An identical folded envelope, an identical carefully trimmed piece of parchment—
Mister Ellis,
No doubt there will be some useful odd or end to be mined out of whatever small collection of responses may be unwillingly scraped together.
As to the plants, I respectfully make no guarantees regardless of whatever attentions I might provide them. I believe I have mentioned before a lack of skill with respect to most things which grow in daylight. Surely you have heard of the saying that if one would see a thing done properly, they often must see to it themselves.
Yet another identical folded envelope containing an identical carefully trimmed piece of parchment, resolutrly set in Ellis' mailbox at a perfectly normal hour of the day—
Mister Ellis,
Happily, all of that work is to be completed here in the Gallows, so your management of the plants will have no effect whatsoever on the survey or its associated research. You are welcome to do as you like whenever you like.
If the management of the plants occurs in a stretch of time when Ellis knows Wysteria to be occupied in the Seneschal's office, well.
The potted plants in question have been moved, several pieces of furniture in the front room rearranged solely to benefit optimal light conditions while other pots have been relocated to other rooms in the house. This is potentially enough of a sign of Ellis' presence, but left in the center of the table, pinned over a lopsided scorch mark by a little packet of tea, a note:
Wysteria,
The plants should do well enough in their new positions.
Is the sight of a small folded envelope in a particular cubby on the dining hall's wall mortifying yet?
Mister Ellis,
My thanks for seeing to the plants. I would be remiss not to mention that there is no requirement for you keep them or any of your other belongings at the Hightown house. I know the personal rooms in the Gallows to be rather more limited, but am also quite certain that arrangements might be made. Further, your chickens must long for the company of other animals. Do not let old habits dictate these practices if you have some preference otherwise.
There is no small, folded envelope. There is no pristinely trimmed note. There is no note at all.
But at some point, at some hour in which the aforementioned chickens are acquainted with having seed spread for them, Wysteria is there sitting on one of the garden's planter boxes. She is bundled up against the weather with a scarf pulled high and a felt hat yanked low, and there is a hiss and a squawking of enthusiasm from the assemblage of poultry at her feet as she flings a mitten-ful of dry corn and barley seeds onto the pavers.
The wrought-iron gate has taken to creaking when drawn open. It had been on a list of things Ellis had meant to see to, put off until the weather was more agreeable. The clanking scrape of it announces him, to what Ellis had assumed would be an empty garden.
It would be a lie to say he didn't consider retreating, regardless of how obvious his entrance had been, when he realizes Wysteria is sat out in the garden.
"You needn't do that," is what he says instead, as he approaches. "You've been very clear about your participation in their raising."
He has always liked to see Wysteria out in the garden. It's as much for her as it is for him. As he draws up alongside her, Ellis slides his hands into his pockets. He's watching the chickens instead of her.
"But you needn't delay your work on my account. Or on account of the chickens."
There is a beat in which she sets her jaw very hard, and so the scoffing sound she eventually makes cannot be entirely reflexive. Rather, it's thing she forces. A placeholder. Something to fill the silence or to bolster herself with. She does not however cross her arms; that would be stupid. Instead, Wysteria satisfies herself with lifting her chin by a series of haughty degrees.
"Oh, I see. So today you respect my work. What convenient timing you have, Mister Ellis."
The thing which flashes behind her eyes is very sharp, glancing off him like an arrow off a stone and landing somewhere behind him--a random fixed point on the stone wall, or a planter across the garden, or a chicken pecking at a crack in the paving stones.
Somewhere, high in her chest, a furious tangle is drawing itself into a tighter and tighter knot. It is lodged against her throat, pressed there so definitively that for a long time she can find no way of speaking around it until she mentally divorces herself from the shape of her own form. She imagines herself a different person, standing separate from this and looking down at these two figures in a dingy little courtyard garden. The one sitting on the edge of the planter says. light and breezy and without disappointment--
"There is no need to spare my feelings, Mister Ellis. You may just say when you're angry with a person."
It's almost a singular talent of Wysteria's, managing to say something Ellis could not have expected even if he'd had a week to try and consider all the potential responses she might have decided upon.
"I'm angry?" he questions, startled confusion rattling the level moderation from his tone. His eyes leave the chickens as he half-turns towards her. "Who told you I was angry?"
If anything, he'd presumed Wysteria to be angry. Or worse, to be disappointed, or curious in a way that would inevitably mean Ellis would disappoint her. (He does not think of how sharp her voice had been in the dream. It was a dream.) He does not mention the closings of her letters, nor the suggestion of removing the chickens and all else from the house, simply stalls after the second question, watching her face.
The fixture of her attention on that removed point intensifies, threatening to draw her back into that person at the edge of the planter. She struggles against it, and the silence produced by it is at once braced and brittle.
"You returned the survey. You refused every invitation to participate, despite my insistence of its importance. You have attempted to surrender the care of your things here and in fact made every effort to avoid crossing my path when I insisted otherwise. After I--" She lapses. It's a brief, furiously closed tight thing.
"I'm not an imbecile, Mister Ellis. I don't need to be told to know."
The recitation pulls him forward, closes the gap between them. Chickens scatter as Ellis crouches in front of her, heel to haunch, arms resting on his knees.
"I'm not angry."
A passing notion: if he took her hands maybe she would look him in the eye. But he doesn't reach for her. There is a distance, some chilly gulf between them that Ellis isn't sure he's invited to broach.
"But I think you might be angry with me," he says, aware of the ridiculousness of the statement, turning it back in this manner. "And I don't think it's...I think the survey is only part of what's troubling you."
And worse, that he is going to disappoint her. He is going to tell her no and he doesn't know that she'll be so accommodating of him now as she was the first time.
It's a nasty sort of repetition, half baffled and half mocking, secured by the fact that fixture of her attention doesn't waver from where it's posted away from him and rattled off automatically to keep herself from saying some other thing. Or thinking some other thing.
It's forced to be a flat, simple kind of irritation. It's so much easier to carry around without being cut by it that way.
Wysteria does cross her arms then. And lifts her chin a few degrees further, though he has already made himself so low.
The look she receives is patient, eyebrows raising. The patter of their conversation is still the same, in spite of the dread curling in Ellis' chest. He folds his hands together between his knees (no mittens, in spite of the cold) and watches her face.
And says nothing.
It's the survey, and it isn't the survey. It's the tightness of her voice in a cabin in a dream and the snap between them in a chilly campsite. They all come from the same place, from a deficit in him, but he waits to hear it confirmed aloud by her.
The presence of his attention is like the pressure of a thumb. She doesn't have to be looking to be aware of it hanging there, his face a persistent blur at the edge of her vision.
In reply, Wysteria cinches the wrap of her arms tighter. The chickens peck at the pavers. Feathers are ruffled. The day is gray and drab and no sun reaches this small walled garden. The doors to the house remain closed.
"I am not angry," she says. And then allows, "At you."
Some shadow of skepticism edges across his expression, but Ellis doesn't contradict her. He has the sense they're teetering on the edge of a real argument (if the letters hadn't been one on their own) and he's hesitant to gamble on what will and won't tip them across that line.
"Then who?"
Or what, maybe would be more accurate. But Ellis has a starting point. He's attempting to proceed delicately.
What a stupid question. From a person who has committed himself so wholly to being purposefully dense, she thinks. Is it not enough to just be guaranteed on this part? She could decline to tell him. It would be entirely fair to do so.
This too sparks hot some ember of irritation. It is a stark lack of charity; how unpleasant the shape of it is, and how bitter the tang of the air which lingers about it.
Like a locked door whose handle is being braced by a closed hand on one side, she picks her words carefully. They are all crisp edges, perfectly enunciated as if selected one by one for their sound rather than their meaning. "I am angry," she says. "At myself. For being so short tempered. And unkind. So there. You see the difficulty."
"Aye," comes slowly, brows drawing together in confusion. There's an urge to rebut the charges, but the trouble is that he can't see where they may have come from.
(The dream. Tony's bedside. The sharpness of her voice.)
"Tell me what brought this on," Ellis says, which is perhaps equal parts stalling and self-preservation. "Please."
"Oh please, Mister Ellis," is snapped back. "What has not brought it on? Everyone knows it is true and there it was, made plain as day. Even you can't deny it, having seen the thing first hand."
It takes great effort to clamp her teeth down around the impulse to continue. There are a dozen different things which threaten to follow on the heel of that out of her, rising hot like the color in her face. She hammers them down. The heels of her calfskin colored boots, all stamped with flowers, scrape on the paving stones - a literal digging in as she exhales hard through the nose. A puff of frustration.
"I know it makes no difference really, given that were are here and everything is well after all. But it was cruel of me. To leave. And to abandon him to you. I know these things upset you, so it is only natural that you should dislike me for it."
She looks at him then, all drawn and scowling.
"There are lots of people who are very cross with one another. And you did refuse my survey."
Regardless of whether or not Ellis ever intended to directly speak about what had happened at the tail end of the dream or not, the response comes to him very quickly.
"I could never be angry with you for that," Ellis tells her, firm over the assertion. "You were upset. Even if we were still there, I'd not hold it against you."
A particular challenge: talking around exactly what they'd both been upset about. Ellis is reluctant to invoke Tony's condition in the dream, as if it could cement it into something real.
"It was a hard thing. None of us handled it as well as we would have wanted to."
She looks away again, jaw setting very hard in place of some other, more vulnerable thing—a knot in her throat or the sting of something silly behind the eyes to be blinked away. It's fine.
"Well I think that's a poor excuse. Just because a thing is difficult doesn't mean you shouldn't admit to having done it badly. And—" And. "It is not just that, or only in that terrible dream either. It affects the work, you know. To be so..."
She searches for the right word, falters, and lapses hard across some invisible line and into a long, clumsy silence.
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The potted plants in question have been moved, several pieces of furniture in the front room rearranged solely to benefit optimal light conditions while other pots have been relocated to other rooms in the house. This is potentially enough of a sign of Ellis' presence, but left in the center of the table, pinned over a lopsided scorch mark by a little packet of tea, a note:
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But at some point, at some hour in which the aforementioned chickens are acquainted with having seed spread for them, Wysteria is there sitting on one of the garden's planter boxes. She is bundled up against the weather with a scarf pulled high and a felt hat yanked low, and there is a hiss and a squawking of enthusiasm from the assemblage of poultry at her feet as she flings a mitten-ful of dry corn and barley seeds onto the pavers.
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It would be a lie to say he didn't consider retreating, regardless of how obvious his entrance had been, when he realizes Wysteria is sat out in the garden.
"You needn't do that," is what he says instead, as he approaches. "You've been very clear about your participation in their raising."
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Archly knocks her mittened hands together to shed to bits of seed clinging to the knit.
"If you would prefer me not to assist, then by all means. I have work to do and am already behind."
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He has always liked to see Wysteria out in the garden. It's as much for her as it is for him. As he draws up alongside her, Ellis slides his hands into his pockets. He's watching the chickens instead of her.
"But you needn't delay your work on my account. Or on account of the chickens."
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"Oh, I see. So today you respect my work. What convenient timing you have, Mister Ellis."
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He has no right for her name to come on a sigh, but it does.
"You know I respect your work. Whether or not I fill out a survey has nothing to do with it."
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Somewhere, high in her chest, a furious tangle is drawing itself into a tighter and tighter knot. It is lodged against her throat, pressed there so definitively that for a long time she can find no way of speaking around it until she mentally divorces herself from the shape of her own form. She imagines herself a different person, standing separate from this and looking down at these two figures in a dingy little courtyard garden. The one sitting on the edge of the planter says. light and breezy and without disappointment--
"There is no need to spare my feelings, Mister Ellis. You may just say when you're angry with a person."
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"I'm angry?" he questions, startled confusion rattling the level moderation from his tone. His eyes leave the chickens as he half-turns towards her. "Who told you I was angry?"
If anything, he'd presumed Wysteria to be angry. Or worse, to be disappointed, or curious in a way that would inevitably mean Ellis would disappoint her. (He does not think of how sharp her voice had been in the dream. It was a dream.) He does not mention the closings of her letters, nor the suggestion of removing the chickens and all else from the house, simply stalls after the second question, watching her face.
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"You returned the survey. You refused every invitation to participate, despite my insistence of its importance. You have attempted to surrender the care of your things here and in fact made every effort to avoid crossing my path when I insisted otherwise. After I--" She lapses. It's a brief, furiously closed tight thing.
"I'm not an imbecile, Mister Ellis. I don't need to be told to know."
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"I'm not angry."
A passing notion: if he took her hands maybe she would look him in the eye. But he doesn't reach for her. There is a distance, some chilly gulf between them that Ellis isn't sure he's invited to broach.
"But I think you might be angry with me," he says, aware of the ridiculousness of the statement, turning it back in this manner. "And I don't think it's...I think the survey is only part of what's troubling you."
And worse, that he is going to disappoint her. He is going to tell her no and he doesn't know that she'll be so accommodating of him now as she was the first time.
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It's a nasty sort of repetition, half baffled and half mocking, secured by the fact that fixture of her attention doesn't waver from where it's posted away from him and rattled off automatically to keep herself from saying some other thing. Or thinking some other thing.
It's forced to be a flat, simple kind of irritation. It's so much easier to carry around without being cut by it that way.
Wysteria does cross her arms then. And lifts her chin a few degrees further, though he has already made himself so low.
"What could I possibly be angry with you for?"
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And says nothing.
It's the survey, and it isn't the survey. It's the tightness of her voice in a cabin in a dream and the snap between them in a chilly campsite. They all come from the same place, from a deficit in him, but he waits to hear it confirmed aloud by her.
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In reply, Wysteria cinches the wrap of her arms tighter. The chickens peck at the pavers. Feathers are ruffled. The day is gray and drab and no sun reaches this small walled garden. The doors to the house remain closed.
"I am not angry," she says. And then allows, "At you."
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"Then who?"
Or what, maybe would be more accurate. But Ellis has a starting point. He's attempting to proceed delicately.
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This too sparks hot some ember of irritation. It is a stark lack of charity; how unpleasant the shape of it is, and how bitter the tang of the air which lingers about it.
Like a locked door whose handle is being braced by a closed hand on one side, she picks her words carefully. They are all crisp edges, perfectly enunciated as if selected one by one for their sound rather than their meaning. "I am angry," she says. "At myself. For being so short tempered. And unkind. So there. You see the difficulty."
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(The dream. Tony's bedside. The sharpness of her voice.)
"Tell me what brought this on," Ellis says, which is perhaps equal parts stalling and self-preservation. "Please."
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It takes great effort to clamp her teeth down around the impulse to continue. There are a dozen different things which threaten to follow on the heel of that out of her, rising hot like the color in her face. She hammers them down. The heels of her calfskin colored boots, all stamped with flowers, scrape on the paving stones - a literal digging in as she exhales hard through the nose. A puff of frustration.
"I know it makes no difference really, given that were are here and everything is well after all. But it was cruel of me. To leave. And to abandon him to you. I know these things upset you, so it is only natural that you should dislike me for it."
She looks at him then, all drawn and scowling.
"There are lots of people who are very cross with one another. And you did refuse my survey."
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Regardless of whether or not Ellis ever intended to directly speak about what had happened at the tail end of the dream or not, the response comes to him very quickly.
"I could never be angry with you for that," Ellis tells her, firm over the assertion. "You were upset. Even if we were still there, I'd not hold it against you."
A particular challenge: talking around exactly what they'd both been upset about. Ellis is reluctant to invoke Tony's condition in the dream, as if it could cement it into something real.
"It was a hard thing. None of us handled it as well as we would have wanted to."
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"Well I think that's a poor excuse. Just because a thing is difficult doesn't mean you shouldn't admit to having done it badly. And—" And. "It is not just that, or only in that terrible dream either. It affects the work, you know. To be so..."
She searches for the right word, falters, and lapses hard across some invisible line and into a long, clumsy silence.
"Tiresome."
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put a bow on this pls
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