heorte | when i go towards you it is with my whole life.

"Aye," holds place for the actual answer, making the intent clear even before he's gathered his thoughts. It takes him a moment. They've slipped slightly from the course Ellis had imagined the evening taking. A kiss. Wysteria climbing into bed. Ellis laying beside her and wondering if this is a night where sleep comes easily or not at all.

Instead—

"I care about you very much," he tells her, the words stilted under the weight of some larger sentiment. His thumb sets gently at the hinge of her jaw, fingers very gentle as they cup her neck. Ellis opens his eyes, draws back slightly to watch her face as he continues, "And I am very worried of unintentionally pressing you into ceding things to me you aren't prepared to give. Or inclined to give."

A shade of his apology in her kitchen, the immediacy of his words colored over with dread.

"I want nothing but for you to be comfortable with me, and what we are to each other. Does that make sense?"

"But that is what I want as well. For you to be certain," she insists. "I know this all to be—difficult, is not the right word. I don't doubt your care, only I would prefer it if you were happy and I know you worry a great deal." About everything all the time, though she imagines there's little she can do to check that impulse. She knows that to an extent it is simply what he is.

"So we must be very honest with one another. And confident that any opinion spoken is not merely one of convenience, regardless of subject. Even if the answer is simply to refuse or delay. Yes?" Anchor shards, and midnight fears, and memories of thaig carvings, and—whatever they are meant to be. That is the only rational approach.

Her focus is sharp like the inquisitive point of a hovering pen ready to take notes. She doesn't lean forward after him. Instead, she absently tucks her skirts into the bend of her knee, insinuating her hand there. It is the slightly more dignified version of sitting on it.

"Would you like me to tell you how we would be if we were in Kalvad?"

Wysteria makes it sound so simple. Ellis' thumb strokes lightly along her neck, a small smile working it's way onto his face to displace the furrow of worry. (It stays rooted in his chest, the worry of crossing some line, of doing some damage to her.) There is space between her question and his response that is all muddled with tenderness and lingering uncertainty before he nods in answer.

"Aye."

Even though Ellis would surely be a very different man in Kalvad. His knowledge is limited, but he's certain of that.

But he likes to hear about her home, and he likes to hear her. So he straightens a little further in turn, giving her space to speak and reducing the temptation to kiss her again.

And in turn, she gently removes her left hand from his and does the same with it as with her right. It will be easier not to be so demanding of his affections that way. Sitting up straighter, elevating her chin—

"Well first, we would have likely met at some gathering of a mutual friend or family member. There we might have had a pleasant conversation on some subject or other, or maybe it would have been the sort of thing where one is expected to dance and we would have done that. And if you had thought I was witty or charming, or in some way pleasing then it's possible you might solicit an invitation to another mutual friends where we might run into one another again, or contrive to visit a friend in the region and call at my father's house in passing and then you and I and my mother would sit in a room for conversation.

"—I can't decide if you would like her or not. She is a very particular woman. But I believe she would approve of you in a general sense. And a military man, for I suppose that is a close enough comparison, is respectable enough for her not to dismiss out of hand. My father rarely goes to parties or dinners, so you might introduce yourself then as well if you'd not met him. —He is a different sort of particular. And he would be extremely suspicious of you, but I doubt he would be unkind. Are you following so far, Mister Ellis? We have spoken two or three times at this point."

In the course of her explanation, Ellis stretches out sideways across the rug, propped on one elbow. One hand curls around her ankle, replacing the relinquished contact at her neck. It feels essential, to have at least one point where he is touching her.

"Aye, I'm following," he answers dutifully. "Would I have been allowed to bring a gift to you at this point, or would that have been a unappreciated?"

Presumably unappreciated by her parents, not by Wysteria herself.

Or hopefully Wysteria would appreciate whatever he selected, in this hypothetical scenario. Ellis has been giving Wysteria little gifts for nearly two years now, but still, maybe he shouldn't assume his own proficiency.

"Flowers," she answers, pulse fluttering a little in the direction of her throat. His hand on her ankle is—on her ankle. "But absolutely no gifts. That would be presumptuous beyond believe, to say nothing about it being outrageously extravagant. If you brought me a gift and didn't propose on the spot and anyone found out about it, my reputation would be tarnished forever."

Her eyebrows rise and fall for effect.

"Now, let us assume at this point that you find my company very agreeable. Likely because I'm pretty and because I'm the heir to my mother's estate and to my father's business. It certainly cannot be because you know me well. In which case, you might arrange to stay at your friend's for the season. And let us say that friend is married, in which case his wife might invite myself and my mother out for a day in her gardens or walking and then you and her husband might be there as well. And we might speak a fourth or even fifth time. Perhaps we might even walk around the yard together while they had tea by the house."

"Flowers," Ellis repeats in an undertone, observation rather than interjection, as Wysteria goes on.

By comparison, he has tarnished her reputation several times over. His thumb rubs absently up and down the bone of her ankle as he looks into her face.

"I wouldn't be allowed to hold your hand?" he clarifies. "Or would I hold your hand to signal my intentions?"

"My hand. Oh no, Mister Ellis. You might offer me your arm if our walk was particularly treacherous. If you held my hand without reason—for dancing or to help me up a stair or up from a chair and someone were to see, then everyone would either assume we were engaged already or that you were desperate for my fortune and looking to put me in an inconvenient position so that my family would be compelled to agree to our marriage despite your considerable debts or the ruin of your own family's connections. —Would be the theory. But no, no holding of hands."

She shifts her leg by a very minor fraction. Not away from his hand. And not toward it either, she has decided. She is only making herself more comfortable.

"Now, eventually—somewhere around five dances or seven pleasant conversations—there would come a point where you would be obligated to make a decision as to whether you meant to seriously pursue me. In which case, we might continue in that vein. And if not, you would have to either turn your attentions to some other lady or cut short your visit and be away. For a man and a woman can only spend a handful of times in one another's company before they are understood as being attached. And once a pair is understood as attached, if they were to become unattached at any point—well, everyone would wonder what objectionable thing had been discovered."

They'd had once dance, but many conversations. The point of this story isn't for comparison, Ellis knows, but still. Some minor calculation inevitably happens in the wake of this new information.

"Would I ask you?" Ellis questions. "Before we became attached?"

The motion of his thumb had ceased in the wake of her movement. But the contact remains, for the moment.

"No," is her immediate scoffing response. Imagine! Discussing these things aloud? Truly absurd.

But lest she sound completely toothless, she hastens to add—

"Let us say only that if I'd allowed it to reach the point where you'd have been faced with such a decision, then that would have been an expression of my own interest. I'm hardly short of suitors, Mister Ellis. I would have refused your invitations and replaced you long before it became a question otherwise."

"I see."

And though they're talking about Kalvad, Ellis is fairly certain the same rule applies here. It's a small comfort.

But the question that leaves him with—

"How long would we be attached before I asked you to marry me?" is a slightly hushed question, careful around a sentiment that is not so far removed from Thedas. People marry here. They will be attached for some time. Ellis doesn't intend to ask her to marry him.

"Well it would depend," she says, tilting her head gently to one side—ear resting gently against her shoulder as she regards him.

"On your feelings and mine, and on the weather and politics and whether you were called away by your duty or if my family went away for holiday. But given the level of our attachment to one another—we have spoken a dozen times now, I think; my gods, perhaps you even know of my fondness for books at this point!—, I would expect your proposal by the end of the season and be naturally heartbroken if fate intervened. Oh but if you failed to propose by then, everyone would assume there was a reason why you hadn't and our attachment and reputations would very much be in doubt unless you wrote to me for all the time we were apart and asked to marry me the very next time we crossed paths.

"I have always liked that version best, I think," she adds after a moment, a little more gently. "You can say so much in letters."

"Aye."

They have said a great deal in letters. Maybe if they'd never taken up the habit, they wouldn't have landed here now. A lot of things had been easier to put to paper.

It seems to be the end of his questions. Ellis' gaze drops to where his hand is settled around her ankle, thinks that he is glad they met here. He's done next to nothing right by the Kalvad standards, but—

"It's a little late for the rest of it, but I can still write you letters."

And flowers, but that goes without saying.

Late? Maybe it is.

Above him, some small thing in her expression softens by just the narrowest degree. Withdrawing her hands from where they've been jammed so studiously behind the backs of her knees is a delicate thing. Gentle. And after, she doesn't reach out to touch him; instead, Wysteria laces her fingers together. She lets her palms open up across her lap.

"Would you tell me how it would be if I were from this place instead?"

Complicated, Ellis thinks, but doesn't say aloud.

Instead, he rolls off his elbow and onto his back with a soft, strained intake of breath. Everything will be sore in the morning, but it's not the kind of pain that requires attention beyond a moment's observation.

His fingers drum against her ankle. He pulls at the threads of some ideal world in which the Blight did not come to pass, where he was someone different, better, whole. His head tips toward her, a little half smile pulling at his expression.

"You'd be a Bann's daughter, I expect."

Though he cannot help but think she'd be bored in Ferelden. He cannot picture her as anything other than curious and driven, bound for some sort of great discovery.

"We'd have known each other since we were small, even though you were nobility and I was not. My father would have known your father and family going generations back. I'd have seen you plenty, before either of us were old enough for it to mean anything if we danced together at a festival. So maybe you'd have turned my head well before I had opportunity to fight my way through all your other suitors to ask you to dance."

They're both going to be very miserable tomorrow if getting to those caves requires any real measure of hiking. And possibly twice as miserable on the unsprung cart seat for however many hours they'll need to sit there to return to Kirkwall. 'Oh, you'll be black and blue in the morning but a little color in spring is in fashion,' the innkeeper's wife had gone to great efforts to assure her, laughing.

"Oh see! There is dancing in common. And technically speaking, we've done that part. In a very roundabout sense, I grant, but still. Now neither of us can pretend the thing wasn't done at least a little properly. —Is that not unusual? For someone with no title to ask a Bann's daughter to dance."

"I'll find you a book on Fereldan gentry, when we get back to Kirkwall. It'll be a help to explain parts of this."

Does a book on Fereldan gentry even exist? Ellis looks as if he's immediately reconsidered, envisioning some condescending Orlesian pontificating about the chaos of Fereldan governance.

"But it's not so unusual. We pledge ourselves to the Bann. And it serves the Bann for us to know them, and their family. Not every Bann is so informal, but it's not so strange to mix with the common folk. What'd start people talking would be if we kept mixing outside of the festival."

It's not the same kind of gossip Wysteria had been talking about. Not exactly harmless, but the attention to young people trading glances wasn't so binding. Ellis' fingers tap out a restless little tattoo in the space where Wysteria's ankle dips towards her heel.

"I'd have to find some excuses to go to the Bann's castle on the hope of seeing you. And if you were interested in seeing me, you'd be in the hall when we went before the Bann, and maybe I'd pass you a note or find some little thing to ask you in passing. Maybe you'd send a goat to my mother, if you'd made up your mind right away and wanted to make your feelings clear."

To this, Wysteria brightens considerably—a tell tale gleam of interest glinting sharp in her eye. She leans slightly forward.

"My mind."

How charming. So charming that she will allow herself to imagine that she would have done something like it rather than stuff his note into a pocket or a drawer. Maybe if they had known one another as children. Maybe if every other thing he'd described was in place, then yes. Maybe then she would be the sort to think to send a goat directly to Ellis' mother after a dance and a note slipped to her in passing.

"You know—" She begins, then stops herself. "No, I will tell you after. Go on. Once your mother receives her goat, what then?"

The light little tap of his fingers at her ankle speeds up a fraction, Ellis' smile widening as he tells her, "You could have kept me visiting for months, while you made up your mind about all your suitors. But maybe you decide right away, and you send a fine goat to my mother. But whether the goat comes right away, or after months..."

Trailing into a pause, Ellis' free hand moving indecisively in the air while he thinks of his mother.

"I'd send something to your father, something from our hearth, or something I'd made. Then we would be together more. We would come to see each other without any excuses about it. I would be your escort to the festivals," Ellis tells her, borrowing a word far more fancy than the actual thing might have been. "You would already know my family but I would introduce you again, properly, and you would be welcome in our house."

The recitation wobbles, drawing too close to something very real. He draws a breath, palming settling back over her ankle. He still smiles at her when he says, "Of course, there would be talk. You can imagine."

"Well yes. There usually is. —Honestly," Has the tenor of a tangent. "It is frankly outrageous to me how tight lipped the entirety of the Gallows is. Not just about who is or isn't connected, of course. It must have something to do with the number of circles mages. And scoundrels and oathless Templars and so on. I suppose we might all be thankful for it, but it makes filling out most conversation rather challenging indeed."

Bold words from someone who has speaking almost without pause for a considerable portion of the day.

"And we might we do as we liked then? Go walking together, or riding, or—whatever it is Fereldans do when they wish to see one another. Hunting?" Her smile flashes broad, widening into a grin. "Admiring every dog in the bannorn?"

From the floor, Ellis' smile widens. Perhaps thinking better of mentioning that Wysteria has only once in his memory seemed at loss for words, and had made up for it by almost immediately nearly choking to death.

"Aye, more or less. There'd be a chaperone. Someone from my family, or yours, or enough of us to make it a group," Ellis tells her, before adding, mock-serious, "Admiring the dogs is the Bann's duty, so it would have been an honor for me to accompany you to make the rounds."

One of those jokes where it sounds funny, but is it really a joke?

"There'd have to be some decision on the dowry, eventualy. Your family has the standing, so you'd make an offer and my family would decide if it was enough."

Her laugh is a bright, easy thing in the moment before she puts a hand over her mouth. It's not so late, but somewhere down the narrow little staircase lies the rest of the world and other people in it.

"And once they'd agreed," she says, much lower and almost between her fingers. "Then I'd sweep you away from them and take you to live in the Bann's keep or whatever place my father had set aside for us, I assume."

"Aye, you might," Ellis agrees, reaching to recapture her free hand. "Or I'd build you a house, for us to stay in until you inherited the keep."

In which Ellis carefully thinks more of the idea of Wysteria as a Bann than Wysteria in a house. There's a little space in this room to welcome in certain dreams, but Ellis knows his own limits.

His thumb runs along her knuckles as he says, thoughtfully, "It'd depend on how many cows you proposed me to be worth."

"Oh, well." Turning her hand in his, Wysteria gently pinches his hand along the curve between thumb and forefinger. "You're a fairly strapping sort. I should think a half dozen cows at least. But obviously it would depend on the quality of your teeth and how sound you were at the trot and canter."

She slips him a sly sidelong look, nudging him with the toe of her stocking foot.

Edited 2021-03-13 00:47 (UTC)

Ellis laughs in return, low and pleased at the expression on Wysteria's face. His body shifts towards her in return to the prodding of toes, a lazy rearrangement of shoulders and hips along the rug as he makes a show of considering the concept.

"I would say...the teeth are good. But the trot and canter are only middling," Ellis answers, fingers pliable in her grip. "But he takes instruction well."

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