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

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."

"I didn't realize there were still terms," he says, schooling his expression into seriousness. Ellis steadies himself on the arms of the chair, looking up at her for a moment. A smile pulls at his mouth, before amusement gives way to something more thoughtful.

"Alright," Ellis continues, potentially heading off either an objection or request. "I used to worry that I was...obvious, when I looked at you. That anyone could see how I felt, because it always came to mind. There was nothing for it."

He turns into the shape of her hand, mouth against her palm for a moment because he cannot simply lean into her in his present position.

Being completely out of the loop as to Riftwatch gossip has one benefit: Ellis has no bearing on anyone's perception of his feelings, whether he's been as obvious as he feared.

"Am I obvious?" is a little teasing, in the wake of her complaints.

No. No, he is obtuse and opaque and pained and kind, and even those who know him best can't have guessed his feelings in the subject beyond that he must feel something, or else why would he tolerate hers and Tony's and Mister Fitz's company at all?

But one should encourage the version of the truth they like best, so what she says as she is slouched low in the chair and with her hand gentle over his mouth is—

"Oh yes. Painfully so in fact, I'm afraid." The curve of her mouth is fighting against a smile. "The whole world must know about it at this rate, to say nothing of the rest of the Gallows. I believe Monsieur Bastien to be something of a gossip."

"I should have expected," carries the undertone of Well, he's Orlesian along with it.

And it's all skirting the edge of a joke, but Ellis still clarifies behind the soft press of her palm: "I wouldn't mind."

Or he would, but not for reasons that had anything to do with her. (His own failings, complications and sins he doesn't want to draw into this little room with them.) Looking up at her, using the grip on the arm of the chair to balance himself as he straightens away from her palm, he asks her, "Will you come down here and kiss me?"

It's made easy for her, he hopes. Easy for her to lean down and pull back again, decide how she cares to approach the thing, if she's inclined to indulge him.

Well I should hope not, says the arch rise of her eyebrows and the crooked, edge-of-teeth-glinting smile which hooks at the edge of her mouth. For if he desperately wished the keep the thing a secret, there are any number of things about their behavior which she might be forced to recommend they alter and the ideal of that is—

Far less appealing than agreeing to this more present request.

"Very well," she says, retrieving her hands and setting them at the chair's arms so she might herself out of her mortified slouch. "Since you have asked so nicely."

That is not why. Or not all of why, though it doesn't hurt. He has tactfully avoided kissing her properly all evening, even out there in the corridor, and so naturally she has thought of little else. So with the box of pins and comb and brush in her lap, and her hands having returned to his face, she leans down to him.

Her kiss is all warmth and affection, a spark of delight for how he must tip his face up to her. She kisses him once like that, smiling. Then her fingers shift to his temples and into his dark hair there and Wysteria kisses him again, smiling less but with no less warm, like that. And then, with just a fraction of a moment for consideration, she kisses him a third time and a little fiercely at that.

Wysteria's fingers thread into his hair and Ellis sighs softly into her mouth. The hitching inhale, then exhale, that follows after might have been something, a word, a request, but stalls and gutters as he leans up into her. The entirety of his focus settles onto her, attentive to every shift of her body. His eyes close. Everything narrows down to Wysteria, and her hands, her mouth, the way she's bent down to him.

He can taste the lingering sweet notes of wine, imagines he can still feel the heat of her face. Her smile gives way to some sort of intent, and Ellis marks it in the same motion as he lifts a hand to catch in her hair, thumb finding the high point of her throat where her pulse beats. It's a loose hold, in spite of everything. There is always a part of him that wants to tighten his grip, hang on tightly to her, but he keeps it curbed and quiet. Wysteria kisses him and it is enough. He tips into her, mouth soft against hers.

When he breaks to draw breath, press his forehead back against hers while he inhales unsteadily, his hand leaves the arm of the chair to slip into her lap. His fingers graze along the fabric of her skirts, settling on the little wooden box of pins to lift away and set down on the floor beside the leg of the chair. Foresight, maybe, warding against the potential for her to rise without thinking and scatter the pins across the floor. Their noses bump. He breathes out, turns his smile against her cheek.

For just an instant, she sharpens to the shape of his hand. Not balking, just attentive. Her face tipping faintly to track—

"Ah yes. How very thoughtful of you, Mister Ellis," she stage whispers.

There is some laughing note in it, for the curve of his smile tickles and because the shape of pressed close is charming in the same way that his good humor is. It warms something broad behind her ribs. Like winning an argument (a pasttime she dearly loves), pleasing him seems so similar to getting away with something.

With that in mind, Wysteria straightens by just the marginal degree necessary to look at him. She runs a teasing thumb along one dark eyebrow but otherwise leaves her fingers laced into his hair.

"It's not meant to be a question I ask. Usually I might say only whether you were allowed or answer to you, so if you would prefer to pretend that you've done the asking then do." She tips her face just a little, bending toward his careful hand in her hair and the thumb gentle at her neck. "But would you mind it very much if I kissed you again? Just once, and then we may proceed however you like. I recall something about buttons."

She seems so pleased with herself. Or pleased with this, them, how the pair of them fit together, and it settles some quiet worry in him. Her fingers on his face and in his hair feel liable to crack him open, spill out a rush of tender, unspoken things into her hands. He swallows, eyes intent on her face before he nods.

"Please kiss me again," comes as murmur, Ellis' fingers winding higher into her hair as his free hand curls around the smooth wood of the arm support. His knuckles graze the fabric of her dress. "You can whenever you want, you needn't ask."

Maybe he should be more circumspect. But what's the point of trying to diminish or even halve the truth of it? If Wysteria reached for him, he'd bend to her. That's been the truth for a long time now.

She imagines that out of all the things which might make a person's stomach feel very light or make them flush, that this must be one of the silliest. How ridiculous it is, to be even slightly flustered by such a thing. It should be reassuring that he should say something so kind as Please, yet there is something in it which makes her pulse jump so hard she she is glad his thumb is no longer set across it.

It quiets her and makes her hesitate, but only for a moment. When she bends to him again it's—not tentative, just slower. Characterized by some halting breath before she kisses him with some deliberate curiousity as if it might somehow be different simply because she'd been the one asking, her hands in his hair taking on some absently coaxing shape.

In that small moment of hesitation, Ellis takes in her expression, breath caught in his throat up until the moment she bends again to him. His grip tightens in her hair and then deliberately loosens, intention catching up with instinct as Wysteria kisses him. Ellis is easily coaxed, pliable beneath her hands.

Yes, he'd made requests. The memory of the small buttons running up her back comes to him very far off, and maybe it will be compelling in a moment, when they aren't kissing and he can think of something other than her mouth and hands and what she kindles in him, warmth and light and some deep, tender thing that he can only glancingly acknowledge. But it bleeds through, colors over the quality of the kiss before Ellis draws back, just far enough to see her face.

When he says, "Wysteria," it's a hushed, achingly fond thing. He thinks to kiss her again, a fourth time, but instead:

"Let me see to your buttons."

There is an urge to keep him as he is, low and between her hands with his face tipped so tenderly up at her, so she might kiss him again. Because he had said she could do as she liked, and she has discovered such an affection for the soft shape of his mouth under hers. But this is like a request too, and he doesn't say please but there is something in the timbre of his voice which takes the form of it and who is she to deny him that?

She is so partial to him; it almost aches to look in his direction.

And it does feel like a kind of sacrifice to unravel her fingers from the coarse curls at his temples so she might take up the brush and comb from her lap and set them side.

"Help me up then," she says, shockingly even to her ear as her heart hammers away high in her chest. What she really means is Very well, for she is already bracing her hands against the arm of the chair and moving to lever herself out of it.

The disentangling of their bodies, the small ways in which they part from each other even for a small moment, stings. His fingers draw slowly down through her hair, lingering at her collar before falling to the arm of the chair to get his feet under him, straighten fully with the little box of pins caught in his opposite hand. Without her drawn in so close to him, the ache of having crouched there for so long catches up to him, burns and recedes as he sets the box alongside the discarded comb and brush.

He reaches immediately for her hand. If he isn't careful, he'll forget there's any other way to exist in her space other than linked this way. He reels her a few steps closer, lifting her hand to his chest, then to his mouth. A few things come to mind, Are you sure first among them. The quiet stretches, Ellis studying her face and thinking about kissing her again.

"What can I do for you?" he asks instead. "What about what you want?"

The space is so narrowed. That goes for between as well as about them, the small room feeling that much more claustrophobic despite the window's open shutters and the fresh air curling through it. Maybe it is the brazier which saps all the breath from the room, or maybe it is the heat in her face as he draws her hand up to his mouth.

"You're meant to be undoing my buttons," she reaffirms, eyes bright as stars and rounded as saucers. And then she carefully extracts her hand from his possession, fingertips skittering across the collar of his tunic and then away. "It's late and I should like very much to go to sleep, and that is the natural thing to see to."

Obviously. Like assisting her with the multitude of pins in her hair, this is a matter of consideration more than anything.

So after a beat, Wysteria turns from him. She sees to it that the great collection of braid-curled hair is drawn forward over her shoulders so that he might easily see to the extensive collection of little buttons running down the length of her bodice's back.

In all their time together, all the travels and experiments, time spent in her little kitchen or jolting around the countryside or the Gallows, Ellis has caught glimpses of small details of her wardrobe. All these tiny fastenings, buttons and ribbon and otherwise, cinched precisely into place.

Wysteria turns from him, decisive, granting him this. Her bare neck is still flushed. He isn't unaware of the vulnerability involved in this. The first thing he does is run his fingers lightly from the topmost button at the nape of her neck to the last, assessing. Thinking of the moment at the edge of the dance floor aside the open doors, where his fingers had mapped across her back unseen.

His fingers flattened over those last buttons, he leans forward to drop a light kiss at the nape of her neck before raising his hands and undoing that topmost button.

Ellis' hands could be mistaken for clumsy. Nothing about him speaks to any particular finesse; a mace is not a precision weapon. But he manages. The buttons are worked free. The dress loosens. Ellis' fingers graze her skin, chest tightening with each brush of contact.

There are so many pieces to a young woman's wardrobe. Bodice and sleeves and shift and stockings and various laces and, today, short stays. But for all that undoing this line of buttons doesn't make her in any way truly bare, it is nonetheless a kind of exposition--so outrageously intimate that once he begins she can hardly direct her thoughts elsewhere. Instead, her hands float unbidden up to her own face and settle there about her jaw and cheeks where the heat radiating from her seems strongest. Thud thud goes the pulse in her neck. This must be why women let their hair down, she decides. So that men won't see them so easily. So they might have a moment to steady themselves in these keenly private moments.

With her face in the curve of her palms, she studies the open window and the lit brazier and does her best not to linger too long on the thought of Ellis' hands and how steady they have historically been when they are dancing. And if all the small hairs at the back of her neck were to stand to attention now--

Well. That would be silly.

"Do you know, it is such a trial to do them up in the morning. I usually put the thing on backwards and do them up halfway and then squirm around before hooking the rest of them. I believe the next dress I have made will be clasps down the side. Or perhaps lacing straight down the front. It is a truly monstrously unfair thing for a young lady to be expected to dress herself in this fashion."

The only reason you need a maid comes to mind is because he remembers Maud, her traveling companion. Ellis has some sense of the utility of another set of hands in the matter of fastening a long row of buttons in the most inconvenient location. But what he offers—

"I'll do them up for you in the morning, if you like."

Having reached the midway point, his hands slow over his work. The urge to put his mouth back to the nape of her neck is a distraction; the newly revealed squares of bare skin are shadowed by Wysteria's hair, the position of her body in relation to the brazier and it finally fully occurs to him what the end point of this exercise will be. Ellis' fingers trace the loosened folds of the dress at her hip, lingering over nothing while he refocuses, finds himself steady enough to go back to her buttons without wanting to fold himself forward, hook his chin on her shoulder and draw her back against him.

A little absently, he tacks on, "It might not go faster, but it'll be a bit easier," to draw out an easy topic to navigate. His thoughts keep circling back to her mouth, to her hands in his hair, to the flushed nape of her neck and the few visible inches of her back. It's making a mess of his ability to focus.

"Oh, I will wear the other dress tomorrow," she says automatically. And then lapses into an abrupt silence.

Then--

"Ellis."

She doesn't turn to look at him, but the angle of her face turns faintly toward that impulse. It's in the lift of her chin, the tentative shape of her hands about the heated column of her own neck.

"Has there ever been something you believed you wanted very much? And if yes, did you contrive some way to get it? And when you did, was it all you'd thought it might be?"

Edited 2021-04-11 08:02 (UTC)

His hands pause, three buttons from the waist of her dress. His name, stripped of formality, catches him first. How many times has she lapsed away from her chosen form of address?

But the question that follows—

Unseen, Ellis' expression veers into seriousness, brow drawing into a frown as he contemplates the answer. One comes immediately to mind, but it's the kind of thing that needs to be softened. He's aware of the weight the truths in his life carry. He's reluctant to burden Wysteria with them.

"Yes, there was," he tells her, hands slipping beneath the loosened sides of her dress. When his hands settle at her waist, there are still layers of cloth between him and her skin, but it is not unlike her hand slipping inside his gambeson to touch his chest. "But I didn't receive it the way I imagined I would, and it wasn't..."

A pause. Ellis sighs. Finally, he bows in towards her, chin on her shoulder, more or less out of sight between her hair and her hands, face turned in towards her neck. The only points of contact between them: his hands on her hips, his face resting at her shoulder. Steadying himself there while he sorts through what he should say, fit a complicated thing into something that can be contained in this room.

"It wasn't what I thought it would be. Most things aren't, but that isn't a bad thing."

There's a gulf between what Wysteria is asking and what he's answering; the Blight, the Wardens, the course of his life, all of them exist outside normal parameters.

Under his chin and between his hands, Wysteria shifts absently. Flexing her weight from heel to toe then back again as if in some small way testing the limits of the space in which she resides.

"I know exactly what you mean," she says, hands still molded to the shape of her neck and jaw. "When I left Bellmoral it's because I was very keen to have some sort of fantastic adventure and I thought going to study was the most likely way for me to find myself one. And I suppose I was correct, but I don't know that I would have ever guessed the shape of it."

"And I suppose too that it is possible that the same thing might have happened had I stayed at my father's house," she confesses; his breath his warm, gentled by the fact that it first must pass through the curtain of her hair. "We still don't know why certain people fall through the Fade and why others don't. But—I don't know why, but I feel quite certain that isn't true. I think if I'd never left there, I would still be there. Or not exist at all, really."

She does turn just a little then toward the set of his head on her shoulder—an encouraging sort of flexion rather than looking to dislodge him.

"But on second thought that probably sounds like nonsense and not at all the sort of thing you were talking about. Forgive me."

As she turns, Ellis' fingers shift and settle, resting loosely against the sturdy fabric of garments he doesn't have proper names for. The small movement sets of a restless slide of his fingers, carefully tripping over the sturdy cinch of corsetry There's a seam here, a stretch of unyielding fabric here, and that is as far as his fingers go, up and down from the curve of her waist to the neatly stitched seam at above her rib.

The fidgety motion of his hands slows, but doesn't cease. He turns his mouth against her shoulder, so when he says, "There's nothing to apologize for," it's muffled but audible by virtue of being said so close to her ear.

"It's not nonsense," comes in a murmur. "It's different than what I was thinking of, but not by very much."

What if he had left? The Blight would have still come. It would have still swallowed his village whole. He would still be alone. What would be different? Nothing.

"I wanted to travel," he tells her. "I wanted to have adventures, like you. And I have, just not how I meant to. Like you."

The quiet shift of his hand along the bone of her stays hums across her ribs, and the faint rasp of the stouter fabric of the undone layer across what must be the ridges of his knuckles or the curve of his wrists pricks at her ear. Thud thud goes the beat of her pulse, heavy in her neck and against the heels of her palms.

"Do you think—" she starts to say, and then stops. No, there is a better way of shaping what she actually wants to know.

"I can tell you're being very careful with me. But I think I would like your opinion on why. If it's because I've asked you to be, or if there is something you really think I should be wary of."

At the question, his hands come to a stop, settle back at her hips.

The answer that comes to mind is kin to what he's already said. Worries he's passed into her hands that still guide his hands. He could dredge them up again, but he leaves them be for a long moment. Eventually, his mouth moves against her should, indecisive and silent, before his head turns back in towards her hand, her neck, the shadow of her cheek behind the cloud of her hair.

"Was there someone else before me?" he asks. It is an easier starting point than the depth of what he feels for her, how important she is to him, the little story she'd spun for him about how he might have courted her if they existed in a wholly different place.

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