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

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

You came to the side of the bed
and sat staring at me.
Then you kissed me—I felt
hot wax on my forehead.
I wanted it to leave a mark:
that’s how I knew I loved you.
Because I wanted to be burned, stamped,
to have something in the end—
I drew the gown over my head;
a red flush covered my face and shoulders.
It will run its course, the course of fire,
setting a cold coin on the forehead, between the eyes.
You lay beside me; your hand moved over my face
as though you had felt it also-
you must have known, then, how I wanted you.
We will always know that, you and I.
The proof will be my body.

— louise glück

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Here again, the impulse to be a little petty. Oh, so for anyone else this would be cause for a little temper. What then makes her so different? It is irresponsible, you know, to treat a person so unevenly in these cases. It it like to make them willful and stubborn and very silly, and she has quite enough of all those qualities all on her own thank you very much.

But fine. Drawn in close—as close as he dictates, for she is delicate about pressing so near given all the battery which has occurred about his back and shoulders—, she suits herself with frowning a little harder near to his neck and restlessly smoothing the lay of that borrowed shirt's collar with her spare hand. It's not quite turned to lay flat, and it's a relatively straightforward thing to correct compared to a long list of others things which are not.

"What manner of bargain?"

"That the next time we come across something, some...magical thing," Ellis begins, a pause where he considers his terms. Rifts must be excluded surely. They've been poking at rifts together for so long that to begin attempting to restrict it now is absurd.

He's not quite drawn her into his lap, but the intention is there. It stalls as he pauses over the specifics of his request, his thumb rubbing back and forth along her knuckles as he continues, "When it's the pair of us alone, far from anyone who might be helpful, then we save experiments until we've made it back to Kirkwall, aye?"

There are less reasonable requests. He isn't a mage. She isn't one either. Not properly. And this is true: magic here in Thedas is dangerous, untamed. It is all sharp edges and quiet threats, grown from grim places like fungi under heavy stones.

(It's good that he stalls. Given the shape he's in, she might balk at being drawn so near.)

"Very well. It's agreed."

And surely it will be easy to comply. There are other people who wouldn't know when a thing has been steeped in magic.

"Thank you."

And that's all there is. Ellis lapses into quiet, the restless movement of his hands carrying on a different, unspoken conversation.

"I liked seeing your magic," he tells her, abrupt into the warmth of the space between them. He doesn't say: I wanted to see it enough that I ignored good sense to do it. Wysteria is carrying enough, she doesn't need Ellis' poor decisions heaped onto her shoulders as well.

"Nonsense," she grouses primly, a last death throe for her ill-humor. "It hardly warrants the name."

The collar has been smoothed to her satisfaction, or at least has achieved a state as close to it as it is likely to reach. Clearly it has lived at the bottom of some drawer or trunk for quite some time, not a favorite of the owner from whom she'd borrowed it. The wrinkles attest to that much. Regardless: here, her spare hand falls away.

"Don't," is for the departure of her hand. Ellis turns his head in against her shoulder, as if to account for the loss contact. When he continues, it's spoken there, slightly muffled but clear enough.

"It's magic," he tells her, clear about his opinion. Uneducated opinion, perhaps, but surely he's been adjacent to enough magic to be able to recognize it at a glance. "I'll want to hear more about it, when we're home."

He might well say when my head is clearer, but the edge in Wysteria's voice has ebbed away, and Ellis is in no hurry to call it back.

"There is very little to tell," she says, though in that narrowed space and with his head placed so, it becomes a more delicate thing. She turns her face a little—just a few degrees toward him—and says, "Which you would do tell to remember, should anyone ask you. Though I've no doubts in your discretion."

But it is true that she has gone such a long time without being called a mage in Thedas, and though there is little about the idea that truly rankles her there is no denying that there are some who might take exception to the idea. And better, surely, to move about as an scholar from beyond the Fade than to be a scholar of the arcane from it. It would make no difference in the Gallows of course, but—

But, well she doesn't know exactly. And theoretically the not knowing, she has been told with respect to this particular thing, is meant to be dangerous. Which is a conversation so opposite to anything like what she wishes to have that she instead suggests the first thing which comes to mind to replace it. That is:

"But shouldn't you be resting by now?"

Discretion pricks at the edge of his thoughts.

But Wysteria's instincts are correct. This thing she's shown him is an easy thing to safeguard. He knows just as well as she does how Thedas treats its magic users. That's an easy reason to keep her abilities close to the chest. Rifters were already a source of debate tilting towards an unfavorable outcome. Ellis wouldn't see her nudged any further along towards the far side of that scale than she already is.

Whatever question he'd been considering, about to ask against her shoulder, is more bypassed by Wysteria's query. He turns further in towards her, grimace hidden by the position he's placed himself in.

"I am resting."

In a sense.

He shifts by degrees, realigning his body until he can put his head into her lap with a low exhale of discomfort that tapers into a sigh.

She doesn't protest the delicate rearrangement, though this is far from the ideal way in which he is meant to rest his head in her lap. He ought to do so in the summer, in the shade of some tree in an hour of idleness where she might idly twirl his dark curls between her fingers and they might discuss some book to avoid the flustered heat of embarrassment to keep from crawling too high up the back of her neck. It is not meant to occur because he is in pain, or because he is exhausted. It isn't not at all like how she had pictured the thing—

Her hands fall gently to him anyway, fingers delicately threading through his thick hair despite the prickle of fever and sweat she finds there. That will break in an hour or in two, she thinks. Hopes. Tells herself so very strictly so that she won't consider it at length.

Her nails are kept so trim that they hardly catch against his scalp. If she were a less poor musician, she might hum to him in an attempt to encourage him to sleep more quickly. But as it is—

"So you are."

Her hands in his hair are so good. It blunts the pain singing through his body, all protest at the movement ebbing down to a manageable roar as Wysteria's fingers thread into his curls and skim along his scalp. One hand curls over her thigh, just above her knee, as his other returns to her hip, slides to span the small of her back.

He closes his eyes. Time passes. His fingers trace the detailing of her dress, attention narrowing down to the feeling of her hand in his hair.

"I didn't ask about your hand," he says eventually. He should have asked hours ago. "Is it hurting you now?"

He closes his eyes. Time passes. The filaments of his hair slides between the faintly calloused tips of her fingers, and she studies the lines which make up his brow and nose, the shape of his mouth and the shadows cast by his eyelashes.

"My hand is perfectly well," she answers, slow due to the meditative quality of the quiet and his weight and the shape of his hands more than because it's a lie.

(It's barely one. Her hand aches, but that is ordinary.)

She twirls a dark curl between her fingers. She doesn't care to discuss the anchor. No one asks Gwenaëlle Baudin whether her hand hurts after she closes a rift.

"Has anyone ever said to you how handsome your hair is?" Is a preferable point of conversation.

Is he meant to say no?

Some passing urge tugs towards that answer, a denial that is untrue. The urge to conceal is always there. (Or just some instinctive urge towards self-preservation that flinches away from excavating painful things.) The silence stretches. He breathes out. He says—

"Yes. Once."

There had been others. Wysteria knows this.

"It was a long time ago," follows after, his thumb stroking back and forth over the top of her thigh. Whether or not it is good to hear now, well. (It's not as good as her hands feel.)

Was it your pretty girl who danced with you when you were a boy?, she doesn't ask. It doesn't particularly matter and he will go rigid where he lies if she were to ask. Instead:

"Good. I'm pleased someone has said so."

Even though he lapses into silence, the sweep of his thumb continues. This close, he can hear the rustle of layers of fabric under the motion. There's a brief consideration of all her many layers, with which he has a passing familiarity with by now, of whether or not she'll be comfortable whenever she lies down here to sleep.

"That feels good," is a small, useless thing to say. Her hands feel good. Anytime she touches him is good. He doesn't know that he's said it before, but he should have. The words come easier here, now, in this moment. The workshop is small and warm, half-lit. After all the day has brought them, it's made even this meager lodgings more a comfort than they might have been otherwise.

In reply, she smooths back the hair from his forehead in two soft strokes. For a long moment, there is no other response—just the soft shape of her hands gently shifting. Then, again: "Good."

This too is a small, useless thing. It is entirely inconsequential save for how it's spoken by the low flicker of the woodfire stove while he has his head pillowed in her lap. What a terribly fraught day it must be to make silly little nothings like these matter at all. She continues this quiet ministration for some uninterrupted minutes. The rhythm of the thing is lulling. It allows her some minutes to measure her own displeasure, the hot little coal burning at the center of her, and to let to flare and spark in time to the rare snap of the fire winding low until it has run out of fuel to burn. It is not so cold to be concerned about keeping the stove hot, and it seems unnecessary to concern herself overmuch with curating the light to see by.

Eventually, when both those little flames have been permitted to burn low, Wysteria delicately extracts her hands. She tells him, "You should sleep now. Let me put our things away."

"I don't care about our things."

Things that are easily said now, when he's half-asleep and Wysteria's had her hands in his hair for what feels like hours. In the morning, when he has to take stock of the damage and all the wounds in his back have turned stiff with scabs and bruising, he might feel differently. But now, all he really has the space to consider is—

"Lay down with me," follows after, Ellis' hand tightening slightly over her thigh. "I'll sleep better with you close."

"I will," she says, doing her best to lean and fetch his discarded gambeson without fully dislodging him from her lap. She can only just reach it. "When I'm reasonably certain the jam has been closed and tucked away. If I wake up to rats in my near vicinity, I will simply die. Now take this and tuck it under your head and I will fetch your pack for the same purpose and return shortly to lay right here beside you with it. Agreed?"

Agreed, seems to be her automatic assumption for she has already folded the gambeson into a more or less pillow like lump and laid it there beside her knee so he might shift easily over to it. Extracting herself from him isn't technically difficult, only in the sense that it takes a great deal of willpower.

But no, at the very least she must fetch something to rest her head on or risk waking up with sawdust and wood shavings caked into her hair. And while she is up, there is no reason not to pack their little dinner and to quietly organize the discards of his plate armor or to remove her knife from her belt and indeed her little belt so as not to be pinched or prodded by them in the night. To sleep in her short stays is one thing. To sleep with her belt on is quite another.

But eventually she does as promised and returns to him, clambering down to join him on the floor. It is not strictly comfortable there, but neither is it strictly uncomfortable and she decides immediately that she has slept under worse circumstances. It is not, for example, a stinking and flooding jungle or a bitter cold desert. And she is very tired. That helps as well, she decides as she insinuates her hand into Ellis' and settles where she lies.

Tomorrow is going to be an extraordinarily long day.

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

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veering close to bow territory here

tentatively slaps one on there unless you have something to add