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

"I swear it."

The immediacy of her answer should by rights render it flimsy. But in that small space drawn between them, she is so painfully earnest. Brisk, yes, but achingly sincere as if it were a thing she had put in her mind a long time ago and subsequently come to memorize it.

She'd said it before, hadn't she? That they need only be honest with one another.

"Thank you," is not as simple a thing as it sounds. She is certain of what a promise means to him.

"Now," she says, her hand which is still at his cheek shifting faintly to touch the edge of his sun-drying curls. "You have my permission to kiss me how you like."

There is nothing between them to distract Ellis from Wysteria's face in this moment, bright and open and promising him this without any hesitation. Wysteria says this as if she'd decided it already, is confirming what's already known, and Ellis was only late to ask her.

What has he done right in this life to be deserving of her, of this trust she bestows on him so decisively?

She must be expecting to be drawn back down to him then, rather than studied for a moment. Ellis does think of it, as his thumb runs along the back of her hand. But instead, he kisses the heel of her palm, then the inside of her wrist, before releasing her hand.

All the little obstacles are left in place, minor safeguards as a check against the sweeping permission he's been granted. He reaches up to put his fingers back into her hair and encourage her back to him, close enough that he only need lean up a short distance to kiss her.

It is in moments like the one where he looks at her so carefully that she wishes she could read the progress of his thoughts like words on a book's page. There is fondness there, she thinks, set beside something tender (in every sense of the word), but the exact depth of it she can only guess at. If it lasted a moment longer, she might have asked Tell me what you're thinking of.

How narrowly he misses further interrogation.

She instead obliges the gentle set of his hand, swayed down in easy range to be kissed. It's such a steady thing. Unhurried. She can taste the bite of the raspberry jam of the edge of the wine on her own breath maybe. And for a moment it feels very serious, like something is being placed in her hands to be responsible for, but then the severity of that very thought and how absurd it is makes the line of her mouth twitch toward a barely restrained smile.

Wysteria doesn't smile, but Ellis does after a point, interrupting them for a moment without drawing away. His hand shifts in her hair at the same point his opposite ranges out across her lap to find her hand without breaking away to look.

As you like still feels like the sort of offering that comes with limitations, and he can be nothing but attentive for the moment when they reach those limits. His hold on her is so carefully light, even when his fingers nudge in beneath the pins holding damp hair in place to draw her impossibly. She tastes sweet. Her mouth is very soft under his.

There's no urgency in the way they move together. It's easy with her. When Ellis breaks, it's with a soft, jagged inhale. He's left himself no real space to tip away, having urged her so closely to him, and the trappings of the picnic keep him in place. All he can do is stay there, nose bumping against hers, gathering himself.

It is close enough that she can feel silly things like the shadow of his eyelashes and the warmth of his cheek, the shape of his breath against the corner of her mouth. Somewhere between them, in her lap, she scuffs her thumb across the miniature mountain range of his knuckles then turns his hand so as to blindly examine the curve of his palm.

Then with a swift, punctuating kiss, Wysteria straightens up and away from his mouth and his fingers in her hair and even his hand in hers.

"Stay there as you are if you would, Mister Ellis," is closer to an order than a request, however politely worded. She tucks a series of loose strands of gold-blonde hair behind her ears. With the same sort of thoroughness she'd unfolded everything, Wysteria begins to refold the waxed paper and napkins and so on about their various picnic paraphernalia and shifting them prudently off him.

The retreat is so quick that Ellis instinctively chases her up, shoulders coming up off the ground and holding there, still weighed down. He'd expected to stay that close, linger and disconnect slowly. The abrupt, decisive draw back leaves him blinking up at her for a moment, processing the re-established distance.

But he settles at her urging, eyebrows raising in silent question as she packs up the food, seals the jars. His hand falls back to her knee as the other lifts, plucks at the saddlebag behind his head, offering without an excess of movement.

"No, no. You may keep your pillow. I am merely rearranging. I shouldn't want your hard work to go to waste or for jam to get on anything. And," she adds, setting side some packet or another. "It is terribly unsporting of me to handicap you so."

Her glance is his direction is sidelong. A little sly, but only just—as if the moment she slings it in his direction, she wonders if it would be better to have treated the thing seriously.

And then the last of the cheese is displaced.

The cheese is dispatched. The food is cleared aside. Ellis' thumb strokes along her kneecap, watching her face. His hand drops from the saddlebag to his chest, as if marking out the cleared space.

"I didn't mind."

There's an element of humor in his tone, looking up at her. Of course Ellis didn't mind a tangible check on his movement. It's not so different than the way he proceeds at any other moment. The motion of his thumb continues, back and forth along her kneecap. Ellis keeps his place, limbs still sprawled loosely across the clover.

"Wysteria," might have been the prelude to some question, meant to be followed by What now? But Ellis stalls there, voice infused with such fondness.

Sitting there beside him, her legs tucked almost beneath her and very upright, she is all keen and clear-eyed when she looks at him. If his hand is restless at her knee, then hers are very patient where her fingertips have come to rest against his ribs. His tunic is still damp. Her own things are too.

"Yes?"

Her eyes go a little wide after, eyebrows rising in a blatant display of faux guilelessness. She can play dumb too, Ellis.

Come back down here, is very close at hand. Ellis feels it beating hard under Wysteria's hand where she's settled it over his chest. But it's not what comes when he answers her.

"You're very beautiful," is certainly not the intended response. But he says it anyway, because it feels as if he should say it more. She looks so pleased with herself, some element of expectation in her innocent expression, and Ellis finds himself with nothing else to offer her but that bit of truth while he works his way around to more actionable offerings.

"If you say so many more times, by head will become too large for my neck and have to be carried around all day on my shoulder."

Despite the scolding, it's clear that she's pleased to hear it for a smile tugs at the corner of her mouth strong enough to briefly flash her teeth, and there is something warm (equal parts fond and embarrassed) which lights up in her face. She pokes him between the ribs. Stop that.

The jab of her fingers inspires a fidgety shift, arching away and then relaxing back, unwilling to turn from her even when at the mercy of sharp fingertips.

"I've lost time to make up for."

Not that anything had ever been stopping him, it had just—

There were things that had been too revealing to say before. There are things that are too revealing still, though the weight of them feels less impossible now than they had then.

"Will you come down here?" is phrased so politely, a counterpoint to the restless grip of his hand at her knee.

There is a warm thing which blooms at the center of her chest for it. For his sincerity, and the sweet shape of the quest and the way his thumb cannot sit still, and for how for a moment there he could almost have been described as squirming away from the inciting press of her fingers. It's sweet, she decides. All of it is. He seems so untroubled in the shadow of its combination, all that severity which so often lurks at the corner of his eye or in the habitual tension of his brow smoothed away in the warm afternoon sun and on the cool bed of clover.

"Very well," she says, haughty so as to mask all her affection. "But don't think by asking that you have distracted me from noting your weakness."

Warden Ellis, sensitive having his sides tickled. It is good to have a secret weapon.

She shifts - not to lean down to him again, but to draw her legs out from under herself. That knee unbends under his hand. When she moves to join him, it is by stretching out on her side alongside him supported by elbows and forearms so as to be flush against his side but not over him. Not really, save perhaps by the height afforded from being propped slightly up where he is reliant entirely on the saddlebag for elevation.

Here she is meant to ask stubbornly Well not that I'm here, what did you wish to tell me? or something very like it. Something coy or clever or funny. Did you know, Mister Ellis, that this is all highly inappropriate?, or It is a good thing you thought to bring me a change of clothes; it is very hard to sit back up once you'd lain down in stays. But here she is and though the thought is there, the words fail to materialize. Instead, smiling, she regards him for a moment in that close up space and when she does speak it's to say with all her affection:

"I think you're very beautiful too. The wrinkle there, between your eyebrows. That one is my favorite for it tells when you're thinking very hard about something and I have used it often to overwhelm you."

As if there is only one weak point when it comes to her. Ellis is chuckling at that as much as he is over the way she lays out her opinions of his face.

"I see," is very solemn but for the stubborn curve of a smile that doesn't quite leave his face. "You've found out all my weaknesses, it seems."

That displaced hand has returned to lift her fingers, run his thumb along her palm. He thinks to draw her in close. He thinks to put his hand back in her hair. He thinks to do nothing, because she is already tucked in neatly against him and having her this near is satisfying on its own.

"It's a good thing you're so kind to me, or I'd have cause to worry."

A teasing lilt drawn over a kind of truth. As he speaks, he trades his hold on her hand to reach up to her face, tuck back a few stray wisps of hair before they can become a nuisance to her.

"I believe I did tell you this. That I have chosen to be careful with you out of respect for your—I shall not call them delicate but think of some word that is near to it—sensibilities."

This she ribs right back with, neither deterred or softened by the sentiment in how he tends to her flyaway hair.

"Why, I can think of a half dozen ways I might torment you in this very moment."

"Can you tell me some of them?" feels like inviting trouble, and yet. "Or would that give me an unfair advantage, when you do decide to torment me?"

"It would," she is swift to confirm. But— "However, as you've been so studious a teacher this afternoon, I suppose I can afford it as a demonstration of my gratitude. That seems only fair. But you must close your eyes, because if you look at me I'll feel too guilty and be unable to recite any of it. Agreed?"

Beside him, Wysteria shifts up a little higher on her elbows in anticipation of some recitation of ills she has until this point courteously held back.

His fingers travel slowly down her jawline as Ellis studies her, a pause that could be mistaken for hesitation when instead it's a moment to take in her face, her expression, the way Wysteria looks when she has something in mind to say, consider how appealing it is and mark that knowledge.

Then his hand returns to fold both over his belly. He closes his eyes, turning his head up towards the sky, as if to ward against the possibility of a single peek.

It's a fine show. She even waits a beat longer to give it the credit she deserves before unfolding her torture's toolkit.

"For example, I think I should ask you for a list of your favorite things. Colors and your favorite book and seasons and what is your favorite place in Kirkwall and so on. This of course is to slowly acquaint you with the concept of giving your opinion on things. And then, once your guard was sufficiently down, I would ask after your ambitions and what you would like to do once the war is over or for you to tell me some story of thing you are most proud of doing."

She doesn't watch his face as she speaks. Instead, she allows herself to shift a little beside him, her attention drifting to his folded hands. Eventually, she moves to touch them, fingertips idly wandering along his wrist and the back of his topmost hand.

"Or I would ask after more or your scars, or that you would tell me what the mark on your chest is and where you acquired it, or attempt to satisfy any number of curiosities. Or I might make some very poor attempts to compliment and see how long you could bear it before you argued. Or—"

There is dirt under her fingernails from touching the pond's bottom. She notices it for the first time as she lightly traces the shape of his hands.

"Or I might only lay here and needle you with the facts that we are alone and I can think of nothing at all that might cause me to be frightened of you."

Had Wysteria been looking, she'd have noticed the furrow in his brow reappearing somewhere in the course of her recitation. His fingers twitch slightly when she touches his hand, then relax. He stays quiet afterwards, giving her opportunity to continue as much as taking a moment to consider what she's said, let the initial prickling of discomfort recede.

His hands move before he speaks, palm turning up under her fingers.

"So I should count myself very lucky that you're so merciful," Ellis tells her quietly, looking back to her in the same moment his eyes open to focus back on her face. Maybe she's not asking him now, but she will ask all of those things eventually. He understands that, even if he hasn't yet decided exactly what he'll do when, or if she does.

"Yes." She brushes her fingertips down the length of his palm. It's a gentle touch. "That is more or less the shape of it, Mister Ellis.

She lifts her eyes from the shape of his hands then and looks at him. Searching out, perhaps, that studious wrinkle.

"I hope I haven't overwhelmed you too much by revealing it."

"No, you haven't."

And that is seemingly all he has to say. His hand remains relaxed under the sweep of her fingers, eyes intent on her expression. When he moves, it's a slow upward arch, their hands undisturbed as Ellis leans up, kisses her very softly rather than try to condense what's in his head into a coherent statement.

It's a very sweet thing, she thinks distantly—strangely analytical despite how willing, ready even, she is for that exceedingly gentle kiss. She has been so relentless with him, and he in turn has been so gentle and measured. It's strange to think that between the two of them, it's Ellis who asks for delicacy. Enforces it. Requires it, even.

(His kiss is so soft. The tenderness of it makes her heart ache in her chest.)

"Ellis—" is a tentative thing against his mouth. Like a question, but not. She forces herself to say the thing she's thinking. "I said you might kiss me how you liked because I wanted you to."

"Aye," comes slowly, questioning, very close for a moment longer before Ellis draws back. His expression is searching, weighing the question up as his head sinks back to the saddlebag.

A handful of questions come to mind, a muddled mix of queries that Ellis sets aside. I wanted you to holds a different weight than the rest. It nudges up against conversations they've had before, the caution embedded in everything Ellis does. He doesn't think she is asking in objection to the way he's kissing her.

"I know," is more prompt than answer, seeking what's behind her reminder as his fingers close overs hers.

I know, he says, and she waits—lingering there tucked in close beside him, hovering and expectant and uncertain in that way that someone entering an unfamiliar dark room with no light in their possession might be.

She recognizes, belatedly, some anxious racing of her heart. The feeling of foolishness suddenly gripping her, because what is she implying? A delayed flush creeps up her neck for it and when she shifts, it's toward withdrawing her hand and in the direction of pushing herself upright.

"Good. I'm pleased you do."

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