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.
Darras finds himself waking when she does, pulled back to consciousness each time she starts awake. The sudden twitch of her hand or even the shift of her weight as she turns against him, or away. The sound of her voice had been soothing, smoothing away some of the uncertainty of leaving the larger story untold. She had followed the pattern that he would have used, if the story had been his. That had been familiar, too, as had been the shape of her in their bed. But the fitfulness is wrong.
When at last she leaves the bed, he lets her go. Pretends to be asleep, still, and when she slips out the door he rolls onto his side and watches her go through half-closed eyes. And he can't sleep either, as the light in their room begins to turn soft and gray, and then pink as the dawn settles in.
Then Darras climbs out of bed and follows Yseult to the office. She will be at her desk. He knows that sight well.
She is, of course. She'd snagged her light summer dressing gown from the chair when she went and the wide silk sleeve pools around the elbow propped on her desk, sliding off a shoulder. She tugs it and the neck of the shift beneath back up as she turns to look at the door opening, not caught by surprise at his entrance just combining the movements. Her smile is small and soft, apologetic. There's a smudge of ink on her jaw.
"There's so much to catch up on," she says, quiet to not disturb the sunrise, "I thought I might as well begin. Did I wake you?"
He licks his thumb and gently takes her chin, swipes at the ink stain before he tilts her face up so he can lean down and kiss her. The early sunlight is soft around her. Rosana is out here as well, curled up on the sofa. She doesn't lift her her head but her ears turn toward them.
"You should try to get back to sleep. All of this," whatever is spread out across her desk, "it will keep."
She's visibly confused by the thumb for a moment until it meets her cheek and then eyes roll and mouth hitches up as his purpose clarifies. She lets a hand drag down his chest as Darras pulls back from the kiss.
"I know," she says, glancing back at the stack of reports, her little notebook with its incomprehensible shorthand. "But I've already begun. I can nap later. Sit with me, we can go through the reports from the Waking Sea."
The weight and warmth of her hand is very solid and very grounding as well, a reminder: this is real. The curve of her smile is real, the early dawn's light and the way it softens her face is real. It was all nearly taken away--but it wasn't.
He sighs, heavily. Then he pushes back and goes to drag a chair around to her side of the desk.
"Only because it means spending time with you."
Rosana pricks her ears again. Her eyes track Darras as he moves. She doesn't yet jump down, but she's clearly thinking of doing so.
She smiles, soft still and crooked, too, for his grudging, conditional acceptance. She makes room for his chair beside hers and shuffles through the stack of reports for a sheaf someone has helpfully marked 'naval'. As he gets settled she begins, reading of pirate attacks in the waters around Ostwick and Hercinia. The descriptions of the ships and their colors are frustratingly limited and contradictory, impossible to reliably identify as anyone in particular, and she makes a note to set agents to gathering better information, looking to him for direction on precisely what information would be most useful, and where they might find it, if there are any particular captains he thinks might be most inclined to the Venatori cause for one reason or another.
As they go, she shifts gradually nearer, first hooking one bare foot into the bottom rung of his chair, then, to Rosana's undoubted annoyance, draping a leg across his knee. Both are there by the time the stack is dwindling and there are footsteps in the hall outside and the narrow pillar of sun through the window opposite is tall enough to reach them, warming his back and turning her hair to bronze.
This scene is familiar, but becomes more familiar as the weeks pass, because it repeats, and repeats, and repeats. There is always a stack of work. There is always an early morning, when Darras wakes up and the bed beside him is empty and he leaves their bedroom to find Yseult sat in her chair, working.
She is deft when she changes the subject, when the subject comes up. And it does come up. How could it not? She was missing, she was held captive. And she doesn't talk about it, no matter the hour or the day or where they are when Darras brings it up--at her desk and working, sitting on the sofa while she works, laying in bed and trying to fall asleep. Some days he comes back from the ferry early and finds her already asleep, taking a nap while Rosana suns herself curled up on the desk. And even then, when he shakes Yseult's shoulder, gently, and her eyes flick open and soften as she smiles--even then, she swings her legs over the side of the couch and stands up, stretching. Not now.
One evening he brings her fishing with him, instead of dinner in Kirkwall or dinner in her office. The days are getting shorter as the season begins to turn, but the weather has been pleasant enough on this particular day, so even as the shadows start to lengthen, there is no need to turn back from where Darras has taken them--a rocky cove off of the Wounded Coast, with a narrow strip of beach well protected from the sea winds. They can build a fire there, cook what they catch. Mostly it is nice to be alone together, in the quiet, with the waves lapping at the side of the slender skiff and the wind pushing lazily at its slack sail.
Yseult is looking out across the water when Darras says, again, "Will you tell me?"
It is nice, stretched out across the narrow bench in the last patch of orange sunlight, shins and arms bared to catch it. This little part of the Waking Sea is drowsy tonight, and the gentle rock of the boat and the shush of Darras's fishing lines in his hands have Yseult the same, gazing out toward the distant shores of Ferelden without any particular focus. So it's startling, when Darras speaks, to realize she has been caught in a trap.
She lolls her head back to him, and then drags a pointed look around at their surroundings, so that when she fixes her gaze back on him and draws herself back to something like upright, it is with a sigh that is both annoyed and a little amused (even impressed) to have been so neatly and unwittingly outmaneuvered. She brushes hands together and flicks the hem of her skirt back down to her ankles.
"Why do you keep asking? What does it matter now that I'm back?"
It does seem cruel, to ruin the peace of the moment. Times like this are the easiest to put away the weight of what happened. When Yseult gives him that look, Darras understands. Another time and he would pull a wry smile, give her a half-shrug. Helpless, me.
But he can't. What happened--and what nearly happened--is still there, a shadow under the surface.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
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."
no subject
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?
no subject
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?"
no subject
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.
no subject
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?"
no subject
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.
no subject
Date: 2021-10-15 04:18 am (UTC)When at last she leaves the bed, he lets her go. Pretends to be asleep, still, and when she slips out the door he rolls onto his side and watches her go through half-closed eyes. And he can't sleep either, as the light in their room begins to turn soft and gray, and then pink as the dawn settles in.
Then Darras climbs out of bed and follows Yseult to the office. She will be at her desk. He knows that sight well.
no subject
Date: 2021-10-15 05:44 am (UTC)"There's so much to catch up on," she says, quiet to not disturb the sunrise, "I thought I might as well begin. Did I wake you?"
no subject
Date: 2021-10-26 02:48 am (UTC)He licks his thumb and gently takes her chin, swipes at the ink stain before he tilts her face up so he can lean down and kiss her. The early sunlight is soft around her. Rosana is out here as well, curled up on the sofa. She doesn't lift her her head but her ears turn toward them.
"You should try to get back to sleep. All of this," whatever is spread out across her desk, "it will keep."
no subject
Date: 2021-10-27 04:41 am (UTC)"I know," she says, glancing back at the stack of reports, her little notebook with its incomprehensible shorthand. "But I've already begun. I can nap later. Sit with me, we can go through the reports from the Waking Sea."
no subject
Date: 2021-10-29 12:22 am (UTC)He sighs, heavily. Then he pushes back and goes to drag a chair around to her side of the desk.
"Only because it means spending time with you."
Rosana pricks her ears again. Her eyes track Darras as he moves. She doesn't yet jump down, but she's clearly thinking of doing so.
no subject
Date: 2021-10-29 01:10 am (UTC)As they go, she shifts gradually nearer, first hooking one bare foot into the bottom rung of his chair, then, to Rosana's undoubted annoyance, draping a leg across his knee. Both are there by the time the stack is dwindling and there are footsteps in the hall outside and the narrow pillar of sun through the window opposite is tall enough to reach them, warming his back and turning her hair to bronze.
no subject
Date: 2021-11-03 03:28 am (UTC)She is deft when she changes the subject, when the subject comes up. And it does come up. How could it not? She was missing, she was held captive. And she doesn't talk about it, no matter the hour or the day or where they are when Darras brings it up--at her desk and working, sitting on the sofa while she works, laying in bed and trying to fall asleep. Some days he comes back from the ferry early and finds her already asleep, taking a nap while Rosana suns herself curled up on the desk. And even then, when he shakes Yseult's shoulder, gently, and her eyes flick open and soften as she smiles--even then, she swings her legs over the side of the couch and stands up, stretching. Not now.
One evening he brings her fishing with him, instead of dinner in Kirkwall or dinner in her office. The days are getting shorter as the season begins to turn, but the weather has been pleasant enough on this particular day, so even as the shadows start to lengthen, there is no need to turn back from where Darras has taken them--a rocky cove off of the Wounded Coast, with a narrow strip of beach well protected from the sea winds. They can build a fire there, cook what they catch. Mostly it is nice to be alone together, in the quiet, with the waves lapping at the side of the slender skiff and the wind pushing lazily at its slack sail.
Yseult is looking out across the water when Darras says, again, "Will you tell me?"
no subject
Date: 2021-11-03 06:30 pm (UTC)She lolls her head back to him, and then drags a pointed look around at their surroundings, so that when she fixes her gaze back on him and draws herself back to something like upright, it is with a sigh that is both annoyed and a little amused (even impressed) to have been so neatly and unwittingly outmaneuvered. She brushes hands together and flicks the hem of her skirt back down to her ankles.
"Why do you keep asking? What does it matter now that I'm back?"
no subject
Date: 2021-11-09 03:59 am (UTC)But he can't. What happened--and what nearly happened--is still there, a shadow under the surface.
"It matters because it happened."
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