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

The only response in the midst of Wysteria's winding recitation of complaints is a small smile, one that sparks and stays throughout despite how similarly he feels.

Had he known he'd be gone so long, he might have been more thorough in his leaving. He likes to think he would have managed a more appropriate goodbye. But who could have foreseen the promise of a few days work dragging on so long?

Rather than make mention of this, he submits to the examination, the catch and instruction of her fingers tipping his head to all angles to catch the light. His hands drop from her arms to her hips, settling as he observes her scrutiny.

"It's hardly noticeable," he reassures. They both know Ellis has survived worse injury than a scrape. It's a miracle Ser Pouncival did not do worse in the course of their struggle. It will mend. He hardly feels it now.

His hands flex at her hips. Ellis draws in a breath, looking at her, before clarifying, "The only thing I care to think about is you."

A little fond, a little amused. What else would he think about? The sting of that moment outside the drawing room is set aside, just as the question of what might be said to explain his abandonment of the Lady Paget or the scrape on his face. He's missed her. He would rather have spent these past weeks in Kirkwall with her than anywhere else.

"Don't be charming," she tells him, quite strictly indeed. And wipe away that smile, you terrible man; why can he never be fully cross furious about anything? "It's very dreadful when I'm in such a poor mood. Don't you know that good suitors are meant to compliment and agree with their lady's temperament?"

It is not at all the worst scratch on him she's ever witnessed. But it's different, you see, as she placed it there herself. That must make it stand out very bold on his cheek, a thin red line drawn out from his lip to slash up off his cheekbone. She frowns at it, and then more specifically at him.

"Could we not sneak away in the night, do you think?"

It is the last sullen and petulant thing she will say to him this evening. Purposefully, anyway.

A minor ah of acknowledgement, though the instruction passes without comment. There are points where Ellis does consider his deficiencies, all the ways in which he is not the sort of suitor Wysteria might have chosen for herself. But that is a far off consideration on this night, when there are more immediate matters to think on.

"Aye, we could. But we'd have to sleep on the ground if we did, and I've none of my gear to make it a comfortable thing."

As comfortable as sleeping on the ground ever was.

"She'll not rise to see us off," he adds, for no reason at all. "Lady Paget favors a late start to her days."

Her hand springs away from his face with all the haste of snatching fingers back from a hot stove.

"Then I should leave you so you so we might immediately go to bed and so rise very, very early and see this place well behind us. If we're very diligent about our riding—and I brought with me that flaxen colored gelding who is so reliable—, then we may reach Kirkwall almost in time for the last ferry."

The emphasize the point, she begins to extract herself from between his hands—

And she is caught up in his arms, escape momentarily curtailed.

"You should stay," Ellis counters. "I've missed you."

And he'd trade off any measure of sleep to keep her nearby.

"Will you sleep here? With me?"

Being caught clearly surprises her. When has she drawn back and found herself even so much as curtailed? It prompts a little sound of surprise, her hands briefly hovering in that ill-defined fraction of space between them—

She colors promptly. It's a full red flush, hot in the face and up the back of her neck, and is almost instantly obscured by the intercession of her hands pressing over her own cheeks.

(It is one thing to say 'Stay' and to contrive to sleep in the same bed, or to funnily circle around the idea. It is another thing to say it aloud. To be direct. To—)

"Oh." And then, "Oh, but if Lady Paget were to somehow find out—"

It's a momentary curtailing. Enough to stop the momentum, with Ellis' hands settling back to a loose grasp at her waist once he's sure Wysteria means to stay long enough at least for him to make his case for it.

"Lock your door. I'll lock mine. We'll rise early and be gone before the household is any wiser."

And for all her blushing, Ellis tacks on—

"I'll sleep on the floor, if you like. But I'd rather be in the same room with you than spend more time apart."

For a moment, it looks very much like she will find her way to further protests. Mister Ellis, a lock means nothing at all to the servants of a fine house. Mister Ellis, it is perfectly boorish to make you sleep on the floor after
brutishly scarring your face. Mister Ellis—

She is still blushing when she catches Ellis by his collar with both her hands. She surges up to him. Or she pulls him down to her, or some combination of the two, and so kisses him abruptly.

He has not yet kissed Wysteria properly since she'd arrived at the estate.

Yes, he has thought of it at length. But their earlier attempt was foiled partly by open doors and partly by a murderous cat. And even though he's been considering the possibility of it for hours now, even having asked her to share a room with him for the evening, Ellis is caught entirely off guard by the swerve from objection to action.

Ellis bends to the clasp of her hands at his collar, to set his arms back around her more securely. The initial clumsy lack of response is remedied quickly. He kisses her back, having coaxed her back in close to him.

He's missed her. Every line of his body repeats that truth.

She's missed him. Which matters because she rarely misses anyone at all. Not even Alexandrie who is such a delightfully shameless gossip. But he is such fine company, and she has become very accustomed to his presence as her side, and to having his attention, and she has even once or twice in the weeks since his departure found herself thinking with fondness about the terrible scrape of his beard when he kisses her cheek.

There is some bristle like this too, of course and under her hands as they move from his tunic collar to Ellis' face. The fact that he bends in answer doesn't do much to diminish how fierce that impulsive kiss is.

When she has imagined him kissing her in that moonlit garden, it has always seemed a deliberate and quiet thing. This is not that at all. It is rushed and bursting with some wanting thing, as demanding as it is sweet. And after, blurted out against his mouth with all the enthusiasm of something who is certain they know the correct answer to a question:

"I love you. You should know it. I know you don't wish at all to marry me, but it makes no difference. I will anyway."

Once, on accident, Ina had misdirected a bolt of lightening in the training yard and struck Ellis rather than the training dummy set beyond it. (This was the point of the exercise: to aim a strike beyond the front line to incapacitate darkspawn.) Ellis remembers how his entire body had locked up, how the pain had come second to the crackling force of the blow and the way, for a moment, movement had been so entirely beyond him.

Wysteria's declaration is a cousin to Ina's lightening bolt. Ellis feels her words in the same way, a shock that prickles through his entire body, winding his arms tighter around her. Her hands are gentle on his face and her voice had been so clear, no hesitation in it, and Ellis had anticipated none of it.

It is a surprise. In spite of everything, there had always been some quiet impression set into Ellis' mind: Wysteria is fond of him, and that is enough. He had never needed her to be more than that, except—

I love you she says, and Ellis makes a soft noise in response, uncertain and overwhelmed by turns at the sentiment. His forehead rests against hers. His arms have cinched quite securely about her waist to draw her in tightly against him.

"Tell me again," comes quietly, a little pleading. Holding place for whichever parts of the truth Ellis can pull together for her. She must have guessed already, anything he might say aloud. Wysteria has grown so very adept in her study of him.

She is aware of it—how he starts, the sharp little catch of a noise—because it happens under her hands and nearly against her mouth and because it would be difficult not to know. Because—

"It's only that Lady Paget reminded me so forcefully of a dozen very dreadful people from Kalvad, and rarely think long on it but it really is true that I'm very pleased not to be there. And you've been nothing but good and kind. And not just to me either. I think it's very dear how much you care for Mister Stark and for Mister Dickerson. And even how measured you were angry with her Ladyship today. It's all right if you don't— If you don't feel precisely the same. I know it must trouble you, but I do," she insists, smoothing her hands across the bristle of his cheeks. "Love you, Mister Ellis. Very sincerely."

"I do."

An admission so sincere that he might as well crack his chest open in the process of it, show her where all he feels for her has rooted in among his bones.

"I do," he repeats. "Feel the same."

A clumsy declaration, by any metric. All those books of poetry and all those novels containing flowery proposals, and this is what Ellis has to offer her in this moment: not the words themselves, but an echoing of hers.

"You must know," follows after, Ellis straightening by only the smallest degree to study her face. "You must have known this."

Had she? Of course. Though there is something here in him now which lives right next to the agonized look he'd worn all that time ago outside the Gallows' library. That baffling, tangled knot of how he feels and how it's a thing she recognizes as being equal parts sharp and sweet to him. Or razoring because of it's a kindness. Or because of some obligation to do with the Wardens. Or something she doesn't understand at all.

"Yes, but—Only I know it's more complicated." She is very determined there in his shadow, a sort of stubborn pride in the set of her expression and her hands about his face. "I've just decided that I'm pleased by it regardless."

What else could he say?

That he is in love with her. That were his circumstances different he'd have tried to marry her already. That he is hers in every possible way, that he has been for longer than she might realize.

All these words are caught somewhere in his mouth when he leans back down to catch her mouth with his own. A better way to communicate anything, surely: dipping to kiss her rather than try to vocalize any complicated sentiment.

Or to explain that the way he loves her is not complicated. Ellis has no confusion over it. He loves her and there is no question of it. It is a truth that's set deep into his body. Ellis feels it in every beat of his heart. His hands have slid, palms against the small of her back and the dip of her spine, keeping her tucked in close against his chest.

Don't go beats alongside I love you, in every single flex of his hands and soft sound made against her mouth.

In some other circumstance—one where she has not spent the evening embarrassed or seething or jealous or impatient or all those things in combination—it might be easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer force of the thing. By this faint tilt toward desperation; the way he holds her in very close, how he bends to kiss her, and how the great shape of his affection looms very large. It would be easy to feel untethered in it.

But she is in a temper, and quite certain of her footing. So if he wants, then she and her kiss and her hands at Ellis' face and neck are insistent. She is staying, and—as if it's possible to be a little vindictive and petty about the thing, for the whole world and Lady Paget and everyone who doesn't have Ellis' full and abiding attention should be very jealous—Good.

(Yes, he ought to love her. If he didn't, she might be rather cross with him.)

There is a great deal of emotion behind the kiss, all this feeling winnowing down to the clutch of his hands at her back and how open his kiss is, the way he shapes his body in against hers as if to give it all over.

What is there to give, really? Wysteria has had hold of all of this for such a long time.

He's had so much time to make a study of Wysteria's hands. Her soft palms make it all the more obvious as to where the work has marked them. It's a nonsensical thing to consider as she touches him, some small observation running alongside the beating repetition of her words echoing in his ears.

I love you, she'd said.

What does he do with all of this feeling? There is a scalding element to it, like warm water over long-frozen fingers. Ellis draws a breath against her mouth, breaking the kiss to lay a second, sweet peck at the corner of her mouth before bending further to put his face in against her neck and stay there for a moment, breath rising and falling in time with hers.

He bends further and the natural thing is to slide an arm about his broad rounded shoulders and a hand into the curls of his dark hair, and to twist, reflexive and minor, in reply to the ticklish scrape of his beard against soft and sensitive skin. His breath is warm, and the shape of him pressed and clutching so is not at all intimidating. If anything, she might conjure up some narrow filament of guilt on account of how she might have said earlier had she known it might mean as much to him.

To have that kind of sway over a thing is appealing and pleasant and very like being given a kind of responsibility all at once, isn't it?

"There is just one thing," she says after a moment of his holding there. The breath in her chest rises and falls in sympathy to him, and she turns her face just a little to say so into his hair. He smells a little like some strange and expensive soap (Lady Paget's doing, no doubt) and like a more familiar tang of work (Ser Pouncival's).

"But it's a very minor complaint. And not at all irreparable, I don't think."

The implication of some minor thing to be rectified doesn't dislodge Ellis from her neck. But it does stall the trail of soft kisses Ellis had begun applying to Wysteria
s throat, the motion coming to a tapering halt.

"Aye?" he asks, prompting.

If she has lifted her chin just a fraction to encourage that path—Well. No one else is there to see and she is fairly certain he won't fault her for it. And also it means she can be quite self-sure, delivering her assessment to the crown of his head more or less down the length of her nose:

"Well only that it seems to me as if one of the fundamental advantages in being courted by some strapping Fereldan farmer is to occassionally be swept off one's feet or thrown over a shoulder in the very literal sense. That's how it is in all the books I've consulted on the subject, you know."

This time, the progress of his mouth is halted by a short burst of laughter. He presses his smile in against the curve of her neck.

"I see."

Not a no. His fingers come around to her waist, palms running up her ribs then down to the curve of her hips, then back up again.

"So you'd like me to lift you that way?" comes the question, considering. "Carry you around the Gallows in my arms?"

His laugh or the tickling burst of air or the scuff of his facial hair from it makes her laugh too—a twittering, absurdly girlish sound—, and it's only after that she considers the possibility of the sound carrying from beyond the room to the corridor where anyone at all might be listening.

(Or peering through a keyhole or—)

But it's a brief flicker of awareness, there and gone as she tucks her face in closer to him and hisses a little well humored protest.

"Mister Ellis, you have truly forgotten all semblance of propriety! But also, I believe it's meant to be a surprise."

A surprise.

Or it's meant to be a surprise, the way he's meant to ask before he kisses her. If Ellis prompts her, he's sure Wysteria will tell him almost exactly how he's meant to sweep her off her feet and the right circumstances in which he should be on the look for to deploy such methods.

He weighs it against how nice it is to have her tucked in against him. His lips move against her neck as he speaks again.

"I'll think on it then," Ellis tells her softly. "Ways to surprise you with it."

Would the ghost object to Wysteria being swept off her feet?

"I shouldn't expect to carry you from the room in the morning?" is entirely teasing. Ellis knows the answer already.

Her appalled hiss and the hand which flaps at his shoulder must be answer enough. Honestly, Mister Ellis.

"If you try, I will scream," is somewhat undermined by the inviting tilt of her chin. He can kiss her neck more if he likes.

Yes, he could kiss her neck more. He would like to.

He thinks again of the way her voice had sounded, telling him I love you.

So his mouth moves briefly at the underside of Wysteria's jaw, setting a last kiss to the high point of her throat before his hands lift from her hips. Maybe a disappointment, right up until—

Ellis sweeps her up into his arms, hoists her up off the ground to hold her against his chest.

"This way, aye?" he asks, inviting instruction, practice for a real attempt.

Edited 2021-09-25 02:38 (UTC)

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hey what the fuck

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clenches my fist

hey they're Good

yells about it tbh

honestly

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