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

There is a very brief, but very stark instant of indecision. And then she must at last recognize it for what it—a creeping, ridiculous and frankly illogical sort of fear when they are standing in a pond in the middle of the day, with the sun shining and no danger whatsoever to speak of—for abruptly she frowns very harshly, solidifies her footing. Standing very upright (the effect somewhat minimized by the fact that she's neck deep in a pond), she takes one of her hands from his arm.

"This is nonsense," she declares, which may be in reference to the subject of swimming or regarding her hesitations. Either way— "But so long as we're out here and my hair is wet already, then we may as well touch the bottom while we're at it."

Nonsense is about the verdict Ellis had expected to receive, regardless of how well swimming lessons went.

The small smile on his face is more for the way Wysteria steels herself, turns stubborn in the wake of the frown. Ellis reaches back for her under the water, finding her waist rather than her newly freed hand. If he were a different kind of man, he might have something clever to say, some flattering turn of phrase to sum up his admiration.

Instead, he has the light squeeze of his hands at her hips, stood close to her in the water.

"When we put our hands on the floor of this pond, shout that as loud as you like. That it's nonsense."

Marginally more proper than the profanity his own teachers had suggested.

"Come up when you've done."

There is something in that lopsided tilt of his expression which sparks something warm and makes her feel abruptly twice as foolish all at the same time. It sees her setting a jaw a little, a very obstinate sort of decision making. Right. She will touch the bottom of this dreadful, picturesque pond, and she will scream at it when she does, and when she has righted then they will do whatever the backstroke it. It is hardly difficult.

"Yes yes, shout as loud as I can. Come up once I've finished. Easy enough. I will count it down from three."

Is like a dare. So crisply, without hesitation: "Threetwoonego."

With a great suck of air, Wysteria plunks her face down unto the water and wills herself to lunge down through it.

A brief bark of laughter escapes as Wysteria plummets into the water. There's a little sploosh, water slapping against Ellis' chest as he steadies himself, takes a deep breath and follows down after her.

The water isn't exactly clear, but when he opens his eyes, Wysteria is easily seen. Wisps of gold hair float up around her face. Their knees bump. Ellis feels his held breath like a vise around his chest, pressure vibrating as he looks at her.

Instead of touching the pond floor, he puts his hands over hers.

In the upsidedown space below the water's surface—not weightless; she can feel it pressing against her, working to undo all this effort she's made—, Wysteria's eyes are clamped tightly shut. Where her hands have found floor of the pond they've pressed in, fingers digging into the moss and the mud. Closing over small stones and the filament detritus of twigs. When he touches her hand, she turns it over. Clutches blindly at his wrist—

She doesn't know that she shouts anything so much as she just yells—a pitched shriek gone flat from the press of water and all the space in it, bubbling out in that narrow space between the bump of their knees and the tangle of fingers even as she's tugged gently upward. Loses contact with the bottom of the pond.

When she runs out of air to shout with, she jams her legs straight. Hand closed tight over his wrist, Wysteria makes to dredge him back up with her.

Even muffled into incoherence, Ellis thinks it's perhaps the most unchecked display he's ever seen from her.

But she yells and Ellis does not, distracted first by her and then by the insistent upwards tug of her hand. It feels like a success, so much so that the first spluttering gasp of air as he breaks the surface, clumsily staggering a step forward before getting his bearings.

"Was it as terrible as you expected?" he asks, voice light with a mingling of amusement and affection. His wrist turns slightly in her grip, fingers coming up to link around her wrist in return.

She's spluttering a little, her loose hand rising to thoughtlessly wipe the excess water from her face without considering that her hand too is damp.

"It was—" Blinking back water, she looks at him and is struck by the humor in his face and how the water has stuck his dark eyelashes all together in places.

"No, it wasn't terrible. Only awful." Her hand drifts to cover her nose and mouth. From behind it—"And I think water went up into my nose, which seems like it ought not to happen."

"It shouldn't, but it does sometimes," Ellis tells her. He is no dryer than she is, but his hands lift to her face anyway, smoothing back stray locks of hair plastered across her forehead and temples and swiping away running drips of water. "It's helpful to blow out your nose, but you won't need that for the backstroke."

Surely this is a point in it's favor: there's no need to put her face back into the water.

"Do you want me to demonstrate it?" is a little concession to the sense that he's not as adept an instructor as he would like to be.

She wrinkles her nose at his attempts to put her back into order—not a protest, just mentally logging some absent recognition of the thought that she must look rather out of sorts.

"If you would. I may as well know what it's meant to look like." Much though it means—

Carefully, Wysteria undoes her hand from about his wrist. Untethers herself.

"You're alright," is automatic, whether or not the reassurance is strictly necessary. His hand lingers at her jaw, then breaks away in turn. He hops a few light steps back, careful to stay well within arm's reach.

Belatedly, some spark of self-consciousness manifests. This is not as similar to displaying the right way to nock an arrow as he'd thought.

But the sense of it fades by degrees once he's properly aligned in the water. Ellis circles her once, in easy, smooth sweeps before angling back in towards her and letting himself catch hold of her waist to break the momentum rather than continue. Reclining in the water, he kicks lightly, drifting back close to her as he turns an inquisitive look up to her.

Her feet are firmly beneath her. And were she to somehow loose them, coursing back upward to break past the water's surface has already proven itself doable. So yes, she is alright--steady enough that when he shifts back and begins to make his way in that slow, deliberate circle that she is (comfortable isn't the right word) secure to follow the lines of his movement, her attention very fixed and stern.

He looks very well in the water, is a distant and largely abstract thought. It falls in line with a great host of things Ellis is so accomplished at: swimming, and swinging a mace, and being an excellent hiker, and sound in any situation where tensions are pressed high, yes. But also things like how readily he digs into the earth. The cultivation of a hundred gentle little flowers in the shadows garden of the house in Hightown. His hands and shirt front streaked with dust from the tidying of that place.

--Is not a thing she thinks about, really. But the sensation, low in the center of her, is the same here as then. So that when he looks at her, she says first:

"You're very good at that."

"I've had time to practice."

And physical action will always come easier to him than most anything else. He trusts his body more than anything else. His fingers flex at her waist, looking up at her face against the sky. There is no current. There is nothing to carry him away from her, so long as he keeps his hand where it's settled.

"You're going to be good at it too, I expect."

As he speaks, he straightens, abandoning his position in the water. It's a simple thing to maneuver in the water, find his feet, straighten until his neck and shoulders break the surface. Rivulets of water drip down his neck, slide down to his sodden tunic collar.

Maybe that's true. Maybe she will be good at it. After all, it can't be so hard. Lots and lots of people in the world swim. Nevermind that she suspects swimming to be very much like dancing, where one must be enthusiastic about the whole arrangement or risk looking a little silly. For it is very easy, she has always thought, to be a perfectly fine dancer so long as you are enjoying yourself. And how much difference is there, really, between a fine dancer and a truly good one? Certainly not so broad of one that it will ever matter at all to her.

So were she very determined, now would be the time to nod curtly, announce 'Right then' and go about the thing. No time like the present, and so on. Particularly not when she has already stubbornly decided to no longer be something so silly as frightened.

Instead, chin hovering just above the surface of the water, she finds herself absently reaching for him. It's a very small thing, and perhaps easily interpreted as reattaching herself to him like how she'd begun. But mostly, her fingers just skirt tentatively as if absent minded against the flimsy water-floated front of his tunic. Not quite touching and not quite not touching.

"How much practice would you say? Out of curiosity. Before you felt certain of it."

The almost-clutch of her fingers is becoming familiar. Ellis is reminded of her fingertips hovering over the scar at his shoulder, the prickling delicacy of the contact. He inhales deeply, more for the suggestion of her fingers than for the question itself.

"I don't remember, exactly," he admits. "It took some time, I think. It didn't come to me right away."

It's natural, in some way, for childhood memories to blur together. But that is all another lifetime. Reaching back for it is like straining for a vanishing dream.

A shrug, water rippling out from him at the small movement. It's not enough to disturb the drifting fabric of his tunic in her grasp.

"And do you think—" She pauses to reorder the question. The water makes the sturdy fabric all light and worn soft between her fingers—falsely delicate. It occurs to her that none of her current things are so different from it.

She looks down from his face, studying the ripple of the water shifting between them.

"If you'd never learned, is there a time it would have ever made a difference?"

The press of his thumb is set just beneath the jut of her rib. It's very different to put his hand along her waist with nothing but a tunic between her skin and his palm. The sturdy, tightly-sewn fabric of her corset had been a kind of unyielding.

"Wardens don't have much cause to swim," he says first, slowly. Had she taken a different tone, he might have thought she was stalling. But by now, he knows what it looks like when Wysteria is wheedling her way out of something. "I fell into a river once, before. I like to think knowing how to swim made it easier to find my way out."

That knowledge, and a well-placed log. But—

"Are you trying to decide if it's worth learning?"

"No, no," is a hurried thing. Dismissive like a wave of the hand. She looks back up at him. "No it seems very productive. As we discussed—the ferry might sink."

It's very briskly stated and by all appearances quite sincere. He offered, she agreed, she has decided she wished to learn and enjoys the prospect of knowing a thing. That makes it worthwhile all on its own, doesn't it? So no, it isn't stalling. Nor a shift in her intentions to learn. It is—

"Have you ever instructed anyone before?" She asks, plucking thoughtlessly at the floating shape of his shirt. "At swimming."

—a point of diverging interest, lets say.

"No, not at swimming. It's not the first of my talents people ask after when they want me to give instruction."

Not that Ellis had advertised. There's a wealth of better options, people who spent their lives on the water before coming to Riftwatch. The middling skill of a Fereldan Warden isn't going to top any list of swimmers Riftwatch's Division Heads might seek to assemble.

It's a dangerous thing to assume Wysteria is winding her way towards a particular point. Ellis has spent many afternoons, evenings and plodding lengths of travel listening to Wysteria and Tony's conversation unspool past him in far-reaching directions. But it's not a hardship to be asked and to give an answer to her. They have yet to stray towards the kinds of questions that strike defensive tension in response quicker than they do an answer.

"You're the one who'd be able to tell if I'm more or less adept in a pond than I am in the training yard."

"I suppose we are rather full up on various sailors and pirates and that sort of thing so if someone wished to learn, they might go rattling about in that general direction first."

She can hear herself talking, the spin of some idle thought being allowed to play out without much conscious effort as she fiddles uselessly with the fabric of his shirt front. Talking to fill some space she hasn't identified the dimensions of—

"I suspect you're the person people look for when they wish to know something about darkspawn or clobbering demons with a mace or whatever else Wardens are known for these days. And probably dogs, as everyone secretly takes that joke about Ferelden so seriously. And I am not stalling," she adds briskly, recalling what he'd called to her when she'd been rattling about in that bush. She shoots him a sidelong look, and then lets her eye line skirt away past his shoulder to the very blue sky or the bullrushes on the other side of the pond.

"I only wanted to say that it's very thoughtful of you to be so willing to do it."

No that's not it.

"And that I think being chin deep in pond water suits you unexpectedly well." There it is, all ridiculous and so silly that she is compelled, no forced to continue: "And now I'm afraid you must let me drown, so we will never have to suffer through another attempt of me saying another complimentary about your face ever again."

It's not the end point Ellis had envisioned.

But it does draw out a small smile, some minor flush and prickle of self-consciousness gathering at the nape of his neck. There's no real reason to be caught off guard by her admiration, but it's still unexpected.

He thinks to say something, offer some minor deflection in response to her. But his hands lift to cup her cheeks, fingers finding the line of her jaw. Her hair is coming up in loose, damp tendrils around her face.

You really are meant to ask, she'd scolded once, and Ellis does think of it in the breath of time in which he sways in towards her and the moment his mouth finds hers.

Wysteria tastes of the pond. Ellis has a split second to register it before he remembers his intentions: it's a relatively chaste kiss. He straightens from it with an abashed little smile, nothing to say for himself, or for the quality of Wysteria's compliments, or their progress on her swimming lessons.

He is meant to ask her, but there is something in the willing tilt of her face between his hands which suggests that in this very specific circumstance (maybe there are others; she hasn't yet decided) that the transgression has already been forgiven.

Although afterward, with her fingers having closed in the fabric of his wet tunic, she makes a little grumbling noise of protest. "You're not meant to reward me for being so dreadfully inarticulate, you know. It will make for a terrible habit. The next time I think you look well, I will lose even more syllables at a time until eventually I am only paying you compliments in assertive nods. You ought to know that is no way to teach anything, Mister Ellis."

And--

"Also I lied. I was stalling."

The admission makes him laugh, low and fond. Ellis kisses her in response. It's a brief, chaste kiss, there and gone in the space of a breath.

Ellis has found it's easier to kiss her that way now. The impulse at first had been to linger, but almost without realizing he's gotten used to the idea that there will be other moments to kiss her again. Everything feels more secure, the affection between them setting down enough roots. He doesn't need to brace for a moment when it vanishes.

"Try for me once," he coaxes. "Then we can see about food, if you're hungry."

Her tsk is sharp, punctuated by a faux-aggrieved look and a tug to his shirt front.

"Very well. Though I hardly see why I should when I could simply stand here and say terrible things to make you kiss me."

With a great roll of her eyes, she looses her hold on him and shuffles her preparatory steps backwards. Fine. And so she will flop around in the water for a few minutes more, all half-floating and the awkward working of limbs, with more splashing that is really necessary for the very small progress she makes in any particular direction.

What she does manage to do, no doubt under Ellis' careful supervision, is ungainly splash her way to some point where when she goes to put her feet down to steady herself—"There, you see. I've done it"—Wysteria finds herself straining to do so. At the very limit of her height to keep her tipped up face above the water, she squawks in dismay and feels out blindly after him .

As expected, Ellis is within arm's reach.

The first swipes of her arm land in the wrong direction, but Ellis catches her hand on the second.

"Here. Kick your feet," he instructs, stepping towards Wysteria rather than reeling her in towards him. "I have you."

Trading the hold on her hand for light, steadying pressure at her hips. He's near enough that Wysteria could easily use him for leverage, if treading water doesn't take.

She's going to kick him, is not what she says, thought it occurs to her while doing what he instructed that it would be easy to kick to wide and wallop him in the shin or thigh. He is close enough for it.

—But it's a distant thought, there and gone again, swallowed down under the effort of keeping her face out of the water while complaining in fits and starts that, "I didn't agree to not touching the bottom, Ellis. This is viciously unfair. I will report you to the Commander for abusing your post."

She makes a stubborn effort, bobbing up and down like a cork for maybe a minute. Then at last Wysteria uses her grip on his arm to dredge herself in close, clinging onto his shoulder like a particularly motivated leech.

"You see, I've mastered it. Well done."

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