They return one evening an hour or so after the late summer sunset, in the lull between ferry traffic heading for a night out in the city and that returning from one. Yseult sends a runner ahead, one of the handful of servants to carry the message directly to Darras while gossip spreads through the rest of the tower: Alive, whole, back on the island. She'll join him shortly.
What the detour is from dock to suite she doesn't specify, but it can't be more than half an hour, including the time to climb the stairs. It's not to bathe--she arrives dust-spattered, with dirt beneath her nails and a bit of straw accidentally woven into her braid. The clothes she wears are not her own, and there's a tear in one knee and another at a shoulder. But there's no sign of injury in how she moves, entering the room and shutting the door quietly behind her, sliding the bolt in the lock. No hesitation in embracing him when he inevitably steps near. Her smile is tired, but warm with relief. "Hello."
Alive, whole, back on the island. When they were at home--their home--and Darras was waiting for Yseult, there were a thousand tasks with which he might occupy himself. There was always a rotten patch of roof to replace, or a shutter that needed mending, or a branch that needed chopping. Fetch fish for supper, water for the washing, unearth the locked chest that had the linens.
In the time that he has known she was alive, what has Darras done? In the time that shortly could happen, what has Darras done? Thought, mostly, that he ought to go and look for Yseult and find her right away. Scour Kirkwall for her. Kiss her. There is nothing more important to him than finding her, but finding her before was impossible. With today's news, he thinks he might find her in Kirkwall; he thinks he won't find her in Kirkwall if she does not want to be found. She has, after all, some reason for sending ahead a runner, whose message was met first by Darras closing the door in her face and then, a moment later, met a second time by Darras opening the door again and grabbing her by the arm and demanding more information. Where, and why, and where, and when there was nothing to be learned, he'd shoved her away and went to put on his boots.
He still has his boots on when Yseult opens the door. The sound of it opening startles him, even if it shouldn't. And she's there when he turns around, and her arms open to him when he steps in close and pulls her in, tightly, and she fits precisely the same way that she did before, and will later, forever.
He tucks his nose into her hair. He doesn't say anything. What is there to say right now?
"I'm alright," is a thing worth saying, but Yseult saves it for a minute or two. He can feel the truth of it in the meantime, the familiar shape of her against him, the wrap of her arms around him as tight as ever, the grip of her hands in his shirt. She tucks her face into his chest, nose brushed inside his shirt collar, pressed to the hollow of his throat.
Her hair isn't clean but thankfully it's not six-weeks-dirty, either, smelling of smoke and straw and the brackish mineral tang of pond water. He smells of salt spray and sweat and her tobacco and she breathes it in, pressing closer with lips to chest before she says it, against his skin: "I'm alright." Hands open to rub palms at his sides and she draws slowly back, looking up. Again, with a hand on his jaw, "I'm alright. Just filthy. Come sit with me while I take a bath before bed." Easy as if she's just come in after a long day in the sun. "You can tell me what I've missed."
The words thaw the tight hitch of Darras' shoulders, the cold fist that has been curled around his heart. All he's felt for these weeks is anger, with fear sandwiched between, so thick it made a wall that kept everything out. Now it is cracking, and every feeling he's denied is there to seep through. Just holding her is enough for now. Her hands on him, pressed to his chest, his throat. The hammering of his heart can be felt through his shirt and his skin, and when she pulls away and puts her hand against his face, there's a dampness to his eyes.
He laughs, and the sound is stuffy, tight with emotion.
"You look all right to me. You look beautiful," and he cups her cheek in his hand. Her cheek is warm to the touch. She's really here. Alive, and whole. Back on the island. "You look beautiful."
"Hey," Yseult says softly, head tipping into his palm, and angling further to get a look up at his face. She catches a hand at his neck, thumb to jaw, and tugs him closer. "Hey," she says again, the word melting gentler, into almost a whisper. She flashes him a quick smile, bright and teasing, gentle still, "So do you."
She laughs soft and twines arms around him again, fingers scuffed through hair at the back of his head. A breath deep enough to feel moves chest and shoulders against his, and she holds him another minute before pulling back. This time it comes with a little shove, but she's reaching for his sleeve in the same motion to pull him along. "I'm pleasantly surprised to find the towers still standing."
He permits it all without complaint, everything. Even when she shoves at him there'd be nothing to complain about. His scalp tingles where her fingers were gripped.
"I didn't have anything to do with that. I was looking for you."
Whole. She does look beautiful. Not unwell, exactly. But it's worn on her, Darras can see that. He doesn't want to ask what happened, where she's been. He wants to know. He doesn't want to change this moment of her, back, in their rooms. It's important suddenly that it's theirs.
"I knew you would." And it's the thought that counts, now that she's back. She tugs him by the sleeve through into their private quarters, an eye cast over the state of it on the way to the bathroom. Brazier lit beneath the water tank, she lets him go to brush her teeth, watching him in the mirror as she does. There's an urge to talk after so long apart, but there's not much that's happened in the last six weeks that she wants to bring into this suite with them just yet.
Finally, she asks, "Is everyone alright? How's Rosana?"
Darras watches her. The whole time, Darras watches her, and if he feels that urge to talk, he for once does not indulge it. He watches her back in the mirror, and watches her when she steps away from it, remembering her place among their things and in their rooms and here, in Kirkwall, with him.
The state of things is not terrible. Someone has lived here without living here. The untidiness is spare and routine, no sign of broken mirrors or furniture hacked to pieces in grief.
Yseult smiles back around her toothbrush and shrugs one shoulder.
"I don't know what to talk about," she admits once she's rinsed and turned back to him, hips leaned against the counter's edge. The little fire crackles softly in the brazier. She smiles again, closed lips hitched up crookedly, and shrugs again, too, shoulders drawn inwards as much as up. She reaches out a hand, to wrap her fingers around his and squeeze firmly. "Are you alright?"
He squeezes her fingers back, a gentle familiar pressure. Her smile is familiar, too, a shape he'd thought of, and missed, and could remember but seeing it is different--better, more, complete.
"Now, yeah." Honesty. "Or better. I don't know what to talk about either or--how to put it to words, any of it. What it was like without you, or even--" Another little squeeze to her fingers. "This."
Her nod understands, and she tugs on his hand to draw him the short distance across to her. "We don't have to talk," she says, an arm reaching around his waist, and then the other. She leans her cheek against his chest, light at first but he'll feel her sink nearer on an exhale and further on the next, fingers curling into his shirt.
Unless Darras finds something he feels compelled to say, Yseult's content to stay that way a while until the room warms with steam. Then she'll ease away, to set the tub filling and make quick work of clothes, dirty things kicked into a pile to be disposed of. When she steps into the tub and gingerly lowers into the water, he may notice there's not a mark on her that won't wash off, not so much as a bruise or a scratch.
At some point, Rosana slips in to the room and begins investigating Yseult's clothes, her little nose wrinkling and working. So that's how she's been. Darras gives her a little smile as he rolls up his sleeves.
The tub is positioned in such a way that he's able to crouch behind and scrub Yseult's back for her--tender, careful. Dirt sloughs off of her, turns the water muddy. Her spine, her ribs, they're just there under the skin, the wings of her shoulder blades too raised.
Her skin is pale, all the familiar summer freckles faded away. Darras traces between where he knows two should be, a gentle constellation.
She corrals wet hair over a shoulder and leans forward, arms folded onto knees to let Darras work. Her face and the back of her neck are darker, forearms too and a wedge of skin from throat to breastbone, half-tanned again from the few weeks since she reportedly escaped from that dungeon. She presses a finger in at the unusually-sharp border near her elbow, and clicks her tongue against the back of teeth.
"I look like a farmer." She sets her cheek on her arms again with a little sigh, as water drips down shoulders. There was a little scar on her upper arm when she left, a faint slice not even from a blade but a sharp bit of fencing on a mission a few months ago. It's gone now, too. "If we were at home now I'd lie out on the cliff in the sun for an afternoon and even it out. But I can only imagine how much work is waiting."
Darras exhales through his nose, a quiet little laugh. "Prettiest farmer I ever saw, despite it all. You could win an award."
With his thumbnail, he traces where that scar used to be. A streak of soapsuds is left behind, ephemeral, and makes a faint crinkling as it dissipates. He remembers that scar, the shape of it--and when she got it, the little smile she'd given him as she was bandaging it.
"Were you healed?"
With magic. What else could do it? But would it heal everything--even old marks?
Taking that cue as he takes up the sponge again-- "Prettiest farmer with the best onion and biggest cow, aye. But they'd split the categories up as well so you could at least take that first one. Unless you're now interested in keeping cows. Are you?"
There's another question there, hiding behind this first and more playful one. There is work to be done. But there's the cottage as well, somewhere she might rest.
"Maybe a milk cow or two." On their fantasy future farm, where knowing nothing about agriculture or animals is no real obstacle.
Yseult unbends from around her knees to lean back against the end of the tub and reach to take the sponge from Darras's hand. "Will you wash my hair?" is an almost-rhetorical request, as she drags the sponge down the stretch of one arm and then the other.
"They were saying in town there have been pirate attacks on the eastern Marches. You must be looking into that?"
He gives the sponge easily, freely, and takes up the soap again so he can begin to work up a lather. Their farm is a pleasant thought, distant from everything else. He thinks again about mentioning it.
"I've been distracted. Everything--" Pirate attacks, the eastern Marches, anything that wasn't Yseult-- "seemed small."
"Mmm," is a hum in the back of her throat. Not in agreement, but not as disapproving as it might be some other day. It matches her tone--dry, but not sharp enough to be looking for a fight--when she jokes, "So you didn't spend the weeks asking yourself," she puts on an imitation of his accent,"'what would Yseult wish me to do?'"
Edited (too many --) Date: 2021-10-04 04:11 am (UTC)
That does get a little smile out of Darras as he begins to work the soap into her hair. The texture is familiar, a mild textured coarseness that relaxes easily under attention.
"You know me. I'm not very focused when there's something weighing on me. And every time I thought that, I'd get to Yseult, and that'd be it, I'd get distracted all over again. Never got to the sensible part."
"Mmhmm." She's always found it difficult to sympathize with people who fail to stay focused when there's work to be done. But it's also difficult to really be angry with him for loving her to distraction. Frustrated, sure, but even that is hard to muster up just at the moment. "We can catch up together tomorrow."
Lather and steam fill the room with the scent of her soap, lavender and rosemary like the walk from the road in to the cottage on a hot summer day, the plants that line the drive baking in the sun, their scent wafting into the house on the breeze. For a moment, she shuts her eyes.
Tomorrow seems a very long way away. It did before as well, when Yseult was missing. Days that just went on, and on, until the sun rose bleakly and the next endless day started going on, and on, and on. This is the better version, a day that should last forever. The sort of day that you turn over in your mind when you're living through the other kind.
Darras washes Yseult's hair--once, and then again, until the water that drips down her pale back runs clear. He kisses her, the ear and then the cheek and then the back of her head, the smell of her clean hair a heady perfume. He is thinking of the cottage as well, the plants and the sun and the sea and the waves at the bottom of the cliff. The fire in the grate when it is cold, the sun through the curtains when it is hot.
"Do you want to tell me about it?"
He doesn't ask until later, until after she's out of the bath and dressed in clean clothes and he's rubbing at her hair with a towel, leaving it damp and half-dry.
She takes a minute to think about it, like she hasn't already spent hours (weeks) considering that question. His knee is planted on the bed beside her, and she plants the heel of her hand into the muscle just above it and rubs, absent, soothing. "No. Not right now."
Half dry is enough, and she lets him get in one more ruffle of the towel before escaping it, flipping it over his own head with a teasing smile and finger-combing damp hair smooth and into a loose braid.
"But I should tell you about our travails getting back here. It was like one of your stories. Maybe tomorrow." She is more than halfway ready for bed, but the way she says 'maybe tomorrow' seems to invite him to press for sooner if he'd like.
Her fingers move deftly, make quick work of the strands as she weaves them around and over and in to one another. The weight and warmth of her hand is still a lingering feeling on his leg. Darras watches her work, raises a hand to touch his thumb to the nape of her neck, the soft indent of that tender spot.
"At least one now," he says. The knob of her sine is just there, a little sharp under her pale skin. There's a freckle there which stubbornly has not faded. He leans in and presses a kiss there. Her skin smells sweetly like soap and water and like her, but there's something that lingers underneath. A shadow of a scent, a reminder of how much more there is lurking. Not right now.
She's still but for her hands, breath slow and even. The last few rounds of over-under and then she ties the braid off with a little scrap of ribbon, and reaches back to touch his cheek without dislodging him. Not for another moment, at least. Then she slips away, only far enough to lie back against the pillows and draw him down with her. She's already begun the story as they get comfortable, in which she and Flint, already on the road for some time it seems, lose the boat they've stolen and all the supplies they've gathered in a terrible storm and end up on the wrong side of the river where they're forced to pose as a couple of out-of-work circus performers in order to discreetly hitch a ride with a passing caravan.
It's a good story, full of the sort of bad luck that's free to be entertaining because you already know things worked out in the end, and she tells it as near the way he would as she can. But before too long she can't help a yawn and pauses grow longer until finally she asks him again to guess what happens next and is asleep before he answers. For a couple minutes, at least, before she jolts awake. She apologizes with a hand stroked silently down his arm, and then sleeps again quickly enough.
She sleeps close, at first, face against Darras's shoulder, an ankle hooked, an arm draped. The next time she suddenly wakes, tensing with a wary inhale, might not disturb him. But she tosses and turns, too, a rare occurrence, and wakes up at least a half-dozen times during the night. Each time quietly, no cries or flailing limbs, just a sudden shock of consciousness and disorientation and, after the first few times, mounting irritation. Finally, a few hours before dawn (too early even by her standards), she gets up, silently slipping out into the office.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2021-08-23 02:18 am (UTC)What the detour is from dock to suite she doesn't specify, but it can't be more than half an hour, including the time to climb the stairs. It's not to bathe--she arrives dust-spattered, with dirt beneath her nails and a bit of straw accidentally woven into her braid. The clothes she wears are not her own, and there's a tear in one knee and another at a shoulder. But there's no sign of injury in how she moves, entering the room and shutting the door quietly behind her, sliding the bolt in the lock. No hesitation in embracing him when he inevitably steps near. Her smile is tired, but warm with relief. "Hello."
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Date: 2021-08-23 04:11 am (UTC)In the time that he has known she was alive, what has Darras done? In the time that shortly could happen, what has Darras done? Thought, mostly, that he ought to go and look for Yseult and find her right away. Scour Kirkwall for her. Kiss her. There is nothing more important to him than finding her, but finding her before was impossible. With today's news, he thinks he might find her in Kirkwall; he thinks he won't find her in Kirkwall if she does not want to be found. She has, after all, some reason for sending ahead a runner, whose message was met first by Darras closing the door in her face and then, a moment later, met a second time by Darras opening the door again and grabbing her by the arm and demanding more information. Where, and why, and where, and when there was nothing to be learned, he'd shoved her away and went to put on his boots.
He still has his boots on when Yseult opens the door. The sound of it opening startles him, even if it shouldn't. And she's there when he turns around, and her arms open to him when he steps in close and pulls her in, tightly, and she fits precisely the same way that she did before, and will later, forever.
He tucks his nose into her hair. He doesn't say anything. What is there to say right now?
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Date: 2021-08-23 05:11 am (UTC)Her hair isn't clean but thankfully it's not six-weeks-dirty, either, smelling of smoke and straw and the brackish mineral tang of pond water. He smells of salt spray and sweat and her tobacco and she breathes it in, pressing closer with lips to chest before she says it, against his skin: "I'm alright." Hands open to rub palms at his sides and she draws slowly back, looking up. Again, with a hand on his jaw, "I'm alright. Just filthy. Come sit with me while I take a bath before bed." Easy as if she's just come in after a long day in the sun. "You can tell me what I've missed."
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Date: 2021-08-25 03:02 am (UTC)He laughs, and the sound is stuffy, tight with emotion.
"You look all right to me. You look beautiful," and he cups her cheek in his hand. Her cheek is warm to the touch. She's really here. Alive, and whole. Back on the island. "You look beautiful."
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Date: 2021-08-25 03:27 am (UTC)She laughs soft and twines arms around him again, fingers scuffed through hair at the back of his head. A breath deep enough to feel moves chest and shoulders against his, and she holds him another minute before pulling back. This time it comes with a little shove, but she's reaching for his sleeve in the same motion to pull him along. "I'm pleasantly surprised to find the towers still standing."
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Date: 2021-08-26 03:04 am (UTC)"I didn't have anything to do with that. I was looking for you."
Whole. She does look beautiful. Not unwell, exactly. But it's worn on her, Darras can see that. He doesn't want to ask what happened, where she's been. He wants to know. He doesn't want to change this moment of her, back, in their rooms. It's important suddenly that it's theirs.
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Date: 2021-08-26 04:54 am (UTC)Finally, she asks, "Is everyone alright? How's Rosana?"
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Date: 2021-09-23 05:03 am (UTC)The state of things is not terrible. Someone has lived here without living here. The untidiness is spare and routine, no sign of broken mirrors or furniture hacked to pieces in grief.
In the mirror, Darras smiles at Yseult.
"That's your first question?"
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Date: 2021-09-23 05:19 am (UTC)"I don't know what to talk about," she admits once she's rinsed and turned back to him, hips leaned against the counter's edge. The little fire crackles softly in the brazier. She smiles again, closed lips hitched up crookedly, and shrugs again, too, shoulders drawn inwards as much as up. She reaches out a hand, to wrap her fingers around his and squeeze firmly. "Are you alright?"
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Date: 2021-09-29 10:18 pm (UTC)"Now, yeah." Honesty. "Or better. I don't know what to talk about either or--how to put it to words, any of it. What it was like without you, or even--" Another little squeeze to her fingers. "This."
no subject
Date: 2021-10-01 12:37 am (UTC)Unless Darras finds something he feels compelled to say, Yseult's content to stay that way a while until the room warms with steam. Then she'll ease away, to set the tub filling and make quick work of clothes, dirty things kicked into a pile to be disposed of. When she steps into the tub and gingerly lowers into the water, he may notice there's not a mark on her that won't wash off, not so much as a bruise or a scratch.
no subject
Date: 2021-10-01 11:59 pm (UTC)The tub is positioned in such a way that he's able to crouch behind and scrub Yseult's back for her--tender, careful. Dirt sloughs off of her, turns the water muddy. Her spine, her ribs, they're just there under the skin, the wings of her shoulder blades too raised.
Her skin is pale, all the familiar summer freckles faded away. Darras traces between where he knows two should be, a gentle constellation.
no subject
Date: 2021-10-02 12:35 am (UTC)"I look like a farmer." She sets her cheek on her arms again with a little sigh, as water drips down shoulders. There was a little scar on her upper arm when she left, a faint slice not even from a blade but a sharp bit of fencing on a mission a few months ago. It's gone now, too. "If we were at home now I'd lie out on the cliff in the sun for an afternoon and even it out. But I can only imagine how much work is waiting."
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Date: 2021-10-02 03:57 pm (UTC)With his thumbnail, he traces where that scar used to be. A streak of soapsuds is left behind, ephemeral, and makes a faint crinkling as it dissipates. He remembers that scar, the shape of it--and when she got it, the little smile she'd given him as she was bandaging it.
"Were you healed?"
With magic. What else could do it? But would it heal everything--even old marks?
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Date: 2021-10-02 07:16 pm (UTC)"Like at a country fair?" she asks, steering the subject back, "Biggest onion, best cow, prettiest farmer?"
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Date: 2021-10-02 07:43 pm (UTC)There's another question there, hiding behind this first and more playful one. There is work to be done. But there's the cottage as well, somewhere she might rest.
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Date: 2021-10-02 08:22 pm (UTC)Yseult unbends from around her knees to lean back against the end of the tub and reach to take the sponge from Darras's hand. "Will you wash my hair?" is an almost-rhetorical request, as she drags the sponge down the stretch of one arm and then the other.
"They were saying in town there have been pirate attacks on the eastern Marches. You must be looking into that?"
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Date: 2021-10-03 11:09 pm (UTC)"I've been distracted. Everything--" Pirate attacks, the eastern Marches, anything that wasn't Yseult-- "seemed small."
no subject
Date: 2021-10-04 03:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-05 04:42 pm (UTC)"You know me. I'm not very focused when there's something weighing on me. And every time I thought that, I'd get to Yseult, and that'd be it, I'd get distracted all over again. Never got to the sensible part."
no subject
Date: 2021-10-06 08:47 pm (UTC)Lather and steam fill the room with the scent of her soap, lavender and rosemary like the walk from the road in to the cottage on a hot summer day, the plants that line the drive baking in the sun, their scent wafting into the house on the breeze. For a moment, she shuts her eyes.
no subject
Date: 2021-10-07 03:43 am (UTC)Darras washes Yseult's hair--once, and then again, until the water that drips down her pale back runs clear. He kisses her, the ear and then the cheek and then the back of her head, the smell of her clean hair a heady perfume. He is thinking of the cottage as well, the plants and the sun and the sea and the waves at the bottom of the cliff. The fire in the grate when it is cold, the sun through the curtains when it is hot.
"Do you want to tell me about it?"
He doesn't ask until later, until after she's out of the bath and dressed in clean clothes and he's rubbing at her hair with a towel, leaving it damp and half-dry.
no subject
Date: 2021-10-07 10:06 pm (UTC)Half dry is enough, and she lets him get in one more ruffle of the towel before escaping it, flipping it over his own head with a teasing smile and finger-combing damp hair smooth and into a loose braid.
"But I should tell you about our travails getting back here. It was like one of your stories. Maybe tomorrow." She is more than halfway ready for bed, but the way she says 'maybe tomorrow' seems to invite him to press for sooner if he'd like.
no subject
Date: 2021-10-13 03:25 am (UTC)"At least one now," he says. The knob of her sine is just there, a little sharp under her pale skin. There's a freckle there which stubbornly has not faded. He leans in and presses a kiss there. Her skin smells sweetly like soap and water and like her, but there's something that lingers underneath. A shadow of a scent, a reminder of how much more there is lurking. Not right now.
no subject
Date: 2021-10-13 04:59 am (UTC)It's a good story, full of the sort of bad luck that's free to be entertaining because you already know things worked out in the end, and she tells it as near the way he would as she can. But before too long she can't help a yawn and pauses grow longer until finally she asks him again to guess what happens next and is asleep before he answers. For a couple minutes, at least, before she jolts awake. She apologizes with a hand stroked silently down his arm, and then sleeps again quickly enough.
She sleeps close, at first, face against Darras's shoulder, an ankle hooked, an arm draped. The next time she suddenly wakes, tensing with a wary inhale, might not disturb him. But she tosses and turns, too, a rare occurrence, and wakes up at least a half-dozen times during the night. Each time quietly, no cries or flailing limbs, just a sudden shock of consciousness and disorientation and, after the first few times, mounting irritation. Finally, a few hours before dawn (too early even by her standards), she gets up, silently slipping out into the office.
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