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.
He looks up into her face and thinks again that there is such bravery in how Wysteria carries herself through the world. To meet grief and fight it, rather than be broken, that is something worthy of admiration. Ellis hadn't managed it.
Ellis shifts, weight grinding his boots against the dirt.
"You did the best you could," comes more quietly, entreating.
"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.
Is it a kindness to watch Wysteria pluck up a smile and spark some brightness into her voice and think to let the conversation drop? Maybe it would be as simple as that, sweeping all of it aside and leaving it alone. But—
He closes his fingers over her mittened hands on the pan, stalling against the possibility of retreat before Wysteria can make a move towards it. The cold has reddened his knuckles, but his grip is firm.
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.
In the midst of the determined nudge of the pan and shifting of grain on tin, Tony's assertion of months before comes back to him: "Well it's important the whole time, Ellis."
It would be selfish to take the out. Ellis doesn't even know if he's capable of answering her, if her curiosity is directed in any direction he's expecting. But even if he can't wrench together an answer for her, he can at least explain it's absence. Surely that's better than nothing.
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?
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—
What a thing to have to contemplate, holding Wysteria's hands over a tin of chicken feed in the cold.
His grip loosens, shifting along to draw the pan from her with one hand while keeping hold of at least one of Wysteria's hands in the process of putting the tin down on the ground. The chickens are resourceful enough to manage.
"I don't understand."
Potentially a better answer than I am cared for, which feels true but likely doesn't reach whatever Wysteria is holding up to mark a sufficient level of care.
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."
He can't rightly keep hold of her, can't reconcile the urge to tighten his hand around hers with the obvious: she wants him to let go. She pulls, and his grip loosens, releases his hold on her hand. If he regrets the loss of that small contact, well, that's his problem. It's not Wysteria's task to steady him in this moment. He closes his hand in on itself, shakes his head slightly.
"You know."
Wysteria knows her own mind. She's clever, unravels everything quickly when her interest is piqued. Whatever lurks unspoken after that break in her recitation is likely another piece of evidence he'd rather she turn her attention from. The skin over one knuckle has split in the cold, dot of blood rising and then shaken away as Ellis looks at her. There's some immediate urge to apologize, but he can recognize that for what it is: a stopgap against the bigger problem, even if his remorse for her upset is sincere.
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.
When Ellis rises, it's a sudden enough movement to startle away one intrepid chicken. A squawk and flap of wings sees the creature hopping ungainly around to the far edge of the tin as Ellis straightens up to his full height. He wrings his hands as he turns away and then back, as if thinking better of whatever urge would have propelled him to pace away from her.
"I could never be ashamed. Not of either of you."
It would help if he sounded less wretched over it, maybe.
"Your friendship is more than I deserve, more than I ever expected when I came here. And I—"
A place where his voice breaks, words coming apart as he struggles to find something true to tell her. (It is the wrong moment to think of Cathán, but he does; remembers a similar argument ending in shouting and departures.) There are so many parts of his life he doesn't want to ever touch Wysteria's.
"I'm ashamed of myself," is what he settles on. "Not you. Never, ever you, Wysteria."
It's lucky that he turns back; she isn't prepared to interrupt any escape attempts. Or for this apparently, given the baffled look he receives in answer. Flush with mortification or exasperation, Wysteria struggles after some better reply but finally just finds her way to:
"But this is exactly my meaning, Mister Ellis! If it's not myself or Mister Stark, then it is the—the friendship itself. And I don't understand why it troubles you so, or why you shouldn't think it unwarranted, or in what way it doesn't—" She makes a frustrated noise between her teeth. "Align with the way in which you see yourself."
In the course of her questioning, Ellis has strayed further from her towards the covered garden beds. He'd barely noticed the movement. She is asking him for something he has never shared. Wysteria's face is flushed from cold or from anger and Ellis wants to go to her and take her hands and ask her to set all of this aside. But the distance put between them remains.
If he tells her the truth, will she ever look at him kindly again?
Or worse, if he is to unspool all that he has done in his life, all the mistakes, all the blood, all the death, and for her to take it in stride? It is not something to be excused. He cannot hear that from her.
"Because I'm not as good a person as you think I am," Ellis says, turning back to her. "And I am sorry, I—I'm sorry that I cannot give you a better answer."
"And this is how you would see that managed? By using our care for you as something to berate yourself with?"
He is very far away. Maybe that's why there is room again in her for some flash of anger to spark out from under the distress. Wysteria stamps one of her feet on the courtyard's paving stones, the calfskin boot's tread so soft thwap that it fails to startle even the chickens.
"Well I never agreed to it. And I doubt Mister Stark would be any more pleased to know it."
This is the danger in giving half an answer, though he is caught somewhere between at this point: reluctant to say more, but having said too much, and poorly at that. His hands fold together, cracked knuckles curled into a fist, pressed into opposite palm. The fingers of his left hand have gone stiff with cold. It's a grounding thing, something Ellis holds fast to as he looks back to her.
It's a good question. For a split second, it seems like it might check her.
"You might try not shutting yourself away while I cram my entire foot into my mouth, for starters. Or say it, when you've been harmed. Or just—We're not any of us breakable things, Mister Ellis. I think we are all capable of weathering being a little sharp with one another when the circumstances warrant it. Or do you really think my opinion is that flexible?"
From the edge of the planter box, and under snug fit of her felted hat, she has puffed up considerably. An uncharitable parallel might be drawn between her and the rustled feathers of a small flock's worth of chickens, or an especially harried small dog who believes it her task to wrangle them.
Were they speaking of anything else, at any other point in time, Ellis' expression might have softened in amusement at her outrage.
But that is not a possibility in this moment.
It's not so simple as yes or no. It's about the weight of all this ugliness, and wanting so badly to draw a line around it, wall it away so it would never reach this house or this garden, so Wysteria never has to decide if her opinion of him needs changing.
Rather than answer the question immediately, Ellis tips his hands back, lifts his hands to his face. The great inhale and exhale of cold air rasps in place of a reply, as he plucks at the threads of his composure, steadying himself. Waits for words to come to him.
What does that look like from across a little garden courtyard? Maybe like a series of papers, folded over and left unanswered.
She waits for a beat. And then uncurls her arms from about her and leans down, shooing the chicken off the pan so it might be tipped up and the remaining grain dumped on the paving stones Ellis had spent all summer carefully digging up and relaying. The pan is tucked under her arm and she rises, brushing invisible straw bits from her skirts. The edge of the scarf is tossed back behind her shoulder and—
And.
She is meant to make her way past him and into the house now. She could do it without saying anything.
"Do you want an escape route? The gate is just there. I can look the other way."
"No," is clipped, short enough that his voice doesn't give way.
Wysteria won't forgive him for leaving.
Ellis pushes his hands back, heels grinding briefly against his eyes before he shoves fingers through his hair, then lets them drop back to his sides. His face is flushed from the cold. There is a catch in his throat that won't settle, no matter what he does. It puts a hitch in his tone wen he speaks again.
"Do you remember when you asked me if there was something troubling me?"
If there is a brief surge of satisfaction from his refusal to go, it has no opportunity to either resolve or form fully. Instead it catches high in her chest and hangs there, a hook to secure her in place. There is no divorcing herself from this section of space.
The pan is clutched tight between her arm and side, mittened hands tucked about its curved edge. But it doesn't really matter what her hands do, does it? He's out of reach.
"I said I didn't want to talk about it. Or something close," he reminds her, unnecessarily, but it's close to the point and Ellis is trying to scrape together thoughts that scatter away from him. They'd been sitting out in the sun. She'd had Richard's snake among the flowerbeds. The chickens hadn't been here yet. Ellis turns his head briefly towards the place, but it's irrelevant. The point is not that day, not exactly. It was something that had been enough at the time.
"It's not something I'm hiding from you, or from him. I don't talk about any of it because it's painful, and I can't—"
They're edging towards the most he's spoken at length outside of a letter. Which registers, as Ellis breaks off, thumb pressing down over one knuckle.
"I can't," he repeats, a complete statement rather than an involuntary stop.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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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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There is no hesitation over that point.
He looks up into her face and thinks again that there is such bravery in how Wysteria carries herself through the world. To meet grief and fight it, rather than be broken, that is something worthy of admiration. Ellis hadn't managed it.
Ellis shifts, weight grinding his boots against the dirt.
"You did the best you could," comes more quietly, entreating.
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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.
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He closes his fingers over her mittened hands on the pan, stalling against the possibility of retreat before Wysteria can make a move towards it. The cold has reddened his knuckles, but his grip is firm.
"Ask your question."
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(Be reassuring.)
"Another time. It's hardly important."
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It would be selfish to take the out. Ellis doesn't even know if he's capable of answering her, if her curiosity is directed in any direction he's expecting. But even if he can't wrench together an answer for her, he can at least explain it's absence. Surely that's better than nothing.
His fingers tighten by degrees over hers.
"No. Ask me now, Wysteria."
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"Why don't you want any of this?"
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"Any of what?"
Presumably not the chickens.
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"To be cared for."
Unfair.
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His grip loosens, shifting along to draw the pan from her with one hand while keeping hold of at least one of Wysteria's hands in the process of putting the tin down on the ground. The chickens are resourceful enough to manage.
"I don't understand."
Potentially a better answer than I am cared for, which feels true but likely doesn't reach whatever Wysteria is holding up to mark a sufficient level of care.
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"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.
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"You know."
Wysteria knows her own mind. She's clever, unravels everything quickly when her interest is piqued. Whatever lurks unspoken after that break in her recitation is likely another piece of evidence he'd rather she turn her attention from. The skin over one knuckle has split in the cold, dot of blood rising and then shaken away as Ellis looks at her. There's some immediate urge to apologize, but he can recognize that for what it is: a stopgap against the bigger problem, even if his remorse for her upset is sincere.
"Finish your thought."
And then what?
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"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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"I could never be ashamed. Not of either of you."
It would help if he sounded less wretched over it, maybe.
"Your friendship is more than I deserve, more than I ever expected when I came here. And I—"
A place where his voice breaks, words coming apart as he struggles to find something true to tell her. (It is the wrong moment to think of Cathán, but he does; remembers a similar argument ending in shouting and departures.) There are so many parts of his life he doesn't want to ever touch Wysteria's.
"I'm ashamed of myself," is what he settles on. "Not you. Never, ever you, Wysteria."
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"But this is exactly my meaning, Mister Ellis! If it's not myself or Mister Stark, then it is the—the friendship itself. And I don't understand why it troubles you so, or why you shouldn't think it unwarranted, or in what way it doesn't—" She makes a frustrated noise between her teeth. "Align with the way in which you see yourself."
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If he tells her the truth, will she ever look at him kindly again?
Or worse, if he is to unspool all that he has done in his life, all the mistakes, all the blood, all the death, and for her to take it in stride? It is not something to be excused. He cannot hear that from her.
"Because I'm not as good a person as you think I am," Ellis says, turning back to her. "And I am sorry, I—I'm sorry that I cannot give you a better answer."
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He is very far away. Maybe that's why there is room again in her for some flash of anger to spark out from under the distress. Wysteria stamps one of her feet on the courtyard's paving stones, the calfskin boot's tread so soft thwap that it fails to startle even the chickens.
"Well I never agreed to it. And I doubt Mister Stark would be any more pleased to know it."
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This is the danger in giving half an answer, though he is caught somewhere between at this point: reluctant to say more, but having said too much, and poorly at that. His hands fold together, cracked knuckles curled into a fist, pressed into opposite palm. The fingers of his left hand have gone stiff with cold. It's a grounding thing, something Ellis holds fast to as he looks back to her.
"What would you have me do, Wysteria?"
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"You might try not shutting yourself away while I cram my entire foot into my mouth, for starters. Or say it, when you've been harmed. Or just—We're not any of us breakable things, Mister Ellis. I think we are all capable of weathering being a little sharp with one another when the circumstances warrant it. Or do you really think my opinion is that flexible?"
From the edge of the planter box, and under snug fit of her felted hat, she has puffed up considerably. An uncharitable parallel might be drawn between her and the rustled feathers of a small flock's worth of chickens, or an especially harried small dog who believes it her task to wrangle them.
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But that is not a possibility in this moment.
It's not so simple as yes or no. It's about the weight of all this ugliness, and wanting so badly to draw a line around it, wall it away so it would never reach this house or this garden, so Wysteria never has to decide if her opinion of him needs changing.
Rather than answer the question immediately, Ellis tips his hands back, lifts his hands to his face. The great inhale and exhale of cold air rasps in place of a reply, as he plucks at the threads of his composure, steadying himself. Waits for words to come to him.
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She waits for a beat. And then uncurls her arms from about her and leans down, shooing the chicken off the pan so it might be tipped up and the remaining grain dumped on the paving stones Ellis had spent all summer carefully digging up and relaying. The pan is tucked under her arm and she rises, brushing invisible straw bits from her skirts. The edge of the scarf is tossed back behind her shoulder and—
And.
She is meant to make her way past him and into the house now. She could do it without saying anything.
"Do you want an escape route? The gate is just there. I can look the other way."
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Wysteria won't forgive him for leaving.
Ellis pushes his hands back, heels grinding briefly against his eyes before he shoves fingers through his hair, then lets them drop back to his sides. His face is flushed from the cold. There is a catch in his throat that won't settle, no matter what he does. It puts a hitch in his tone wen he speaks again.
"Do you remember when you asked me if there was something troubling me?"
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The pan is clutched tight between her arm and side, mittened hands tucked about its curved edge. But it doesn't really matter what her hands do, does it? He's out of reach.
"I remember."
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"It's not something I'm hiding from you, or from him. I don't talk about any of it because it's painful, and I can't—"
They're edging towards the most he's spoken at length outside of a letter. Which registers, as Ellis breaks off, thumb pressing down over one knuckle.
"I can't," he repeats, a complete statement rather than an involuntary stop.
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put a bow on this pls
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