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

"Suspicious?" comes with some quizzical furrow of his brow, before Ellis shakes his head and begins to draw her from the room. One hand is released, but the other is kept, his fingers lacing through hers loosely as they move towards the door. "It's tiring, but not suspicious."

Zeroing in on this, perhaps, because Ellis has no way of answering questions about money. The Commander hadn't mentioned, and Ellis hadn't asked. Admittedly, when he'd received the assignment he'd assumed it would be the work of a day or so. There'd been nothing to warn him of exactly what kind of project he's taking on.

"She explained it all at dinner, shortly as she arrived. The bulk of her servants are shutting up her summer house. Once they arrive, she'll be properly attended to again, and she won't notice at all when I leave the estate."

Presumably there is at least one designated cat-catcher among her household. It seems an oversight, to bring the cat and not it's keeper, but Ellis has never managed a household and cannot say whether or not there was good reason for the separation.

"And when, pray tell, will her summer house be closed the remaining sum of her servants transferred here? It seems prudent to point out that the weather has hardly even begun to cool. Surely she mentioned an anticipated date. She cannot mean to keep you for further weeks on end, Mister Ellis. And even if she does, it would be a truly outrageous a misuse of Riftwatch's resources."

This, she has henpecked with as she has been led from the room with only the smallest of backward glances after the looking glass and her reduced reflection in it. Dreadful, she thinks, and is so consumed with this last mental assertion that she nearly allows herself to be taken by the hand across the threshold. It is only at the very last moment that Wysteria wrings her hand free from his with a small hiss that,

"I am meant to be here as an assistant to you. Not as your— Someone might see."

"You should have said you were my superior officer come to fetch me," is only half a joke.

But Ellis doesn't intend to give up on holding her hands so easily. He turns to meet her in the doorway, reaching to catch her by the elbows.

"I've missed you," he repeats. "And I intend to hold your hand, and steal a kiss from you while you're here."

Would Lady Paget object? Ellis hasn't considered that at all, just as he hasn't considered the possibility of ulterior motives beyond the sense that the woman is alone and thoughtless in her assignment of tasks. He doesn't care to think very much of it at all, when Wysteria is present. Her arrival brightens even this impossible search for a cat Ellis is beginning to doubt even exists.

Her "Mister Ellis," is hissed and chiding. It's also punctuated with a poke between his ribs which she is more or less perfectly positioned for given his possession of her elbows.

She has missed him too. Otherwise why would she have come all this way to makes demands that he finish his business? And obviously she would like to hold his hand and to be kissed by him, but in the corridor where anyone dispatched to send for Lady Paget's personal Warden might see?

"It is hardly appropriate. Certainly not when the door is so wide open."

The chiding manages to be such a welcome thing. He has missed her. Having spent a significant amount of time in this house, Ellis realizes how often he had wondered what she would have made of a certain dress or a pattern of fabric on furniture or the tableware, or the Lady Paget herself.

All of this would have been far more tolerable if Wysteria had been in attendance. This is not anything new, but it is still something that sticks in his mind, even when Wysteria jabs at his ribs.

"So you would kiss me, should I find you a room with a closed door?" is not the point Wysteria might have been making.

But there are an abundance of rooms, most all empty, and all outfitted with locks. Ellis knows because in his travels he has searched perhaps a quarter of them attempting to flush out a most elusive cat.

Her cheeks pink. She scoffs. "Well," is neither a yes or a no as her hands flap ineffectually at him.

"That is hardly the point, Mister Ellis. And are you not in hot pursuit of a straying cat? I have already distracted you from your duties. If we were discovered, it would be well within the Lady's rights to expel us from this house."

—Which...

No, surely there are simpler ways to extract him from the Lady Paget's clutches.

"I've never seen the Lady Paget leave the drawing room under her own power."

Does this mean she's carried from room to room? Maybe so.

But rather than clarify the lady's preferred mode of transportation, he draws Wysteria from the door into the hall at last, reaching back only to close off the room behind her before towing her into the drafty room across the hall.

"I'm going to check this room for the cat," he tells her, very serious in spite of the smile working at the corner of his mouth. "And then I'm going to kiss you."

Fair warning. Ellis had closed the door behind them, confident that the worst this room could contain was an irritable cat. If Lady Paget favors cursed jewelry, it's locked in her suite in the east wing of the house, overlooking the gardens.

"You are being outrageously inappropriate right now," says the very prim, well-mannered, and decidedly blushing young Kalvadan lady who has more or less followed him into this second room with its furniture draped in dust cloths very much of her own volition.

"If I didn't know better, I might blame this on your time away from the Gallows. That you have been too long away from decent company and have returned to some more basic nature thanks to the isolation."

This, as she slips her hand from his so she might begin to lift the edges of various obscuring sheets in an effort to flush out this mysterious animal.

"Are you saying Lady Paget has been a bad influence?" is said with some amusement, as Ellis drags a chair over to inspect the narrow slip of space between the top of the bookshelf and ceiling.

Tacked on as an aside, "Be careful. One of the maids told me Pouncival is prone to scratching any face within reach."

And the maid in question had Pouncival's handiwork on display, a fate Ellis knows for certain that Wysteria would prefer not to share.

She straightens promptly. When next Wysteria shifts a dust cover, she is considerably less enthusiastic about peering in under its edge.

"I'm implying that someone must have been, for I've never known you to act like such a scoundrel. Did this maid, who I'm sure you have only had the most innocent of conversations with, say anything about what color Mssr Pouncival is?"

She holds up a straight, coarse hair plucked from off some cushion beneath the sheet.

"I believe you may be heading in the correct direction."

"Calico," Ellis intones from his perch on the chair. Having satisfied himself that no feline has wedged into the far corner, he drops to the floor. "White belly, with black and orange patches."

The recitation of a man who has heard this description repeated multiple times in varying levels of distress and give reassurance each time that he had committed the description to memory.

"Are you a tracker now?" he asks, fond, as he crosses the room to close his hand gently around her wrist and turn her hand to look at her findings.

"I have always had sharp eyes, Mister Ellis." Her wrist turns gently in the shape of his hand all the better to show off the white filament of fur. "And the cushion's upholstery is quite dark."

The edge of the cloth is raised slightly higher to reveal a thick layer of the same hair adhered to the rich green velvet of the delicate chair beneath it. It would take significantly worse eyesight to miss the evidence.

"Pouncival has fine taste in furniture."

"I have been told he has his own room in the lady's wing of the house," Ellis tells her. His thumb draws up along the inside of her wrist. "And that he'll inherit all of this when Lady Paget passes."

Is Ellis joking? Maybe, maybe not. Having spent so much time with Lady Paget, Ellis himself can't be sure the rumor isn't actually true and he's seeking out the heir to a significant amount of wealth.

"You haven't told me what you make of her. Lady Paget."

Apart from suspicions, which Ellis doesn't count as an impression. Wysteria surely isn't serious in her aspersions.

The dust cloth is allowed to fall back down over the cat fur covered chair. Her attention—

Wavers from his face to his thumb at her wrist, and then back up again. She adopts a smoothly cool look. Without dislodging his hand, the white hair is flicked away.

"I imagine the Lady Paget is one of those women who one might describe as formidable if you were to meet her at some gathering. Why? What is your impression of her?"

"Lonesome."

Maybe a generous summation, considering the amount of menial labor that's been put to him over his time in her company. He's yet to tell Wysteria about the ordeal of the curtain hanging, after all. A whole day she spent, despairing over the drape of the cloth.

The motion of his thumb at her wrist is far too deliberate to be mistaken as an absent tick.

"Did she invite you to dine with her tonight?"

"Yes. Although I will say that it seemed to me a very absentminded sort of invitation like the sort of thing one does because they imagine they ought to. I understand that it must be very rare for a Lady to do anything she doesn't expressly wish to do. But out of habit? That is certainly quite possible. 'Lonesome' indeed."

Why yes of course a guest must come to dinner no matter how shabby that guest might be.

(Wysteria tipping her chin up just slightly has nothing to do with habit at all; that is strictly done on purpose.)

There is a temptation to take advantage of her upturned face. It would be very easy to lean down to her.

Instead, when Ellis bends it's to meet her wrist half-way, having lifted it to his mouth to put a kiss where his thumb has tracked.

"You'll see it if you spend a day or so here."

Not that Ellis is inviting such a thing. One trapped member of Riftwatch is quite enough for Lady Paget's purposes.

"But you'd be such a distraction to me that I don't think we should allow it," is also said with great seriousness. Ellis' mouth moves against her wrist to impart this concern, as he moves in a step closer to her.

The tinge of color which had begun to fade flares back again with renewed vigor. She can feel it warming her neck and passing into her face thanks in no small part to the gentle heat of his mouth. When he speaks just there at the skin below the edge of her sleeve's buttoned cuff, she can feel just the faintest edge of his teeth. The soft humid shape of his voice so near.

She's missed him too. At least when it is a matter of swords then at least she may then distract herself with all manner of very reasonable worries, but this? Knowing he is perfectly well, just removed, is a very intolerable kind of absence. There is no good reason for it when he might instead be in her company in Kirkwall, and so she has spent a series of days growing increasingly sullen over his absence. Here are all the books she would like to discuss with him if he were in Kirkwall still (she had written him on the subject, but it isn't the same), and here is all the gossip she would like to share with him (she had lift messages on his crystal for him to review when the time allowed). If he were in Kirkwall she might be greeted at the ferry slip in the morning by someone willing to warm her autumn chilled hands or walked home to the house in Hightown. In the little garden under the brisk snap of fall air, he might kiss her goodnight. His hands would be at her waist, and he would be very warm in the dark, and she might—

Well, it was all nonsense. And now here they are in some miserly old woman's drafty winter house (one would think the winter house would be more robust against the wind), so it hardly matters.

"You truly are acting the beast, Mister Ellis. I'm appalled to discover you in such a state."

Appalled. That's one word for it.

"Which state is that?"

His mouth remains at her wrist while his hand finds her waist, only lifting once alternately anchored. Ellis looks her over, smiling a little at finding her face so flushed.

Once, he'd told her exactly how much he missed her when their work takes them in opposite directions. He's thinking of it now, of all this time with her letters and her voice on the crystal like a tether, stretching thin between her in Kirkwall and him here, in this cavernous estate. He thinks to say it again, and does, soft against the palm of her hand:

"I missed you."

Which state is that, he says, which is outrageous. Him with his hand at her waist and the affectionate little things her breathes into the round curve of her palm knows very well to what state she refers. It is unbearably rakish. She would do well to insist now on how poorly it suits him, particularly when viewed so up close. To that end, the edge of her thumb moves as if to silence him by pressing against his lips. It turns tentative only at the last instant, soft at his lower lip. The impulse to press timidly there toward the edge of teeth and his warm breath is—

interrupted by the FHWUMP! of a calico cat leaping down into the covered chair from the shadowed heights of the top of a nearby wardrobe. Wysteria squawks. Her startled jump sends a delicately pressing thumbnail slashing up across Ellis' cheek.

There's a pained shout for the dig of her thumbnail, a crucial moment of distraction in which the cat continues it's descent, leaping down to skitter across the floor. Ellis' hand tightens on Wysteria's hip, before immediately pivoting to try and head off their fleeing quarry.

"Make sure that door's closed!" Ellis calls to her. The level of urgency in his voice is slightly ridiculous in this setting; it's previously been reserved for rifts and active threats.

Yowling, the cat slides across the hardwood. Perhaps on target to vanish under the armoire, should it's exit strategy be denied.

In a monumental display of the sort of self discipline and teamwork forged by the fires of three years of dangerous field work, Wysteria leaps for the door as commanded. It is only when she has slammed it decisively shut with a walloping crack that she marks the blood under her nail.

The cat screams. It veers off and slides under the armoire with an audible thump in the same moment that Wysteria whirls around shrieking, "Have I cut you?!"

Somewhere below them, the reclining Lady Paget's heavy-shadowed eyes roll upward to mark that muffled shriek, and gestures to the harpist to Go on, won't you? And drown that out.

Meanwhile, Ellis' momentum has brought him thudding into the armoire as the scritch of Pouncival's claws mark his progress towards the farthest corner beneath the comically heavy armoire. Ellis' bend towards the floor is stalled by Wysteria, which freezes him half-stooped between the immediate potential for capturing his quarry and Wysteria's distress.

"Aye?" posed almost as a question, before Ellis spares on hand to touch his mouth. "Don't worry over it."

The muddle of delayed intent is truly more unsettling than the scratch rising on his face. There'd been a split second where she'd been looking at him, her finger set just so—

It's a wrench to have been interrupted. Ellis turns that aggrieved emotion down towards Pouncival.

"Don't worry over it," is wailed back to him, all misery as she descends upon the near side of the armoire. Sorry, were you perhaps considering shifting this very heavy piece of furniture Ellis? "What if it leaves a scar? Oh, there is blood here under my nail. It's monstrous. After all this effort to come fetch you and effect a rescue!"

From under the armoire, Pouncival greets Ellis with a murderous spitting. All the cat's hairs have stood on end, tail bottle brush wide and paws sucked up into her body in an attempt to make the parts of her which might be manhandled as small as possible.

Edited 2021-09-08 07:16 (UTC)

The dilemma is as follows:

While Ellis is compelled to reassure Wysteria that a minor scratch to his face is hardly remarkable enough to hold his notice in comparison to all other injury he's survived, he is also aware this is the closest he's been to having captured Pouncival after hours of pursuit.

It's a difficult decision.

"It's unlikely there will be a scar," is said as Ellis lowers himself further, all the way onto his belly. One hand absently squeezes her hip on the descent. "I will wash your hands of the blood once we've seen to Pouncival."

Because in spite of his advice, Ellis seems determined to put his face directly down to that cat.

"Stand along the side please?"

Surely that's a decent trick, yes? Trick this cat into thinking there's a second opponent in the room, despite Wysteria's inattention to the matter.

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perfect 10/10

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