in so many other ways. His own body betrays him in this. Perhaps she already knows the shape of it, has put name to it and is kindly allowing him the space to pretend he hasn't been rendered so transparent.
Ellis hopes otherwise, but it is impossible to know.
"There are Wardens who dance," he answers. "I imagine there are parties, where they'd do so. I was never one for them."
Then he came to Kirkwall, where enough shifted to make that statement not quite true anymore.
And times have changed among the Wardens regardless. If there was ever dancing in Weisshaupt Fortress, they're well past it.
By the end of the day, there will be some ink spattered here, he knows. His thumb moves along the edge of her knuckles, where a quill may rest at some point. It is still early, though Kirkwall stirs further to full consciousness with every passing moment.
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It strikes her that he is nervous, or frightened, or maybe both, or maybe just something adjacent to them which she would have difficulty recognizing. Maybe it's something he found at Weisshaupt which he now refuses to speak on. Or maybe it's the reason he went to begin with.
"Will you tell me why you weren't?" isn't the following question she had originally planned—Has their ever been a Lady Warden with some dreadful injury, and did she dance, and was it strange to see or did everyone simply forget and see only her and not her pinned sleeve—but it seems the more important one.
"Is it because of—That young lady you knew. Or was there some other reason?"
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This is not a thing he can say to her.
But the question draws his gaze up to her face anyway. It does not still the sweep of his thumb. It does not shift his expression, change where it has cracked open in the course of their discussion. The quiet unspools between them, punctuated by the thunk and crack of storefronts opening, shutters being pushed outwards high above them, the cawing of gulls in the harbor.
"Aye, that was part of it," Ellis ventures, frown deepening as he feels his way through to this answer. Abbreviated because the day is very new; it is too early to invite this part of his history onto the street alongside them.
Yes, part of it was that Shanae was gone. But so was everyone else, even the person he was then, who danced with anyone who reached for him.
"But we should speak on something else now."
There is no obligation for Wysteria to tread along this conversational topic with him.
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"Is that a request, or a courtesy? I can't tell."
He's tired. She knows that.
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slaps down bow