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when i go towards you it is with my whole life.
 | You came to the side of the bed and sat staring at me. Then you kissed me—I felt hot wax on my forehead. I wanted it to leave a mark: that’s how I knew I loved you. Because I wanted to be burned, stamped, to have something in the end— I drew the gown over my head; a red flush covered my face and shoulders. It will run its course, the course of fire, setting a cold coin on the forehead, between the eyes. You lay beside me; your hand moved over my face as though you had felt it also- you must have known, then, how I wanted you. We will always know that, you and I. The proof will be my body. — louise glück |
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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?"
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"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."
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"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."
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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."
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She slips him a sly sidelong look, nudging him with the toe of her stocking foot.
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"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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His hand is turned over, palm up so she might lightly run her fingers over it—a deliberately feather light touch, as teasing as the earlier pinch.
“And I do have an appreciation for an agreeable temperament, having no such thing of my own.”
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"So maybe worth a pair of laying hens, along with the cows?" Ellis questions, fingers twitching up instinctively. His free hand, set across his chest, has taken up the absent drumming against his chest. "Assuming he takes to his new occupation."
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But just for a moment. It's pleasant to be at the end of a truly relentlessly long day and yet to see him successfully led into good spirits (to say nothing of the improvement of her own mood). So after a brief instance of apparent consideration, she leans slightly forward—not over him; nothing like that, only maybe just slightly—and the barely there scuff of her fingers returns to punctuate the matter of fact statement of,
"But yes. Assuming he does and remains good tempered, then we might include a pair of hens."
And then she promptly makes a beak-shaped cone with both hands and sets to pecking his open palm and side with them. It's only right.
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"Tell me what else might be included?" he cajoles, careful of where he sets his weight, leaving Wysteria plenty of wiggle room to break from his hold. "I think I can guarantee good temper."
No, he can't. But this is a good little game, imagining how things might have been and pretending that has any bearing on the present moment.
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"Six cows and a pair of chickens isn't generous enough?" The looseness of his hold just means that it doesn't take much squirming to bring her hands up and punctuate with a few additional hen pecks. "Very well. I might consider including a dozen sacks of grain if you can also swear that he is reliable and curious. I have found those to be advantageous qualities in the field."
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Caution tends to win out over curiosity. Wysteria can't find that much of a revelation. And there is a limit looming, how much longer Ellis will entertain glancing discussion of his virtues. Braving the poke and prod of hen pecks, Ellis braces his weight on his elbow, other arm settling loosely around her as her catches the end of her braid where it's fallen across the rug. He twirls the end idly between his fingers, watching her face, acclimating to the ease of this.
No, it's not new to hear her laugh and feel it spark warmth in his chest. But it's new to process the full scope of it like this, with this new dimension of intimacy coloring over their interactions.
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She glances up at him, eyes rising from where the pair of hens are plucking at his borrowed shirt. And then her chin is raised a little higher still in bullheaded opposition against the little flicker of embarrassment which comes from the closeness of his study. The end of her braid in his fingers prickles gentle at the nape of her neck.
"—Only in the spirit of fair compensation, it has occured to me that in a pinch and given the right keeper that loyalty might be substituted for curiosity. Does he have any of that, do you suppose?"
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And then, he lays a very soft kiss to her cheek, disappears from her sightline as he rolls onto his back beside her. He's tall enough to overlap the rug, but it's not uncomfortable to have his head on the hardwood. They're still close, his shoulder and arm crowding hers. His hand steals up her forearm to catch one peck-inclined hand and lace his fingers through hers, draw it down to him.
"And it may be foolish to say so, but you'd have been able to have him for nothing."
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"It is extremely foolish! Particularly as I've worked so very hard to woo you! And to have all those efforts reduced to so little with hardly more than a word—I should be insulted."
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"I see," comes after a moment's thought. "And how should I repair the insult? Not by skiving off one of the chickens, I assume?"
The entirety of the conversation skirts along imaginings and truth. Ellis' gaze passes from the glancing assessment of her expression to the ceiling overhead. With a low grunt, he frees his arm to stretch it out beneath her, along the carpet, perhaps eventually to circle her shoulders, perhaps not.
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"No, I can hardly in good conscience rescind the offer simply because you are willing to give the man away. It was made in good conscience, and after having done a fair assessment of the man's good qualities. If you care to make it up to me, you may either—"
She squints down at him, mouth drawing briefly into a narrow line. After a moment, Wysteria offers, "Either describe what you believe are his most serious faults, or promise that he will bring me something interesting back whenever he has reason to go away. I do like a souvenir, and it will help him to learn to be inventive if he would like to avoid eventually boring me."
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Wysteria is only playing. (Ellis doesn't want to find out if her face would fall, if she'd flinch away from him.) His heart beats steady underneath their hands. Ellis draws a deep breath, doesn't pluck up the threads of playful consideration. His sins lurk at the edges of his mind as he makes his decision.
"I promise," Ellis begins, as his fingers skim up her back, between her shoulders, nudging aside her braid to curl his fingers at the nape of her neck. "I promise to bring you back something interesting any time I have to leave you."
There is an unspoken aspect to this promise, whether or not Wysteria realizes: I will always come back.
"Something better than flowers," he stipulates, saving Wysteria from doing so.
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Sometimes flowers are perfectly all right, she doesn't say. It depends on the flowers, the season, and how long he will have been gone, and where they might come from and why he would think to bring them to her to begin with. Instead--
"I was only teasing you. You don't have to do either."
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His fingers curl lightly at her hairline, nudging just so into her hair beneath the weave of her braid.
Wants to what? Bring her gifts? Flowers, artifacts, books, sweets, anything that would travel in his pack all the way back to her? He's wanted that before. Or to tell her everything?
He lapses into quiet, watching her face, attention circling back to all the places their bodies are touching.
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It's a series of things she's forgotten to give much consideration, favoring instead an earnest study of the things his face does when he gets quiet and mostly still as if there is something to be divined from out of the wrinkles spanning brow and those tracing the corners of Ellis' mouth. She looks down at him, and the seriousness of it turns her mouth toward a soft frown.
"The thing I thought to say earlier," she says, because she can't ask him to tell her what he's thinking because it's so rarely what he wishes to discuss. "It's that my parents met under very similar circumstances to how you described it. They didn't know each other as children, but everything else—I believe it was similar. So there doesn't have to be such a difference between here and there. It shouldn't concern you so much."
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There's a joke he could respond with, easily made: Your mother sent a goat to your father's family? Thinking of it nudges a small smile onto his face as his fingers curl in her hair, thumb set just behind her ear.
"My only concern is that I make you happy," Ellis says slowly, the slight frown that appears more for trying to parse the sentiment into words that make sense than anything else. "I think what we build for ourselves here will look different than the possibilities either of us described, but I don't worry about that. I worry that we fashion something you're content with."
Because Ellis is so easily contented. What more can he want? He had been very serious when he'd told her it wouldn't matter if she ever kissed him again that night in her kitchen. It is enough to be here, with her. He is not so particular about the form their future takes, but he thinks Wysteria might be. There is still a chance this not enough, with all his limitations.
Their relative levels of life experience and otherwise might be a discussion worth having, but Ellis has the sense that maybe it's better saved for the cart ride home, or after some other near death experience they survive together.
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The thoughtful set of her jaw is a delicate, temporary thing. Crooked.
"Then do as you promised and close your eyes."
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He closes his eyes. Properly. The little prickle of unease at the disadvantage comes and goes. All this room contains is Wysteria, and Ellis trusts her, enough so to dispel the ingrained need to be very aware of everything happening in the space around him.
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But before that, sitting on her feet and tucked in alongside him, she pauses. In the low golden glow of the firelight, she studies him where he lies flat on his back. It's a rare unobserved moment for it. To look at the slightly crooked arrangement of his left hand, and the scratch on his cheek, and the knotted scar that comes curving around his neck.
Her hand isn't tentative, just studied. She touches his jaw, and his cheek, and then eventually moves her hand into his hair. It's smoothed back, all gentle waves, with her thumb setting just there at his hairline.
"I am being easy on you, Mister Ellis. You would do well to remember it, should you ever find yourself laboring under the false impression that it is the other way around. Understood?"
slaps bow down