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

She is already turning her face up to him, cued by the shift of his hands and what has so rapidly become a kind of habit. It isn't so unlike leaving him notes in his kit, or teasing him about his gray hairs or the scratch of his beard, or minding to keep beyond the swing of his mace's arc in the field. These are all practiced things, aren't they? And she is, in her way, such a quick study.

The corner of her mouth quirks under his kiss. She wrinkles her nose at him, close enough that the pull of it must be a felt thing rather than a seen one.

"Nevermind. I have thought how I might embarrass you."

The answering smile curves against her cheek, his thumbs stroking gently along her jaw. She's flushed and smiling and beautiful. If it didn't feel near impossible, he'd like to lean back and look at her, commit to memory her right now.

"Aye?"

"Aye," she echoes him, all gruff and play stern. His whiskers bristle at her cheek when he smiles, and Wysteria makes some little noise of mock offense even as she turns slightly further toward his nearness.

"You must tell me what you're thinking," she says, checking her balance against the door handle; the hardware rattles a little and she half snorts a laugh against his cheek. "What it is you want without first qualifying it based on what you think I'm thinking or what you believe I prefer. That is what I would like to know right now. And it must be a real answer. No conceptual or metaphorical nonsense."

Is she tired? Is she hungry? What would she like to see and do while they are in Markham? Would she prefer beer or water or to dance a reel or waltz? They are perfectly fine questions, of course. It is kind these he asks them. But she knows all the answers to them already, so there's hardly anything to be pleasantly surprised by in them now is there?

His body bows further, hand falling to her hip as he turns his face in against her neck. The flicker of tension comes and goes, passing without gaining purchase. If they weren't touching at so many different points, it would have gone unnoticed.

"Right now?" he questions, muffled against the collar of her dress, grip flexing loosely at her waist.

He's reminded of Wysteria telling him, very seriously, that she was going easy on him. Ellis can't tell if this is her going easy on him or deviating away from that approach.

She laughs again and twists, just a little, from the rough tickle of his face against her neck. Her spare hand--the one not secured at the door handle--rises then, catching at the collar of his tunic. Touching the dark curls at the very base of his neck.

"Yes, right now."

Unsurprisingly, the answer is slow in coming.

"I was thinking about how beautiful you are," he says first. He thinks to straighten out of this position, but her hand feels good where it is, and Ellis doesn't want to dislodge it. His fingers trace the seam of her dress, follow a wrinkle of fabric around her hip to her back, leading back to the row of small buttons over her spine.

Beautiful is true, and it is contained; it's not a word that overwhelms, but it's only a part of what had crossed his mind. The rest doesn't fit neatly, and he's not ready to say any of it, so Ellis moves past it, pares down all his conflicting impulses into words.

"And about how I wanted to take the pins out of your hair," he tells her, pressing on despite the prickling rise of embarrassment, "And I wanted to help you undo all these buttons, and to kiss you, before we went to bed."

Then, clarifying—

"To sleep."

Which might be perceived as a thing tacked on for her benefit. In some ways it is, but Ellis doesn't know any other way than to draw that boundary and stick to it.

She is specifically aware of how the back of her neck goes warm, and that it is tangled up with beautiful and that little flicker of embarrassment she'd felt while standing at the fringe of that tavern with his hand settled against her for just wanting so much to touch the warm skin of his wrist just beyond the edge of his sleeve. Maybe he can feel the heat too since his cheek is right there. She imagines he must at least be aware of the sudden rabbit of her pulse, lodged high in her chest.

His dark curls are a little coarse under her fingers. She smooths her fingers through them and tells herself they can't stand in this passageway like this forever. It's late but not so late, and there are other people in the dormitories and it is only a matter of time before someone—

"Then—" She clears her throat and is more firm the second time. "Then let us do that. The buttons. They're perfectly miserable to undo myself. But I warn you that I will pinch you if you pull any one of my hairs."

Sometimes, when he is like this, he reminds her of a cup with a crack in it that she must hold with both hands to keep together.

(With a little jostling jerk and a shove, the door under her hand opens.)

As Ellis straightens, his grip tightening at her hip as he observes the flush of her face. How much is from the wine and how much might be from him? It feels like a presumption to hang too much on the latter, so he brushes a few last stray hairs back from her face before he lets go of her.

"I'll be very careful with your hair," he promises, invitation momentarily unremarked upon. He follows her inside, closes the door behind them, draws the bolt into place out of habit.

Once inside, he isn't so certain of where to begin. And it is a little distracting to be within her space like this, even a borrowed and temporary. He reaches back for her hand, reel her a few steps closer to him.

"Do you want to put your notes away?" he asks, teasing, as his eyes take in the papers abandoned at the edge of the bed.

It's a small room and between the lecture series and their evening jaunts and the hour at which they'd first arrived two nights ago, she has hardly been it in but for a handful of hours. And yet already the place is well colored in by her presence. There are the pages scattered at the foot of the bed, and the other dress she'd brought thrown over the back of the chair, and her knit wrap and hard sided traveling case, and her hair brush and combs and a series of ribbons and stacks of yesterday's papers.

"Oh. No. Well—" Flush still, she colors a little redder as he recalls her attention to the pages, and so to the rest of the room and the state she's left it in. "Actually yes. Just a moment."

She wrings her hand from his, and with a great flurry of skirts and shuffling of papers, she moves to hastily scrape together the scattered stack.

"And just—and you may move the chair away from the wall. I will sit there so you may see to my pins. Yes? Good."

It's a good room to be in, the much the same way it's good to be in her house, to visit her workspaces. The difference is in the details, the way the signs of her work mix in among the scattering of ribbons and the open case and the drape of her wrap. He's never been in her bedroom, for all he's wandered through her house dodging her ghostly roommate. He likes that she's invited him in, even to this borrowed space.

His smile pulls wider at her blush, but rather than distract her from her task he retrieves the chair in question. When he lifts her dress from it, he folds it briskly, with more care than the fabric might deserve. Wysteria's choices in wardrobe tend to hold up well, but Ellis is still careful with it when he relocates the partially folded item to drape over her traveling case.

For lack of anything else to do with himself, he crosses the small space to open the shutters and let cool night air into the room before he turns back to her.

"My room is in a similar state," he tells her, which is such a bald-faced lie, one that he doesn't expect to get away with. Ellis delivers it to her very seriously, apart from the twitch of humor at the edges of his expression.

The poisonous look she shoots in his direction while she dredges up her armful of papers and stuffs them blindly into her leather folio says he hasn't—gotten away with it. But the preoccupation of kicking her traveling boots under the bed and straightening the bed covers themselves keep her from anything more cutting than, "I doubt that very much."

The folio is flung onto the desk alongside her writing kit. The half folded dress he tended to so carefully is unceremoniously shoved the rest of the way into her case, the lid snapped shut after it. At least she'd had the foresight to put yesterday's stockings away, and he will not know the difference between hair ribbons and garter ribbons so it hardly matters that the latter are what's draped on the bedside table.

Probably.

When at last she moves to the chair, it is with brush and comb and a small, plain wooden box in her possession. She keeps all three in her lap.

"All right," she announces, very seriously indeed for her heart feels very high in her chest and she is thinking—. "I am ready. Do as you will, Mister Ellis. Tell me if you require instruction."

She is thinking of nothing at all, Wysteria decides, and instead opens the box in preparation to receive the assortment of pins that will be coming out of her hair.

Having initiated this, Ellis likely has no right to look caught off guard by it.

Before he does anything, he drops a kiss to the top of her head, hands on the back of the chair rather than her shoulders or at the pins in her hair. He could tell her to instruct him, and it would be an easy way of conversation. He does consider it for a moment, before he says, "I think I can manage."

Without pulling her hair, just as promised.

"Ask me something," he prompts instead, quieter as he lifts a hand to the first, loosest hair pin, draws it free. Handing it to her, he continues, "For penance or otherwise."

The traded embarrassment was more game than anything else, but it's a vehicle to offer her this, a little truth in exchange for the newly shared intimacy.

The small clack of the pin dropped into the box seems very loud to her ear. She resolves to set the next ones more carefully. And for a moment that decision delays her in hearing exactly what he's asked of her—

"Oh. Yes, all right. Let's see." With her head very slightly bowed to his work, she runs her thumbs restlessly about the edges of the box. "What terrible things did you do as a child? Or if you prefer which is your favorite book that you believe says too much about you and so you rarely mention it when someone asks for your opinion on them. Books, I mean. For recommendations. Or would hypothetically, if no one has ever asked you for them."

It's strange—the small prickle of sensation from pins coming undone. The disembodied gentleness of his hands. When she can feel the first section come loose, she is brisk about fetching it forward over her shoulder as if the unraveling of the twist and its brushing out is a kind of sordid thing.

It occurs to him that he's never seen her with her hair undone this way. Wysteria's hair has come loose from her precise stylings, inevitable considering all she gets up to in a day. But he does pause in his work after Wysteria takes that first freed section of hair over her shoulder. One hand comes to rest at her shoulder, thumb light at the nape of her neck before he returns to the remainder of the pins.

"My mother had a set of books she'd brought with her to Fereldan, all the way from Orlais," he begins, steady as he works a pair of pins from where they'd been tucked cleverly into the twist of her hair. "They'd been illustrated with gold borders at the beginning of each chapter, I remember. She'd read one of them with me every night, but I wasn't allowed to take them off the shelf without her, and especially not allowed to bring them out of the house."

Two pins deposited in her little wooden box, Ellis leaning over and closer to drop them in himself rather than disturb the work of her comb.

"I snuck one out when I was...oh, maybe eight. I wanted to show it to one of my friends," he continues, and notes with some surprise the little curl of shame sparking to life in his gut as he approaches the predictable conclusion.

"Fereldan is muddy in the springtime," and every other time, the joke goes, if Ellis were so inclined, but he isn't. "We were lucky to have only ruined the cover and the first few pages, not the entire thing. I'd never seen my mother so upset."

A few moments pause, Ellis' hands lingers in her hair. He can't see her expression. There are only a few pins left. The light from the brazier casts her all in golds and he is going to have to tell her again that she is beautiful before the night is out.

"Otherwise, I was a well-behaved child most of the time," he presses on, light around the statement. "Apart from allegedly stealing a few things out of the neighbors' gardens and orchards from time to time."

With each loosened sectioned of hair being pulled over her shoulder and added to what came before it, she has by now amassed quite the guarded fistful of the stuff. There is an unruliness to it made more severe and it's brushed out—the unnatural wave of hair bent into braids springing broad and flyaway in a way that seems to her eye a little sordid. Embarrassing, even, all burnished and ungainly in the brazier light. What she wouldn't give in this moment to have hair as Alexandrie had once described Empress Celene's—so flaxen it was almost white, and reliably pin neat.

"I believe it is the rule of things that generally good children must occassionally be very terrible. To make it fair on all the mothers who must deal with babies who are generally terrible but rarely truly bad," she reasons, fussing at the uneven ends of her hair with the comb. It badly needs to be cut. She has let it grow long over the winter and wishes now that she'd seen to it before leaving Kirkwall. "I was that kind, I think. Except for leaving to study, and on scholarship to less. I doubt my mother will ever forgive me for it."

To say nothing of the great many things her mother would find to disapprove of now, were she to fall into Thedas today. Her daughter? Roving about the countryside?

(Her daughter, with a man in her room and his careful hands in her hair.)

She lowers her face a little further to draw the wild fall of the waves closer about the heat in her cheek, though she knows he must hardly see her as it is. The rythmn of her comb is a steady plucking scrape.

"Is your mother's family still in Orlais?"

Three pins more. Removing one dislodges the twisted lock, revealing the last two pins. Having a general sense of how quickly Wysteria will gather the newly-freed lock of hair once the pins are slid away, Ellis takes his time about it. His fingers move once, attentively, through the length of this last piece as he sweeps the pins free and lets go.

The quiet has stretched somewhat. Ellis' fingers find the nape of her neck once more, lingering before he comes around her side to drops three pins into her box to join the rest.

"I don't know," he tells her. "I don't know anything of them, other than they had a sickening amount of money, and that they didn't care very much for their daughter's choice in husband."

There was no way to know whether or not they knew about Ellis. He sets his hip against the edge of the little dresser, looks at Wysteria with her hair in soft waves about her face. It's a little like standing close to open fire. The heat of her warms all along his body. It crowds out the bone-deep resentment at these phantom grandparents, wherever they were now. It's easier to let them go, looking at her.

Something else should be said, maybe. That they're likely alive and better off without a stray Warden turning up on their doorstep, that he doesn't know their names and doesn't care to. But he looks at her instead and grasps for something better than a repetition of beautiful.

There is a moment after the last pin has come loose, with his hand warm on her neck and her undone hair thick in her fist, where she lapses into some deeper kind of quiet. Or becomes so aware of the kind that already exists, so that she imagines she can hear the hum of blood in her ears. And then his fingers slip away and he moves and she is no longer in the shadow of him and the pins are all safely in their box.

"I see," is a bland, uninspired thing to say as she quickly combs these last lacks of hair into the rest. "Your mother must have loved your father very much then."

She glances toward him then, a flickering thing that catches only because he is looking so intently at her.

"Stop that. What is that look for?" Wysteria pulls the handful of her hair across her face, red to the tips of her ears. "I will die on the spot, Mister Ellis."

Ellis almost laughs.

The humor is still there in the sound he makes, a little exhale of exertion as he straightens upright.

His hands find her cheek, close over her hands as he steps in towards her. The request comes just from the slight nudge of his hands over hers, the considered sweep of hair back from her flushed face.

"It's because I think you're beautiful," he tells her, trying to find her eyes amidst the gold of her hair. "Please don't be embarrassed."

"I'm not—embarrassed." Yes she is. He says it and it inspires that strange combination of wanting to lean out the open window and tell someone on the street far below about every part of this and then again the desire to melt directly out of her spindly chair and down through the floorboards. She makes do with a snorting, half-mortified-half-pleased laugh and sinking slightly down between the arms of the chair. She lets her hair be coaxed away, but replaces it with the ineffectual sprawl of her hand.

The heat radiating off her face into her palm feels as a warm coal. He must feel it in his fingertips, she thinks, and surely he must see through to her because of it, and the mortification of being so transparent is keen.

"And if I am," Wysteria insists, looking at him between her fingers. "It's only because I'm thinking of how very foolish I've been."

Yes, her face is very warm. As has happened so often these days, he finds himself seized with the urge to kiss her, and sets it aside to make do with the light brush of his thumbs back and forth across her flushed skin. Wysteria's hair refuses to stay tucked neatly behind her ears. He is at the wrong angle to do much of anything other than look at her, but it is enough. It will always be enough.

"Foolish?" Ellis echoes, an open question, one she can refuse to answer.

"Oh yes. Very foolish indeed."

She is very convinced of that, and indeed sounds quite certain saying so beneath the edge of her ineffectually shielding hand.

"Last summer. It feels like such a long time ago. Athessa and Miss Van Klerk and I were discussing certain... let us say pleasant qualities of various members of Riftwatch. And I was very insistent that we not spend much time on your evaluation when your name was given, and I think I should have known it then. How much I value your company."

The space between her fingers narrows to hide her eyes. Her mouth, uncovered—

"How fond I am of looking at you."

Ellis' surprise is quiet but pronounced, flickering across his face before his expression settles.

He opens his mouth, draws a breath to speak, but his response transitions to the slow, light movement of his hands to coax her fingers down from her eyes as he bends, crouching to realign the distance between them to something that feels more managable.

She'd looked at him. Months ago, last summer, before that. (All those notes, the moment she'd begun folding them into little shapes, had it been then—) Ellis can't tell if he hadn't noticed or refused to see. Would he have ever hoped for this? Even now, it feels too good to be true, too good to last. But the weight of that admission settles, slivers of warmth that root somewhere deep in his chest. It softens the lines of his face, the surprise falling to tenderness as he cups her hands in his own.

He doesn't look away from her face until the moment he raises her hands to his mouth, kisses her fingertips rather than fumble his way through something spoken aloud.

He is very difficult to look at like this. And he is very difficult to look away from like this. Bare faced, her hair wild across her shoulder, studying how he studies her, she feels very—uncovered under his observation. Not vulnerable, no. Just very revealed. Like he is seeing a secret she didn't realize she'd ever really gotten around to writing down.

He kisses her fingertips. Some of them have ink stains that she only remembers now, and some combination of these things prompts a small hiccuping sound which is an abbreviated laugh out of her.

"Stop. No, truly. Stop it." Rein in that look, sir. "Or I will have to find some other way of embarrassing you as revenge and I've all but run out of ideas."

"I don't know how."

Except that he does. Ellis found a way to do it before, for months and months, and he has found a way to do it since he'd kissed her that first time, but it is difficult to remember how when they're alone in this room with her hair undone and her hands in his.

"I'll have to pin my hopes on your mercy."

The smile on his face widens, just a fraction from behind her fingers.

"You," she scoffs, outraged and smiling and sinking further into the chair all at once. Bumping him with a knee through her skirts. Scuffing her fingers through the bristle of his whiskers about the silly shape of his widening smile.

"That isn't fair. I told you something by my own volition. It's hardly sporting to make me pry something free of you in return."

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