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

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."

"Aye, well done," is said sincerely enough, all pleased warmth in his voice as he takes a step back. Cinching an arm around her and hooking a hand at the bend of her knee, he can more or less take her weight without much trouble. Combined with the minor retreat, Wysteria's face is well out of danger from the water.

Calling it mastered might be a bit generous, but Ellis isn't inclined to press the point. They can consider a second trip once they've returned to Kirkwall and Wysteria has fully dried herself off and the various objections have had time to fade a little.

"You are a natural," is what he asserts instead. "If the ferry goes down, you'll have no trouble at all."

"There is a current in the harbor. And I will be wearing skirts then," are two wholly unnecessary points of contention made as one of her arms slithers a little higher, securing itself around the back of his neck.

"But it's too late now. You've promised me dry land already."

"Aye, I have."

Dry land, and food, and a sample of pond water, is the apparent sum of what's due to her.

In only a few steps, he could put Wysteria down and she'd be able to stand. Instead, he adjusts his grip to hold her more securely, hitching her weight up with a small grin.

"Give me a kiss, for the toll."

A marked rise in price, considering he'd once toted Wysteria all the way to her Hightown house once without anything more than her gratitude at the end of the journey.

"This is the very definition of extortion, Mister Ellis."

Though there is a spark of good cheer in the sound of her protest and she capitulates readily enough. It takes only a little reaching to do so from where he has her cinched in close to him—a damp hand touching his cheek, a brisk kiss planted on his mouth that is by definition so wet that it makes her laugh after.

"Now on with you, or I will begin to suspect your motivations."

She shifts in his hold for emphasis, a leg stirring the water as her hand falls from his cheek and settles at Ellis' shoulder. The sun is warm where it touches wet skin and at the crown of her head.

There is some temptation to stand here with Wysteria until his arms give out. But having been paid his toll, Ellis does as bidden. It's a short walk to the shallows anyway, at which point he levers Wysteria down to wade the last few steps to shore herself.

The trousers are a novelty. Ellis considers he's never seen her without her skirts, put together to some degree. (Even in the miserable damp of that shared dream, she'd been more or less properly dressed, if sodden and mud-spattered.) He almost thinks to say a second time the she is pretty, but instead—

"What am I going to have to trade you to get you in the water again?"

Maybe not today, but surely there's something he can leverage to arrange a second attempt.

The weight of her sodden clothes is nominal compared to that of her own shape peeled out from the water. Dredging up out of the shallows is a more clumsy thing than she'd have anticipated, to say nothing of the sort of silly twinge of regret which comes with being set down. And it's complicated by the urge to wring out her sleeves and to peel various bits of fabric away from where it might otherwise cling a little too close, thank you.

"Well now that you say so, I have need of a selection of rats."

Is probably not where he was expecting this to go, but she seems quiet genuine as she untucks the tunic and wrings water from its hem.

"Miss Smythe and I have synthesized a toxin from the Bierstagg fungi and I should like to study its effects before we issue it for use in the field."

No, not the kind of demand he'd expected, but it's not so far afield that he can't take the request in stride.

"Rats," Ellis echoes. "Aye, that's not so impossible."

Difficult, maybe.

His eyes catch at her exposed throat, the line of scar peeking from the slight gap in tunic laces, before he drops his gaze. Of all the things about her could that stick in his mind, his thoughts linger on the unexpected calluses of her hands, or the line of her collarbone and the scar she'd despaired over.

Turning slightly, he reaches up to scrape his fingers back through his hair, then shake the last of the water from his curls in a quick, sharp movement.

"Come on. We can eat something while we dry off."

If, while shaking the excess water from her tunic, she happens to glance in Ellis' direction and happens to observe him shaking the water from his hair and happens to observe the close fall of his wet clothes and happens to think to herself that, really, swimming is not so terrible as all that and there is hardly any need for bribery--

Well. That is all either entirely a matter of coincidence or simply her being reasonable about the learning of a new skill, and so certainly deserves no remark or even really any conscious observation whatsoever.

Smoothing the long hem of the untucked tunic down, Wysteria bends to fetch up her boots from where they were discarded on the pond's bank, saying, "I observed a patch of clover just over there which seems unlikely to stick to us. Fetch your picnic while I see that its free of spiders."

Wysteria Poppell, a little frightened of being more than knee deep in water and great defender against arachnids.

All spiders cower before her, Ellis has no doubt.

"All clear?" he asks on the way back to her, saddlebag in hand.

The sight of her at some distance, tunic and trousers and her damp hair curling up around her face, is so charming that Ellis' immediate instinct is to reach for her. When he tumbles down onto the clover, heedless of potential spider presence, it puts him comfortably close to her in a sort of compromise that staves off the more pressing need to occupy himself with taking her hand.

"It is—" becomes a laugh as he throws himself down beside her. "Yes. Quite safe."

Seated with her legs tucked demurely up alongside her, as if dressed in skirts still, she leans across him to rummage through the saddlebags—withdrawing the various accoutrements of the packed lunch and cheerfully balancing each secured packet one after another somewhere on Ellis's partially reclined torso.

Obligingly, Ellis sinks from partially reclined to fully reclined to play the part of table. One hand finds her knee and settles there, face tipped to watch her.

"There's a bottle of wine at the very bottom," he tells her. "I think it's one I remembered you liking."

Ages ago, that party where they'd hidden in a closet together and abandoned Fitz to do the talking, Ellis remembers some offhand comment Wysteria had made about the vintage served along with dinner. Considering how little had been praiseworthy about that evening, that had stuck.

But otherwise, it's largely bread and cheese and meat, accompanied by little jars of berries and jam and fruit. Plain, but meant to be filling, and to keep on a day's journey in and out of Kirkwall.

"So there is," is a precursor to a much more approving noise once the bottle has been drawn free and she has had a chance to examine it. Glancing down past it— "I doubt whether this one will balance very well on you however, so I may as well keep it for myself."

And so the bottle is thoughtfully tucked securely into the crook of her bent knees before Wysteria closes the saddlebag and fishes it in the general direction of his head.

"Here. You may use this as your pillow."

She has serious work consisting of opening jars and arranging everything about his person to do.

The hand at her knee remains, shifting slightly to accommodate the addition of the bottle. Ellis reaches up to draw the saddlebag into place behind his head, propping himself up slightly.

"Very comfortable," Ellis tells her. "You'll have to me if it's a good picnic. The cook helped, but if there's something missing..."

Between them, Wysteria might have more experience with picnics. Ellis' experiences with eating on the road is likely vastly different and possibly lacking.

"That is, I think, the appeal of a picnic, Mister Ellis. The novelty of eating out of doors far from any kitchen makes everything taste altogether better than it might elsewhere. I have rarely been on one where I found myself wishing for anything that wasn't already close to hand."

She has cracked all the lids from all the jars and aligned them patiently along his side. The bread is torn into pieces and arranged on the cloth in which it was wrapped (still on his middle). The cheese is similarly divided.

"But no, I think it's all been very thoughtfully done. Now," she says, looking warmly down at him. It occurs to her that she has acquired a habit of seeing him so easy as this, where once that was—not not true, precisely. But it seems close to it. "What combination of things would you like first?"

The ruling on picnics and what best constitutes their make up goes unchallenged. Ellis is content enough to listen to her and watch as she works her way through the items.

There are points in which all becomes markedly surreal. That he has landed here at all is unbelievable at times, and he has a sense of it now, watch Wysteria arrange a picnic lunch across his torso to her satisfaction. It preoccupies him just long enough that his answer is delayed, though he draws up one elbow as if to sit up then abandons the idea of moving any further for fear of disturbing her handiwork.

"You choose," he tells her, broad enough to be mistaken for you choose for me or you choose for yourself, and I'll take something after.

"Then I will assume you like more or less everything to hand for otherwise why would you bring it. Did you know, I have never been very fond of raspberry jam but here I quite like it. The taste is entirely different to how the fruit is in Kalvad, though the appearance itself is quite near to identical. Isn't that funny? And it is only raspberries. All other fruits--the ones which are familiar to me--have all been as I remember them."

This she says as some of the tart jam in question is spread onto a bit of bread. A chunk of cheese is similarly assigned to it, and then the whole combination is passed over to him before she moves on to arrange the same combination for herself. The sun is warm. The air smells sweetly of clover from where they have trampled it, and the back of her neck is beginning to take on a faintly pink cast without the protection of her broad brimmed hat. It is a fine afternoon for sitting out of doors and they are far enough removed from the road and the city that it is easy to pretend that there is no one else at all who they should concern themselves with.

"Would that I had an example of a Kalvadan raspberry. I would like to look at them both under Miss Niehaus' telescope."

Microscope.

It strikes him as sweet, despite what a little gesture it is. His hand flexes on her knee, but remains as he takes a bite, processes what she's telling him.

"Maybe a bush will fall out of a rift one of these days."

It wouldn't be the strangest thing that dropped from a rift. And even possibly an improvement, comparatively.

"Will you tell me what other foods you like here?" is a genuine question. All the meals shared between Ellis, Tony and Wysteria had never really yielded an understanding of what she genuinely liked as opposed to what was simply sufficient and unobjectionable.

Ellis is no more equipped to distinguish between a telescope and microscope. What Wysteria would gain from using it to look at fruit is also beyond him, but he assumes Wysteria will outline it for him sooner or later.

"Oh happily!" She is getting into a rhythm now, falling into that familiar pattern where she speaks easily and without thinking while her hands and therefore the bulk of her attention are occupied with some other task.

"It is a great treat to have fish out of the sea, I think. They are all fantastically oily. Swordfish is quite spectacular. Have you ever had it? I gather it's somewhat expensive, but it was served at some party I was obligated to be at. I can hardly recall which one now. And there were those...I don't remember what they were called. The dumplings we ate in Ghislain with the cheese in them all floated in sauce. Do you recall? They were this size and shape."

She pauses, first stuffing her piece and bread and cheese and so on wholesale into her mouth before using both hands to mime a small square. Ravioli.

The careful arrangement of food across his middle keeps him from leaning up to her, and the urge manifests in his hand tightening at her knee as he suggests, "Ravioli."

In which he remembers the dinner in question, being there with her, and the food exists as a note in the side margins of it. They'd both been oddities, and Wysteria had made the careless scrutiny of their hosts tolerable.

She'd made a fair amount of things tolerable. That's something to tell her eventually, he thinks, but not right now. He doesn't want to invite even the adjacent trappings of Riftwatch's work into this moment with them.

"What else?" he prompts, as she chews her way through the bread and cheese. "Was there a dessert? The cakes, from that night in Ghislain?"

In reply, she makes some humming noise and wobbles her head from one side to the other in exaggerated consideration. One hand rises to shield her mouth; the other drifts absently to touch his fingers where they have caught her knee. Her thumb marks the rise and fall of his knuckles--drums briefly against the finer bones across the back of his hand.

"They were pleasant. But that strange thing we had in Orzammar. The one that was mushroom and cream custard with the burnt sugar on top? That was very good. I liked how much is tasted like..." A rare pause. She squints, studying the line of shrubbery nearby as if it might reveal some vocabulary to her. "Sweet smoke, I suppose. Which sounds dreadful, but feels correct."

She looks down to him then.

"Which is your favorite?"

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