heorte: (Default)
ellis ginsberg. ([personal profile] heorte) wrote2019-09-10 03:02 pm
heirring: ([008])

[personal profile] heirring 2021-02-13 07:52 am (UTC)(link)
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."
heirring: ([043])

[personal profile] heirring 2021-02-13 06:10 pm (UTC)(link)
"Angry with you!"

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?"
heirring: ([074])

[personal profile] heirring 2021-02-14 12:11 am (UTC)(link)
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."
heirring: ([055])

[personal profile] heirring 2021-02-14 12:54 am (UTC)(link)
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."
heirring: ([074])

[personal profile] heirring 2021-02-14 02:01 am (UTC)(link)
"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."
heirring: ([069])

[personal profile] heirring 2021-02-14 03:47 am (UTC)(link)
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.

"Tiresome."
heirring: ([049])

[personal profile] heirring 2021-02-14 04:59 am (UTC)(link)
"Then why would you not just—" She closes her eyes, breathes in. Stops.

There is a question. It isn't Then why would you not just help me?; this is hardly the first work she has done for Riftwatch which has required cornering people in corridors for an interrogation or catching them in stairwells to shake them down for information. It's a better question. A more pressing one. Because if he isn't angry, then what is he? And if he thought her furious, why not object? Insist otherwise. Protect some thing at risk.

With a prompt unraveling of her crossed arms, she presses her mitten hands briefly to her eyes and quickly swipes whatever lurks there away. All is in order. It hardly matters, and so see! After the briefest pause, she may be all bolstered cheer after as she drops her hand. It is an easy thing, as simple as dipping faded paper in bright dye.

"Well. Then it seems there is no cause for concern at all. How good. I hope you may now be perfectly at ease. Take this if you please, Mister Ellis."

The pan with the remaining seed is fetched up from beside her and passed to him.
heirring: ([133])

[personal profile] heirring 2021-02-14 05:43 am (UTC)(link)
The curve of her mouth slips, slants, and then forcefully reasserts itself. The pan is pushed to him despite the brace of Ellis' hands—a gentle kind of insistence. How satisfying it is, she stubbornly thinks, to prove to yourself that you can do something after all.

(Be reassuring.)

"Another time. It's hardly important."
heirring: ([088])

[personal profile] heirring 2021-02-14 06:07 am (UTC)(link)
He wouldn't keep her here if she were determined to leave. This isn't inescapable. Revolting against his hold might spill the contents of the pan, but it's all destined for the ground already so what harm would there be in it?

"Why don't you want any of this?"
heirring: ([072])

[personal profile] heirring 2021-02-14 06:56 am (UTC)(link)
There is a visible struggle as she scatters in a dozen different directions. There are so many ways the question might be clarified that picking one seems—

"To be cared for."

Unfair.
heirring: ([050])

[personal profile] heirring 2021-02-14 05:28 pm (UTC)(link)
Despite the apparent willingness of the hand he still has a hold on, Wysteria is quick to snatch the freed one back to herself the very instant it's loosed. It is thoughtlessly applied to the task of some minor rearrangement of her scarf about her neck—immediate and avoidant of being captured again.

"If someone did that to me—left me with what I left you with—I would be furious with them. And you couldn't say where you'd been when we'd asked. Which doesn't matter, really. Those things maybe don't count like they would otherwise because it was all Fade walking nonsense. But there are things you won't discuss here too, and if you thought I was angry with you then why not fill out the ridiculous survey, and sometimes it's as if you—

"I don't know," is a sudden sharp stop, when she had just been finding that stone rolling down a hill momentum. "See? I told you. This is very stupid. Pretend I said nothing at all."

She makes to extract her kept hand.
heirring: ([069])

[personal profile] heirring 2021-02-14 10:03 pm (UTC)(link)
That hand too is tucked up close against her. It's a different breed of crossed arms--low across her middle, mitten hands tight against her sides. Between them are her knees, and the scuff of her boots, and him balanced on his heels and the smudge of blood on knuckles. At least one of the chickens is clever enough to peel away from the little flock and coming questing back toward the pan, peck-peck-pecking experimentally at its edge.

"Sometimes I think you're ashamed of our friendship. Mine. And Mister Stark's."

I am devoted to you, he had said so long ago. It had seemed so painful to him then.

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